Author Archive

By now, everybody knows how I feel about Ruben Amaro. Disdain threatened to evolve rapidly into seething hatred if, as was rumored earlier this month, he attempted another ill-advised “three-team” deal to acquire pitching and ship out Jayson Werth.

Well, here we are on July 29th, and the situation has worked out better than any sane, rational Phillies fan could have hoped. Werth isn’t going anywhere, and Amaro deserves credit for getting Roy Oswalt for pennies on the dollar. Granted, he was dealing with Ed Wade, so it wasn’t exactly a triumph of intellect, but I can’t be as harsh toward his many failures without giving the man credit for his successes. Not without being a Mets fan giant hypocrite.

Ed Wade (Artist's rendering).

Seriously, folks, this could’ve been so much worse. Word ’round the campfire was that the Astros wanted Jonathan Singleton, that they wouldn’t kick in a significant amount of cash, and that Oswalt wanted his $16 million option for 2012 guaranteed as a provision for waiving his no-trade clause. Any and all of that would have been terrible for the Phillies. Read the rest of this entry »

Howdy, folks. You haven’t seen me around much lately (or any of us, for that matter). Let’s just forget the month of June happened. I’m sure the Phillies would like to.

July 1st is one of the more exciting days on the sports calendar. Both NHL and NBA free agency begin, and the hot stove usually kicks into high gear leading up to MLB’s trade deadline at the end of the month. And boy, did Jerry Crasnick crank up the heat this morning, breaking the news that the Phillies are interested in Dan Haren, and that Arizona scouts are checking out our prospects.

I’ll pause for a moment while you close your eyes and dream of a Halladay-Hamels-Haren playoff rotation. Read the rest of this entry »

So, we suck.

That’s all there is to it. Right now, we are a disgrace to the game of baseball.

We couldn’t get runs after a night of all-you-can-eat Chipotle. We score about as often as those head-bobbing guys in A Night at the Roxbury. Ryan Howard’s homer last night was our first since the Grover Cleveland administration – the first one. Jayson Werth has followed his beard into the abyss. There’s rampant speculation that Chase Utley is hurt. Ross Gload hit leadoff on Monday. Ross. Fucking. Gload.

I have begun to seriously consider the possibility that aliens from a distant planet have stolen the athletic abilities of our best players, 14 years after dire warnings of just such a occurrence by the Nobel Prize-winning documentary Space Jam.

Pictured (from left): Polanco, Howard, Rollins, Utley, Werth

Everyone: Take a deep breath.

As horrible as this stretch has been – and it has been atrocious on a level that has been thankfully rare in recent Phillies history – we can’t lose sight of the big picture. Even with the Braves sweeping us to run their winning streak to eight, even after losing nine of our last 11 games, we’re still four games over .500 on June 2. Last year, we were two games over .500 on July 2. We survived.

There’s simply no way that this futility continues. Our big guns will come out of their simultaneous slumps. Our numerous, crippling injuries will heal.

We’ll be fine.

That’s us, right now.

Back to back shutout losses. For the first time since 1998, AKA the Dark Ages. To the fucking Mets. Blanton gave up a homer to this fucking guy.

It’s a long season. We’re still in first. The Mets are still in last, and not really a threat anyway.

All the same, we are playing some awful baseball right now.

Hamels tomorrow to avoid the reverse brom job. The way things are going, he’ll have to throw a no-no for us to win.

Ugh.

With the quarter pole of the MLB season approaching this week, and with a streak of posts by Ryan Edmund that simply must be stopped, it seems as good a time as any for a State of the Phillies Address. Platitudes and neverending ovations are not, strictly speaking, necessary, but the latter would be appreciated. H/T to MooseWithFleas for the general concept and some statistical legwork.

Since we never play our reserves, I’ve declined to analyze their performance, but everybody else gets the treatment after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

By now, you’ve probably heard that the current back-up plan to Brad Lidge in the ninth is one of our resident Cuban defectors. Fortunately, it’s the good one. In your face, Ryan Edmund!

I suck. Just like TheRuckus said I would!

Jose Contreras is, to use the technical parlance, owning the shit out of the hitters right now. His velocity is up, and his breaking pitches look awesome. His swinging strike rate is an eye-popping 22.3% – to put that in perspective, Brad Lidge’s 2008 mark was 15.3%. His 16.43 K/9 is second in the majors behind Carlos Marmol (or CarLOLs MarmLOL, as the case may be). All caveats about small sample size acknowledged, so far Contreras is doing a good job of making me look like the genius I am.

Last night against the Cardinals, he entered the game in the 10th, quickly striking out Ryan Ludwick on a two-seamer that the stadium gun recorded at 98. Of course, that gun also clocked Hamels at 95, so it was probably a little hot. Let’s move on before I have to make a dumb taser joke. Anyway, Contreras had Albert Pujols looking mortal on a couple of splitters before surrendering a double on a 1-2 pitch that was more a result of terrible defense by Ben Francisco than anything else. He bounced back to fan Matt Holliday on an absolutely filthy split and got David Freese to foul out to first.

Lidge looked decent last night, but Charlie rightly wants to ease him back into the swing of things. Contreras is pretty clearly the best reliever on the team right now, and it behooves us to use him as such. Hopefully, more like we did last night than with a three-run lead in the ninth, but I’ll take anything that keeps Danys Baez from pitching multiple innings. Or at all, really.

HEY, LOOK OVER THERE as I ruin your beloved franchise's future!

As loyal readers, you may recall that I wrote a series of posts aimed at objectively evaluating Ruben Amaro’s performance as general manager. My conclusion was that despite his occasional moments of brilliance, Amaro is decidedly average at his job.

I was wrong. Ruben Amaro, Jr. is one of the worst GMs in the game, and the sooner he’s fired, the better. Read the rest of this entry »

Gettin' paid, gettin' paid.

My reaction can be found here.

One year ago today, Harry Kalas died in the booth an hour before a game between the Phillies and Nationals.

I was on my way to class at the University of Pittsburgh when I heard the news. It’s a rare thing for me to cry when I’m not alone, but I was unsuccessfully fighting off tears for the rest of the day. I’ve been fortunate enough that no family members who were particularly close to me have died in my lifetime, but the pain I felt at his loss was what I imagine it would be like. If you grew up listening to Harry call games every summer, as many of us did, you know exactly what I mean. We all knew he was getting on in years, and he’d started to slip just the slightest bit in his work. Little things, like mistaking a strike for a ball. Stumbling over a routine call. Not quite bringing the same energy that he had in years past. Still, nobody was ready to see him go.

Going to school a few hundred miles away, I rarely had the chance to enjoy his broadcasts over the last few years of his life. When he passed, I was only a few weeks away from graduating and returning to my parents’ house for the summer, while I tried to figure just what the hell I was going to do with the rest of my life. After the shock and the tears wore off, I kept coming back to a single thought: I wish I could have heard him call just one more game.

I was lucky enough to meet him in 2004. I was working at a hotel which hosted the Delco Times sports banquet, and he was at one of my tables. I tried to be professional, to be courteous, to let him eat his dinner in peace, and above all, to not screw anything up. The entire staff gravitated to him throughout the evening, eager for a chance to have a brief exchange with a legend. It would have been perfectly understandable if he had gotten a little annoyed.

He did not. He was warm and jovial with every person who interacted with him that night, be they fellow guests or hotel employees. I’ve been treated like a lower specimen by many normal people before, but not by Harry. He actively engaged me in conversation, and it wasn’t long before I got past being intimidated by my proximity to the voice of the Phillies and managed to not make a fool of myself.

There are hundreds of stories just like mine, of regular folks who met one of the greatest broadcasters in the history of sports, and came away with nothing but fond memories of a true gentleman.

Harry may not be calling games anymore. The team may not be wearing the black, circular HK patch in his honor this season. But generations of Phillies faithful will always hold him close to their hearts.

Harry Kalas, you were the man.

Runs? Where we're going, we don't need runs.

The Phillies scored 41 runs in the first five games. Much as we’d all like it to, that sort of torrid pace won’t last, and today was easily the worst showing of this young season for the lineup. Jimmy led off with a homer, Chooch brought home a run on a groundout in the second, and that was it.

They picked a good time to sputter a bit, though, considering Doc was on the mound. He was his usual awesome self, allowing only an unearned run in what should be the first of many complete games of his Phillies career. 111 pitches, 83 for strikes; eight strikeouts, no walks, seven singles. Between the sixth and seventh innings, he had five runners on with no outs, and allowed just one to score. I hesitate to use the word “clutch” because it’s so horribly applied by most people, but that’s mighty impressive. No runner reached second base in any other inning, and the Zombie Phillies Astros got a well-deserved bromming. They’re 0-6 for the first time since 1983.

So, the Phils are off to their best start since 1993, and on the road, no less; but for a bad inning by Kyle Kendrick, they’d be undefeated. Nobody’s within 10 runs of their MLB-leading plus-25 run differential. With another series against the lowly Nats beginning tomorrow with the home opener (which certain bloggers will be tailgating), the good times figure to keep on rolling.

Speaking of the Nats, they just took two of three from the Mets, beating Johan Santana this afternoon. If the Flyers can pull out a win against the Rangers, we can leave New York even more demoralized. Here’s hoping, even though the Flyers kind of suck and have no shot at doing anything in the playoffs.

Who really cares, though? It’s baseball season, and the Phillies are off to a great start for a change. As bad as the Nats and Astros are, we should still be enjoying the utter dominance our team is exerting in the early going.

We play the Mets for the first time at the end of the month. Things keep going the way they are, we might have a double digit lead on them by the end of that series. Not that they’re in any way a threat to us. It’s just fun to see Mets fans’ dreams crushed over and over again.