Whew, boy. This one is actually pretty tame by Conlin’s standards, but that still makes it one of the worst articles I’ve read in a while. The article is entitled “Why Phillies are looking at 98 wins.” Not an outlandish prediction, but maybe a little optimistic. Unfortunately, the rest of the column is full of vintage Conlin craziness.

In 1993, I sensed a special set of intangibles in the crazies that GM Lee Thomas turned over to manager Jim Fregosi. Coming off a dead-last finish in 1992, picking the reinforced cast of baseball’s “Animal House” to win the pennant was more than a little risky; it was nuts. But I did and the Phillies jumped out to a huge lead, hung on for the East title, then took out the favored Braves in six.

Mystery solved.

Now, I’ll give the man credit for this much: He freely admits that predicting the pennant in ’93 was certifiably insane. Of course, he’s mentioning this to lend credence to his supposed prognostication prowess, so it still makes no sense at all. Especially since he claims to have divined this result via Spidey Sense or whatever, rather than something crazy, like facts and objective evidence.

Charlie Manuel never held out during a six-season major league baseball career that spanned 432 plate appearances and yielded a .198 career batting average. He held on like a remora to a shark’s underbelly.

Charlie should bring this up at his next contract negotiation. The ability to hold on like a remora is, like, 99 percent of what makes a good manager.

The big redhead went to Japan and finally learned to hit. He became the most popular “Gaijin” to ever play there. He even challenged the sacred single-season home-run record of Sadaharu Oh. By the time he climbed the minor league managing ladder and became the Cleveland Indians’ batting coach, then manager, he had become the Will Rogers of hitting, a folksy master of homespun malapropisms who never met a hitting man he didn’t like.

And that is why the Phillies will win 98 games this year.

Ruben Amaro Jr. had a similar if more privileged baseball upbringing. He was born to baseball royalty. His grandfather, Santos Amaro, is enshrined in the Cuban and Mexican halls of fame. Santos would have been a candidate for Cooperstown, as well, had his Cuban skin been a few shades lighter. Ruben’s father of the same name had hands so soft during his major league career with the Phillies and Cardinals you would have entrusted him with catching an infant dropped from the sixth floor of a burning building. Junior was an All-America outfielder at Stanford. He had been a ball-rat from Day 1. Ruben’s big-league career was a scuffle. He played eight seasons, five of them here, batted .235 and learned his front-office skills from a variety of eminent professors in the College of Base Knocks, including Pat Gillick.

Ruben Amaro’s grandfather is a Hall of Famer in other countries. His father had soft hands, presumably because he moisturized. Amaro himself played baseball, though he was pretty crappy at it, and went on to earn an Associate’s Degree in General Management from the esteemed Base Knocks University in Hoboken, N.J. (Go Whitefish!). All of these things are more relevant to the Phillies’ success than Roy Halladay, Chase Utley, Ryan Howard, Cole Hamels, or anyone else who will put on a uniform and take the field for them in 2010.

It is not easy to find a major league ballclub that has a GM and manager who held on instead of holding out. And rarer still to find one where two advisers to the GM, Charley Kerfeld and Dallas Green, are pups from that same loving-the-game litter. Manuel . . . Amaro . . . Green . . . Kerfeld. They are four reasons why the best team in Phillies history will duck the complacency bullet and should win as many as 98 games.

Manuel went to Japan because he couldn’t hit here. Amaro retired after seven seasons because he couldn’t hit at all. How is that “holding on”? What does “holding out” mean in this context? What does any of this paragraph mean?

Conlin predicts a fourth straight division title, third straight pennant, and a seven-game victory in the World Series over the Red Sox. This is a rather plausible series of events, but here’s how he justifies it:

The Yankees have lost a lot of late-inning clutch work with the sayonara to Hideki Matsui, the World Series MVP, and the seeya to run-producer Johnny Damon.

The Yankees replaced Matsui with Nick Johnson and Damon with Curtis Granderson. Yes, Johnson is as brittle as a Mets fan’s ego and Granderson is Mr. Magoo against lefties, but overall, those are probable upgrades. They also added Javier Vazquez to the rotation. I’ve actually got the Yankees missing the playoffs, but that’s because I am a closet Rays fan, and I’m anticipating a lot of injury and regression for the Yankees next season, because they are old as balls at a lot of positions. This is a much better argument than losing “clutch work.”

Conlin finally starts talking about players in the National League about three-quarters of the way into the article, and none of his observations are particularly egregious. Still, he manages to spend nearly a thousand words making a case for the Phillies winning 98 games and a second championship in three seasons without mentioning Utley, Halladay, or Howard once.

Ladies and gentleman: This man has a Hall of Fame vote.

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