As we move into Spring Training and beyond, one of the baseball questions that keeps haunting me as a Phillies fan is Should the Phillies have kept Cliff Lee? Yes, Roy Halladay is the best pitcher in baseball and is well worth the contract he signed with the Phillies. Yes, Cole Hamels looks motivated to prove everyone that last year was an aberration. Yes, the Phillies rotation looks good in Spring Training thus far. (Though the classic line from “Major League” rolls through my head: yeah, against guys who are going to be bagging groceries in a couple of weeks!) But couldn’t the Phillies have kept Lee, somehow, some way???
The twosome of Halladay and Hamels should be great. But that puts the Phillies on par with some other great duos like Lincecum and Cain, Carpenter and Wainwright, Sabathia and Burnett, Hernadez and Lee and Lester and Beckett. However a threesome of Halladay-Lee and Hamels could not be matched by any other team. (No Red Sox fans, not even by Lester-Beckett and Lackey) The goal is to win the World Series and though I’m ecstatic that the Phillies finally got Roy Halladay, I did not want to exchange Cliff Lee for him. I’m a little torn because I like the moves to keep the Phillies relevant into the future. I’ve lived through the dry times and got razzed on the day of the 10000th loss, so a move to keep the Phillies good for future years is heartening. But couldn’t we have gone for it this year and then seen what happened? The future is not guaranteed, you have to go for the NOW!
I guess we’ll see what happens this season. I expect the Phillies to win the East, take out St Louis for the Penant and face the Yankees again in October. Hopefully this time the Offense, Hamels and Lidge all have their A games ready so Philadelphia can hoist another banner!
The Philadelphia Phillies need to take a page from the New York Yankees handbook. Given a home series with the floundering Florida Marlins, the Phillies proceeded to screw the pooch over the weekend and watched a seven game division lead fade to four after a three game Marlin sweep! Meanwhile, the Yankees strangled their bitter rivals, the Boston Red Sox, taking four from the Sawx with timely hitting and fabulous pitching and taking a firm hold of the division lead. Speaking of pitching, what has become of Phillies Ace Cole Hamels who got lit up again this weekend and fell to 7-7 on the year???
All my life I have dreamt about a career in Sports; player, broadcaster, executive, any would have been great. In retrospect, I think I may have passed on GM of a major sports franchise. I wrote earlier about Roy Halladay and the need for Toronto and Philadelphia to make a deal and GMs Ruben Amaro of the Phillies and JP Ricciardi of the Bluejays (both seen above) went toe to toe to make it happen.
It appears that Ricciardi either dramatically underestimated Amaro or overestimated his market position. Ricciardi has been widely speculated to be a “dead man walking” with his only chance of survival being a drastic salary purge of the Bluejays bloated budget. Plus his current wishy washy handling of the Halladay affair and wide spread use of the local and national media in trade “negotiations”, did nothing to endear himself to already jaded Toronto fans. By asking for a king’s ransom for Halladay and not budging, Ricciardi watched the trade market shift gears and blow right by him, most likely cementing his fate as a casualty of the trade wars this coming off-season.
