i dont think keeping lee would have done anything.

i think that the NL is watered down to hell, and were goin win our division by 4 or 5 games again. so what if we get 110 wins in a season with lee, we dont need it! we will still get to the world series without him, making just as much money for FO as winning it with him. and restocking the farm allows us to make moves. Gillies may not seem attractive because of our depth at outfield but look at what michael borne is doing! prospects are important!

brad lidge costs so much money and for some reason i just dont see him coming back to form. i tihnk aumont will be huge!

Anyway…Happy New Year to you as well…stay warm in VT.

No sh!t!!….Thats’ not the point of the argument….I would have loved to have had Halladay and Lee together as much as anybody else….but it didn’t make sense OVERALL…for the future health of this club…to just settle for 2 draft picks when Lee would have left at the end of the year.

But Roy Halladay will be JUST FINE…WITHOUT Cliff Lee here…he’s the best pitcher in baseball…

If anything…Roy Halladay makes Cole Hamels better..

Maybe these three prospects won’t be worth a damn…and maybe they will….but I’d rather take my chances with having them here…starting at AA….than settling for 2 draft picks at the end of the year…

We could afford to do that BECAUSE we got Roy Halladay in the fold….along with Hamels, Happ and Blanton….

____

How is it that just because someone defends the Front Office…you know the one of Gillick and Amaro and Montgomery and Giles…the SAME F.O. that has given us 3 straight NL titles., 2 straight WS appearances, and a World Title….

How is it that just because someone decides to say “Ok…they’ve pulled the right strings so far so I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt with their decisions” that that person is then assumed to be working for the PR dept…??

I actually feel kinda bad for him right now….here he is…in red pinstripes…happy as hell to be here….and all anybody is talking about is Cliff Lee and “What Might Have Been.”

YOU stop!!!

All I’ve heard from you…and a bunch of other people on here….is how “insulted” and “blind-sided” you are over this Cliff Lee thing….something that was necessary to do for the OVERALL health of the team..

All you guys and girls are doing is crying and whining about something that’s done….and we are BETTER OFF THE LONG-RUN for it..

And…I guarantee that when the time comes for Ryan Howard to walk…all sorts of people are going to bitch, moan, complain…those SAME people that bitch, moan and complain every time the guys strikes out 4 times in a game.

Seriously…if we don’t get back to the World Series…what are you all gonna do…proclaim that the reason is because the Phillies didn’t elect to keep Cliff Lee for 2010??

“The price of the ticket is the least expensive thing the average fan will pay for when going to a game. Or pretty damn close. The money that is made by the club outside of tickets is the BIG number.”

REALLY????

Avg ticket price is what, $30?
$30 x 3.6 million fans = $108 million dollars

I would say that’s easily the biggest chunk of their revenue
Any that pays $30 AND then spends more than that on other things is spending too much at the ballpark

I have an uncle that works for Aramark.. they took a HUGE drop the past two years since tailgating and bring-your-own food are now the most popular options down there

I’m not saying they aren’t making money.. but lets not pretend that they aren’t spending money either.

Some people want them to spend even more, which is easy to say when its not coming out of our pockets … not yet at least .. the slight increase in ticket prices directly relates to their increased payroll.. and their SOLD OUT games help give them revenue to keep this whole cycle going

I guess they didn’t want SOLD OUT games in 2010 … and then only 20,000 fans in 2013 … so they’re trying to keep things within their budget.

…
Keeping Lee and trading him later wasn’t an option.. that would have been a complete d!ck-tease to the fans. So that is why we heard “3 team trade” all along

People can be upset we don’t have both, and that’s fine … but to still be crying over losing Lee, instead of being thankful that we now have the better of the two pitchers doesn’t make sense to me

Chuck, we all realize that Howard will go to the AL at some point, probably sooner than later, so, no, I don’t think you’ll see the same reaction when that happens. Keeping Cliff Lee for one more year, while the core of the team is still here and in their prime, just seems like a no-brainer to me. I’m hoping they’ll be fine without him, but if they end up losing a championship due to lack of SP, well, I don’t even want to think about that now, it’s too painful.

The Dipsy

It’s not as if the Phillies ownership group has made the decision to have a “fire sale”…ala the ’97 Florida Marlins…

This is baseball, people…it’s the harsh reality of the business part of professional sports in the era in which we live..why is this so surprising to all of you?

If you didn’t like this move…then you all had better brace yourselves for the BIGGER moves that are yet to come in the next few years…

What are you all gonna say when the Phillies refuse to resign Ryan Howard…because he’s gonna be WAY too expensive to keep?…

I guarantee that those of you that constantly criticize him for striking out too much and calling for his head…will be devastated when the Phillies let him walk..

Same goes for Jayson Werth…(although that probably won’t have the same emotional effect because Werth is constantly underrated and underappreciated by most fans anyway…he won’t be “emotionally” missed like Howard will be…even though he’s so valuable to this line-up.

It’s one thing to accept what you did with what you had (as we have with 2009). And if people were asking posters to stop repeatedly complaining about a loss in 6 to the Skanks I might have to agree with them. But it’s another thing to be put in a position to always wonder what you could have done with what you could have had, especially if it’s a rotation that offered one of the best starters in the majors and a number two who most teams dream of having as their ace, while still having the rest of a championship-caliber core. At least if we again wind up losing top honors in 2010, we’d know we did it with arguably our best attempt at being greatest team in our franchise history, and most likely the best single Phils team we’d have the chance to see this generation.

It’s sad that this year there’s a widespread sense of disappointment before the season even starts and anything’s even tangibly been lost, because in a psychological sense something has been – the true pinnacle of what the Phils could have presented to the annals of baseball (heck, even if do wind up WFCs) in the coming year. Too bad management couldn’t see the intangible value inherent in this now-impossible opportunity.

I’m sorry, but this apparent knee-jerk salary dump comes as not only an insulting, blind-siding, and embarrassing slap in the face to fans in front of the rest of the baseball community but as a nice bolus of s**t to mentally stick in the craw of fans for years to come. Dipsy, Griffin, j reed, mikemike – I will fully offer my shoulders for crying into (and hopefully not, but probably, way past) 2010, because our outrage is justified not only by the indefensibility of the business/baseball moves as many have already expounded upon, but by human nature, and is our prerogative.

The Dipsy

I was wrong about their payroll going up 48% in the last 5 years .. it was actually in the last 3 years. And it was a Tom Verducci article, not a Jon Heyman one … I’m off my game today

…
“Their attendance has risen 38 percent since 2006, climbing from 2.6 million — ninth in the league — to 3.6 million. Their payroll in those three years jumped 49 percent, from $88 million to $131 million and is likely to approach $140 million in 2010.”

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2009/writers/tom_verducci/12/10/winter.meetings.phillies/index.html