In June 2009, when I was trying to find a job after graduating college, I started writing for a small Phillies blog run by a longtime friend of mine, Paul Boye. He wasn’t doing much with it, I figured, so why not let me on board? That site, The Phrontiersman, trundled along for a while at about 1,500 hits a month for seven months. We each probably posted about twice or three times a week, and it was fun, but we knew that only a couple hundred people read our posts. That site served the purpose of helping Paul and me find our voices as sports commentators, all the while developing this strange sort of comedy double act, with me playing the role of Groucho Marx and Paul as Margaret Dumont.

In January 2010, I wrote a post trying to project the Phillies’ history if they’d kept Scott Rolen. MLB Trade Rumors linked to it, and the site blew up. A couple weeks later, Paul called me at work, saying this site called Phillies Nation had gotten in touch with him and wanted us to move over and write for them. I couldn’t say yes quickly enough, and for the past two years, I’ve written anything from a short poem about Cliff Lee facing the Mets to 2,000 words on attending the 19-inning game against the Reds this year. Over 23 months, we’ve been on a journey together, you and I, that’s featured both emotion and logic, with a touch of confrontation thrown in.

Today, that journey comes to an end. This will be my last post as a member of the Phillies Nation staff.

I know that in the scheme of personnel moves this winter, my leaving for Crashburn Alley is hardly Pujols-to-Los Angeles, but Pat’s asked me to put something together on my time here. I thought about trying to explain what goes into this site, maybe tell a funny story or two, but instead, I thought it more appropriate to let you know why I think this Phillies Nation is so great.

Being a writer for Phillies Nation has become, strangely, part of my identity. It’s given me an opportunity to grow as a writer to the point where I’m embarrassed by some of the things I wrote at The Phrontiersman, or at The Daily Gamecock in college. Writing at Phillies Nation is a deeply social experience, not just because of the people you meet (though that’s pretty cool; after having had a few at a tailgate last summer, I declared Pat Gallen “the sexiest man in the Phillies blogosphere”), but because whatever you write is going to get immediate and passionate feedback. As a group, there’s a lot of badgering and debate over (the aptly named) Yammer as Pat tries like an overwhelmed shepherd to get everything covered.

Speaking of which, I need to express my appreciation for the people I’m leaving behind, and frankly, so do you. Brian and R.C. don’t do much baseball writing as such, but what you see is possible because of their hard work. They made the transition from “no one reads what you write” to “lots of people sort of read what you write and want to kill you” easier than expected.

I leave here confident that the site will continue to thrive, thanks in no small part to an incredible stable of writers who do the heavy lifting for no pay and less praise. Jay is unique among bloggers I’ve known in that he’s carved out a niche for himself, gotten access, and made himself into the foremost expert in his area through old-school reporting. He does a difficult job with verve and panache. Corey gets statistics, he gets controversy, and he can write. I suspect that in my absence, most of your internet vitriol should be directed toward him. Kieran, Amanda, Jonathan, and Ian are the reason you have a place here to gripe, as their news and analysis posts keep this site populated with the very latest, which is what sets Phillies Nation apart. Then there’s Pat, whose leadership and hard work keep Phillies Nation spinning on its axis. Not only is he one of the most underrated sports voices in the area, he’s a charming person, a good friend, and an inspiring leader whom I’ll miss working for.

The point is, we don’t appreciate my now-former colleagues enough for the great work they do, which sustains our discourse and has allowed me to sit in a corner and spew my bullshit for 23 months.

The defining memory of my time at Phillies Nation, however, will be the comment battles. We’ve gone back and forth, you and I, on Domonic Brown, Shane Victorino, Ryan Howard….actually, pretty much everyone who’s put on a Phillies uniform in the past two years except for Chase Utley and Roy Halladay. I think we can all agree that their excellence is beyond reproach. I’m sure there are many of you who will greet my departure with celebration, but frankly even the negative comments have pushed me to write better, argue better, research better, and think more creatively. So while I won’t miss the flame wars, I’m probably better off for having had them, and I hope you can say the same.

So while I’m excited to work with Bill, Ryan, and Paul over at Crashburn Alley, my going there is bittersweet. I’ll miss the helter-skelter of slamming out an unclaimed gameday post at 6:30 p.m. I’ll miss the excitement of having two people writing posts that analyze the same topic and coming up with completely different conclusions. The past two years have been exciting, fun, and challenging, and most of all, gratifying. Phillies Nation, as much as any of its competitors, is an inclusive community, one that I’ve been proud to call home. Now that the time has come to move on, there’s more than a small part of me that’s filled with sadness at what I’m leaving behind.

Thank you all for your kindness and attention for the past 23 months. I’ll see you around the internet.

Most importantly, continue to read and support Phillies Nation and the fine people who work here. I know I will.

This concludes our 2011 Player Review series. Previous posts can be found here.

It’s tough to look at Ryan Howard objectively. The highs have been great (he’s one of only five players in major league history to win Rookie of the Year and the MVP in his first two seasons), and the lows have been dreadful. There’s a great tradition in Philadelphia sports of being able to separate the great athlete from his context. We look at Eric Lindros and see his concussions. We look at Allen Iverson and think first of his bizarre and polarizing behavior and his inability to overcome his terrible teammates. We look at Bobby Abreu and we don’t see the Phillies’ career leader in OBP and an outfield talent the likes of which the organization hadn’t seen since Richie Ashburn–we see his refusal to run into walls. We see Donovan McNabb and rather than recognizing that he’s the greatest offensive player the Eagles have ever had, we crucify him for only being the third-best quarterback in the NFL during his prime.

So, too, with Ryan Howard. But instead of concussions, or Ricky Manning, or a rap album, we see what should simply be known as The Contract. In his prime, Howard was as good a power hitter as could be found in baseball. His 2006 season was probably not as good as Albert Pujols‘, but his winning the MVP that year was hardly a miscarriage of justice. But since then, he’s slipped from those ranks. The league discovered that he was a dead-pull hitter who couldn’t recognize low off-speed pitches, and without much athleticism or defense to fall back on, Howard went from MVP candidate to pretty good in the blink of an eye.

Except Ruben Amaro, in April 2010, signed him to a contract extension that paid him like an MVP candidate through his age-36 season. And while I don’t begrudge Howard a dollar of the $125 million he’ll make over the next five years, that figure will color everything he does for the rest of his time with the Phillies.

But y’all know all this. How did he do in 2011?

In a vacuum, 2.7 rWAR, 1.6 fWAR is not what you want out of your franchise player. But here’s the thing: as Howard continues to age and lose bat speed (as everyone does after age 31), the most troubling bit of his game will only get worse. Against righties in 2011, Howard posted a .266/.370/.566 line. That’s quite good by anyone’s standards. But against lefties? That line drops to .224/.286/.347. That’s a drop of nearly 300 points’ worth of OPS. Howard’s platoon split is so severe that merely bringing in a LOOGY turns Howard from a hitter equivalent to 2010 Jayson Werth into a hitter appreciably worse than 2010 Wilson Valdez. And since he already sees more breaking balls and fewer strikes than just about anyone else in baseball.

That’s where the Achilles comparison comes in. In addition to being convenient because The Howitzer tore his Achilles tendon on the final play of the 2011 season, he’s a man blessed with talent so immense it could only be described as metaphysical. But at the same time, that late-inning lefty throwing slop is baseball’s equivalent to Paris’ arrow through the ankle. For all the good Howard does, that one weakness is certainly a doozy.

Grade: 4.8/10 In a vacuum, Howard is a pretty decent, but flawed player. But in context, where he’s making roughly the same money as Albert Pujols to be the cleanup hitter on a team with designs on another World Series title? Not so much. What you think of Howard depends on how easily you can separate him from his contract.

Oil Can Boyd

There’s a lot not to like about baseball in the 1930s and 1940s–no television, racial segregation, and an offensive explosion that would make the Steroid Era look like the Bronze Age, thanks to joke ballparks (258 feet to the right field foul pole at the Polo Grounds!) and a set of strategic norms still adjusting to the live ball era.

But there were some things I wish hadn’t changed from then. Four, to be precise:

1. No designated hitter
2. No Atlanta Braves (though I admit that if they were from Boston I might hate them even more)
3. No New York Mets
4. Nicknames

Sure, we have nicknames on the Phillies, and while some of them are pretty good (J-Roll, assuming he comes back, Doc, Chooch), others are pretty awful, like “Polly” or “J-Bone,” which is what Steven De Fratus wants us to call his brother, Phillies reliever Justin De Fratus. Intending no undue disrespect to either De Fratus brother, J-Bone is the stupidest goddamn idea for a nickname that I’ve ever heard in my life. We can come up with something better.

That’s what was so great about the interwar years–they put thought into their nicknames, which is how we wound up with The Splendid Splinter, Fat Freddie Fitzsimmons, Goose Goslin, and a litany of awesome sobriquets for Babe Ruth. And because we weren’t afraid of hurting people’s feelings, nicknames weren’t limited to things you might call your golden retriever or the third-line center on the squirt hockey team you coach on the weekend–you couldn’t really be mean, but you didn’t have to be complimentary, either. You could call someone “Losing Pitcher Mulcahy” or “Three Finger Brown” and no one would accuse you of being an insensitive pig. We need to think outside the box here, which is why I’ve been trying so hard to get “Exxon” and “Tony No-Dad” to stick.

It’s also why I need your help.

It should go without saying that several  people working together on a problem have the capacity to solve it more efficiently than merely one. And I know that y’all have the capacity to come up with more than the occasional bon mot (I know this, incidentally, because that predilection for sharp language has been used on more than one occasion to question my parentage). In case you haven’t put this together by now, we’re crowdsourcing nicknames, ideally for the entire Phillies’ 40-man roster, though if you’d like to take a stab at a non-Phillie–particularly if you want to stick a nickname like “The Pimple” on an someone from Atlanta or New York–those submissions are welcome as well.

It’s not just quantity we need, but quality. “Doc” fits Roy Halladay not just because it harkens back to Wild West gunslinger (and dentist,  incidentally) Doc Holliday, but because, like Halladay himself, it connotes an understated coolness and surgical precision. Likewise, “J-Roll” stands above the rest of the “first letter of first name, first syllable of last name” genre of celebrity nomenclature made famous by Alex Rodriguez and Jennifer Lopez around the turn of the century. This is so because the “Roll” connotes a kinetic energy that accurately captures Rollins’ style of play, to say nothing of (and here I’m going to sound profoundly out-of-touch and white) recalling, again, the detached coolness of “rollin’ on dubs” or “pimp roll.”

That’s the level of nickname to which we should aspire.

We should do this not just because it’s fun, or it’s a way to kill time and keep baseball on one’s mind when the alternative is listening to Christmas music, but because of a class of people who suffers when nicknames fall by the wayside: the writers. When you’re writing about baseball year-round, particularly when your focus is only on one team, writing “Utley” over and over gets so repetitive and boring that it becomes almost literally painful to refer to him by the same moniker over and over and over. It’s why I’ve tried and failed to adopt the nickname of the Spanish national soccer team–”la furia roja” or “the red fury”–to the Phillies. Writing “the Phillies” or “Philadelphia” 50,000 times a year has made me into a tortured, twisted shell of the man I once was. We need creativity. We need variety. We need your help.

Here’s a list of Phillies who already have acceptable nicknames, though if, in any case, you think you can do better, knock yourself out:

• Roy Halladay: “Doc”
• Jimmy Rollins (assuming he comes back): “J-Roll”
• Shane Victorino: “The Flyin’ Hawaiian” (though I prefer “Pineapple Express”)
• Carlos Ruiz: “Chooch”
• Dontrelle Willis: “D-Train”
• Antonio Bastardo: “Tony No-Dad”
• Wilson Valdez: “Exxon”
• Michael Martinez: “Mini-Mart”

The following Phillies have nicknames that are okay, but ought to be improved:

• Ryan Howard: “The Big Piece”
• Vance Worley: “Vanimal”
• Cole Hamels: “Hollywood”
• Michael Schwimer: “The Bear Jew” (@FuquaManuel of The Good Phight calls him this, in reference to Eli Roth’s character in Inglourious Basterds, and it’s hilarious, but as a gentile of German extraction I’m not sure I’m totally comfortable calling him that in print)

So that leaves quite a few players, including several with personalities, appearances, or playing styles interesting enough to warrant appropriate nicknames. Here’s a couple ideas to get started. Now go to town.

• Hunter Pence: “Sandbox” in reference to his childlike disposition. Or maybe “Penceypants” because it’s fun to say.
• John Mayberry Jr.: “Stanford” or anything having to do with mermaids.
• Jonathan Papelbon: “Jackie Goodpope” using the same technique that gave us “Tony No-Dad”
• Cliff Lee: “The Widowmaker” just because
• Placido Polanco‘s head looks exactly like a beluga whale’s head. We can do something with this, I’m sure of it.

Anyway, go to town, commenters, because it’s winter, we’re bored, and I’m sick of calling Kyle Kendrick “KK”. If we get enough good responses, we’ll post them on the site.

Michael Baumann writes the weekly Dr. Strangeglove column, which appears every Friday on Phillies Nation. You can follow him on Twitter at @atomicruckus

Let’s leave aside for a moment all the accoutrements that come with Hunter Pence. Let’s leave aside, for instance, the topless photos. Let’s leave aside the ragging on John Mayberry for the Stanford Mermaid Experiment. Hunter Pence: Creator of Catchphrases and Destroyer of Postgame Buffets.

These antics are great, but what do they say about Hunter Pence, the ballplayer? Pence could be a latter-day Roger McDowell, a pitcher remembered today less for his 159 career saves but for the 12 years he spent in major league bullpens setting other people’s shoelaces on fire. (Or for this more recent nastiness, which someone would mention if I didn’t.)

But back to Hunter Pence the ballplayer. From 2007 to 2010, he was pretty decent. But in 2011, particularly in the second half of 2011, he was freakin’ incredible.

Before coming to Philadelphia, Hunter Pence was a nice player, a 3-win-and-change outfielder with enough power and speed to get by and less plate discipline than you’d like. Occasionally, he’d post something like a .370 BABIP and post a 4-WAR year. In Houston, Pence was a solid player, an all-star, even, on a team that didn’t really have much else to offer in terms of players who were worth a crap.

Then he came to Philadelphia and, for 236 plate appearances, was, well, not Jose Bautista with wheels, but close. With Houston, Pence posted a .290/.339/.479 slash line–decent numbers. After his trade to the Phillies, he posted a .324/.394/.560 slash line, a partial season head and shoulders above anything he’d ever done before, and head and shoulders above anything any other member of the Phillies did in 2011. Pence’s .954 OPS with the Phillies, over a full season, would have been the best OPS posted by any Phillies player since Ryan Howard and Chase Utley posted dueling .976 marks in 2007.

Sure, that’s a small sample, and Pence did still have that ridiculous BABIP supporting his season, but this is one case where analyzing it too much kind of ruins the fun. And, really, that’s what Hunter Pence was all about.

Grade: 8.9/10 — A right-handed power bat, good defense, and an engaging, fan-friendly personality that’s even more adorably hyperactive than Shane Victorino’s. I originally had misgivings about rating Pence higher than Ian Riccaboni rated Victorino, but even though Victorino was the team’s most valuable position player by far, Pence was better than Victorino in his short time in Philadelphia.

Note: Thanks to @SpoontownUSA for coming up with the subtitle when I couldn’t think of anything good.

Because it’s finals week at universities across North America, I’d like to encourage everyone to do the following: if there’s a college professor who impacted your life for the better whom you never thanked, go back and do that. For me, it would be Dr. Gordon Smith, Director of the Walker Institute of International and Area Studies at the University of South Carolina and one of American academia’s foremost experts on Russian politics. My junior year of undergrad, I took his Russian foreign policy class because 1) I needed an international relations elective and 2) my girlfriend, a Russian major, was taking it.

That class was the first impetus for my choosing to attend graduate school for political science–international relations in particular–and Dr. Smith was a fabulous teacher. I wasn’t one of the star students, and I figured that if Dr. Smith remembered me at all, it would be as the sleepy-looking bearded guy who sat next to KTLSF in the back row–she was one of the star students–and thought it was funny to characterize the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko as “in Soviet Russia, tea drinks you!” But more than a year after our last class meeting, he spotted me on the street, called me by name, and we talked for several minutes about life, the universe, and everything.

This post was made possible because of one word–gerontocracy–to which Dr. Smith introduced me that semester. I’d like to dedicate this post to Dr. Gordon Smith, who, I’m sure would be proud to know that one of his students got just enough out of his class to spot the parallels between Ruben Amaro Jr., general manager of the Philadelphia Phillies, and Leonid Brezhnev, leader of the Soviet Union.

Leonid Brezhnev, in case you were unaware, was General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1964 to 1982, bridging the gap between the frenetic reign of Nikita Khrushchev and the short reigns of Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, the two forgotten Soviet leaders who preceded Mikhail Gorbachev and the fall of the Soviet Union. He’s the froglike gentleman in the khaki uniform pictured above and without question the owner of the most awesome set of eyebrows of any statesman in the history of this or any other planet. His were eyebrows worthy of a nuclear power, eyebrows to set the world tapdancing to the drumbeat of the vanguard of the worldwide worker’s revolution. Eyebrows that made Roman Cechmanek look like Charlie Villanueva.

But all joking aside, Brezhnev, despite being less celebrated than probably any other long-term Soviet leader, had a massive effect on the direction of Eastern Bloc, and by extension, world politics for two decades. After Khrushchev left office in disgrace in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Brezhnev was a steadier hand at the wheel for the Soviets, a conservative leader who represented a welcome change of pace from the choleric midget shoe-banger who preceded him. Brezhnev’s reign was in many respects quite successful–he guided the Soviet Union into the modern era without coming close to ending the world, as Khrushchev did, committing mass murder, as Stalin did, or causing the whole exercise to collapse on its head, as Gorbachev did. He was so steady-handed, Richard Nixon started acting like a lunatic just so the Cold War would get less boring.

But back to baseball and that word, gerontocracy, which means “rule by the old.” Brezhnev embraced the advice of a set of advisers who served with him in the Great Patriotic War, which, by the time his rule came to an end in 1982, made them very old indeed–in their 70s and 80s. Contrast this to Ruben Amaro’s policy of signing veterans to multi-year deals rather than promoting from within or taking risks on youth: Raul Ibanez, Jose Contreras, Ross Gload, even Cliff Lee and Roy Halladay are signed to deals that take them well into their sporting dotage. I know Amaro gets credit for having the stones to make big moves (I even wrote something to that effect yesterday morning), but in some respects, he’s actually quite conservative.

Critics of Brezhnev note that he put the Soviet Union on sort of an economic autopilot that actually caused sustained negative economic growth–ask an economist how difficult that is to accomplish and how damaging that can be–that went largely unnoticed because price controls set by the Communist government kept Soviet citizens from starving due to the massive and rapid inflation that plagued interwar Weimar Germany. In reality, the USSR went through an economic ordeal under Brezhnev compared to which the contemporary and much-celebrated stagflation that derailed Jimmy Carter’s presidency was equivalent to leaving your wallet at home and asking your buddy to float you $10 for dinner and train fare.

Then there’s Afghanistan. In 1979, as you know, the USSR sent troops into Afghanistan and accomplished, well, not very much except to spend billions of rubles in military materiel and lose some 30,000 Soviet troops to hiding Mujahideen with Kalashnikovs.

Continuing the Amaro-as-Brezhnev analogy, we haven’t seen these parts of Amaro’s reign, but they’re coming. Brezhnev’s economic failures were the result of a planned economic model that didn’t adapt quickly to changing demands or incentivize innovation. As a result, Dr. Smith got to tell stories about how on the road from the airport to downtown in Moscow, the highway is lined with foundations with no buildings on top of them–because the people who lay foundations met their five-year quota and the people putting buildings on top of those foundations didn’t. Given the Phillies’ refusal to change their own economic model as their team gets older, either by acquiring younger players or by adopting innovative practices along the lines of what the Blue Jays or the Rays (who did another evil genius thing this morning) are doing.

As for that whole Afghanistan thing? Not wishing to belabor the point, I’ll direct your attention to Ryan Howard‘s contract and say no more.

I’ve been prone to senselessly bashing the Phillies’ general manager here in recent years, but I really want to make it clear that I’m not senselessly Rubenbashing. Amaro’s three years as Phillies GM are tied for the highest regular-season win total of any three-year span in franchise history. He’s 3-for-3 in division titles and has won a National League pennant–a successful set of results by anyone’s definition, including my own.

Likewise, Brezhnev managed to track the USSR back from the brink of nuclear annihilation without significantly losing face in the international community. By and large, he put a Lada in every driveway and a pot of borscht on every table. Brezhnev put down revolution in Czechoslovakia (though Flyers winger Jaromir Jagr, who wears No. 68 in honor of those who participated in the 1968 rebellion, might not agree this was a good thing) while maintaining the military strength to keep America at bay.

We can mock Brezhnev’s eyebrows and criticize his economic policy from now until the worldwide proletarian revolution, but the fact remains: he held the Soviet Bloc together for nearly two decades, he prevented internal economic panic, and most importantly he maintained enough military power to nuke you, your granddad, and Lyndon Johnson back into the paleolithic era. Brezhnev didn’t bang his shoe on the dais at the UN, and he didn’t make a Pizza Hut commercial. But he kept a superpower at the top of the Eurasian political and diplomatic food chain, which is analogous to what Ruben Amaro has accomplished here.

Perhaps in a generation we’ll look back on Ruben Amaro with the same sort of bemusement with which we look on Brezhnev. Maybe future Phillies GMs will institute the reforms to take this team into the 21st Century, but we can be thankful, for now, that the whole enterprise hasn’t collapsed. Sure, Amaro’s made mistakes, but so did Brezhnev. Be patient, everyone, because glasnost is coming.

Michael Baumann writes the weekly Dr. Strangeglove column, which appears every Friday on Phillies Nation. You can follow him on Twitter at @atomicruckus

On Wednesday night, USA Today’s Bob Nightengale reported that the Marlins, as expected, had withdrawn from the running to sign Albert Pujols, the best baseball player of the past decade and the man who will, if he continues on a normal career path, will retire as the greatest right-handed hitter of all time. The interesting thing about all this is that he also reported that two new teams–along with St. Louis–had entered the running to sign Pujols: the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, whom ESPN’s Jayson Stark later said had offered the top first baseman on the market a deal worth somewhere north of $210 million over 10 years, and an unidentified third team.

Whatever. That’s interesting, but not really worth sharing with you guys on a Phillies blog. But then I noticed, at a quarter to three in the morning, right before I was going to go to bed, that Stark tweeted this:

And now I can’t sleep.

A couple of qualifications before we go any further:

1) There might not even be an unidentified third team, and if there is, it may not have a first baseman it needs to move. This is not to say that Nightengale and Stark, two reporters I’ve enjoyed reading since I was a child, have fabricated this rumor, but who knows what their sources are, and if they’re telling the truth or even part of the truth. The point is, this could all be complete bullshit, and I acknowledge that possibility.

2) Even if there is an unidentified third team, I still think Pujols is going back to St. Louis. I base this on no special inside information that isn’t readily accessible to you, just a gut feeling.

3) I want to apologize in advance for the effects of this post, if any, whatever they may be.

But just for fun, and because something I realized during this thought experiment jolted me completely back awake, I want to take you through a little deductive reasoning exercise to find teams that 1) have the kind of money to sign a player to a $22-25 million per year contract for 10 years and 2) have a first baseman that you’d have to worry about moving.

First, let’s eliminate the teams we already know who are or were in for Pujols: St. Louis, Los Angeles of Anaheim, and Miami (though the Marlins have money and multiple good first basemen already and there’s certainly nothing preventing them from getting back in on Pujols).

Next, eliminate the 16 teams that would be priced out of Pujols: the Mets, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, San Diego, Oakland, Tampa, Minnesota, Arizona, Colorado, Cleveland, Kansas City, San Francisco, Houston, the White Sox, and the L.A. Dodgers.

Then, out with the five teams that might have the money to sign Pujols but don’t have an established first baseman worth making an effort to get rid of: Baltimore, Toronto, Milwaukee, the Cubs, and Texas Rangers.

That leaves six teams that fit Stark’s description: the Red Sox, the Yankees, the Tigers, the Mariners, the Nationals, and, yes, the Phillies. You can see why this would keep me awake.

Let’s go through each one of the candidates one by one.

Boston

Yeah, Pujols at, let’s say, 10 years and $230 million is probably a better deal than Adrian Gonzalez at the 6 years and $133 million he has left, but I’m not positive, because Gonzalez is two years younger than Pujols and is himself coming off a nearly-7-win season. I’m actually not sure I wouldn’t rather have Gonzalez and his deal, and even if I preferred Pujols, it’d be a huge stink to trade Gonzalez in a hurry, likely for less than he’s worth, to commit longer to a slightly better player who is two years older.

Detroit Tigers

Cabrera is even younger than Gonzalez and, with four years and $86 million left on his deal, is better value. Despite his issues with off-the-field discipline, I’d be shocked if Detroit would move Cabrera for anyone, even Pujols. Of course, with Cabrera’s terrible defense, he’d make a decent DH, but if they kept him, the Tigers wouldn’t be able to afford Pujols.

New York Yankees

Mark Teixeira has 5 years and $112.5 million left on his deal and has many of the same concerns as Cabrera and Gonzalez, but, entering his age 32 season, he’s not as good as either of those two, coming off arguably the worst season of his career and averaging 4 wins over the past three seasons compared to nearly 7 WAR for Cabrera and Gonzalez and a smidge more for Pujols. Given the Yankees’ pathological attachment to having the most and best toys, the Yankees can’t be dismissed out of hand.

Seattle Mariners

Seattle’s got some money, but not tons. However, they’ve been quiet but hardly secretive about their desire to sign Prince Fielder, and given that, why not fork over a little extra for Pujols. However, they do have an established first baseman in Justin Smoak, whom you know as the centerpiece of the other Cliff Lee trade, the one that sent Lee to Texas, if you know him at all. I’ve always been a fan of Smoak’s, mostly because he and I were the same year at South Carolina. (I was actually in a bar once as a senior and watched Smoak, Duce Staley, and the late Kenny McKinley all show up independently of each other. It was weird, but that’s neither here nor there.) Still, Smoak was drafted 11th overall by Texas because who doesn’t want a switch-hitting first baseman who plays good defense, hits for a high average and above-average power, and has great plate discipline.

Of course, Smoak’s 2011 was mostly a writeoff because of injuries (to both thumbs and his face) and the unexpected death of his father, so if the Mariners don’t think he can bounce back, why not sign Pujols? Here’s the thing, though: the Mariners are desperate for good hitters–they gave Chone Figgins and his .484 OPS 313 plate appearances last year, after all–so why not keep Smoak, who’s 25 and years away from free agency, and play him at DH? Or play him at first and DH the older Pujols? Either way, Pujols’ arrival would not necessitate Smoak’s departure from Seattle. For that reason, I don’t buy Seattle being the mystery team.

Washington Nationals

Washington’s first baseman is nominally Adam LaRoche, who really isn’t worth worrying about as a player to block Pujols, and probably won’t be healthy enough to play much this season, and even if he were, is a free agent after the season. In his absence, Mike Morse, whose breakout 31-homer season allowed Nats fans to worry less about Jayson Werth‘s unimpressive introduction to our nation’s capital, will get the lion’s share of the playing time at first. If I were Nationals GM Mike Rizzo, who has both the war chest and the balls to pull off a Pujols deal, I’d move Morse to make room for Pujols….if Morse couldn’t play left field. Just like Smoak and Seattle, there’s no need to trade one of your best, cost-controlled hitters if he can move elsewhere to make way for Pujols.

Philadelphia Phillies

Yeah, we know after the Cliff Lee Incident of 2011 that “Mystery Team” means “Philadelphia Phillies,” but all optimism and homerism aside, this is the team that actually makes the most sense to be Stark’s third bidder. Ryan Howard is an established first baseman and, unlike Smoak or Morse, can’t be moved to another position, and, unlike Teixeira, Gonzalez, or Cabrera, represents a markedly inferior player to Pujols. After only one season of more than 3 rWAR or better since his MVP year in 2006 and two embarrassing final at-bats to playoff runs, the sheen is starting wear off of Howard in the eyes of Phillies fans both analytically inclined and otherwise.

That and I’m thoroughly convinced that Ruben Amaro is an genuine maniac whose smugness and myopia are surpassed only by his ambition. A deal like this would represent a colossal upgrade at first base for the Phillies and represent not only one of the great wheeler-dealer moments of recent sports history but a headline-maker to end all headline makers. Flipping Howard and signing Pujols out of nowhere is precisely the kind of move Ruben Amaro would make.

The problem is Howard’s contract, which I had managed not to mention until now, but in order to nab Pujols and still have enough money left over to, say, re-sign Jimmy Rollins or extend Cole Hamels, the recipient would have to eat most or all of Howard’s $25 million-a-year contract over the next five years, which would require not only for the Phillies to receive relatively little in return for their cleanup hitter, but for the Phillies to either eat a large portion of that contract or send another relatively large piece along with Howard. A piece like Vance Worley, Sebastian Valle, or Domonic Brown. Or Cole Hamels.

Look, it’s late and I’ve probably overthought what will turn out to be absolutely nothing, but let’s assume Stark’s source was telling the truth and that there’s a serious bidder for Pujols that’s trying to move its established first baseman to make room–I honestly can’t think of a more likely candidate than the Phillies.

From 2005 to 2008, I probably paid less attention to to the day-to-day operations of the Phillies than at any other time, owing mostly to spending more than half of the baseball season living in a place where there was no local MLB broadcast among people who considered baseball season as nothing other than that awkward time between when the Gamecocks lose to Clemson and when the Gamecocks lose to Georgia. Thankfully, that second modifier no longer holds true. Eat me, Dabo Swinney. Of course, by “paid less attention” I mean “checked the standings online every day rather than spending every spare moment imagining a Hamels-and-Howard for Cain-and-Belt trade.”

Anyway, because I wasn’t watching as much baseball back then, Scott Mathieson was this mystical figure to me. He was some dude who showed up in the rotation in mid-2006 and totally sucked, not to put too fine a point on it, then got hurt and seemingly disappeared back into the woods of British Columbia like Sasquatch evading an enterprising photographer. I always liked him, because as a young guy who threw hard, he conceivably had some value to the Phillies. Also, because of my well-documented and long-running man-crush on Jeff Francis, I have a soft spot in my heart for enormous pitchers from British Columbia.

Since then, Mathieson’s had a fascinating career with the Phillies, which came to an end this week when he was granted his release. I felt a strong personal affinity for Mathieson over the years, maybe because he was the Phillies’ sleeper relief ace every year for the past three seasons but never got the chance as the Phillies relied on the likes of Danys Baez and Mike Zagurski to fill the gaps, a sort of proto-Domonic Brown. Nevertheless, for someone who only pitched 44 innings in red pinstripes, he generated a lot of ink before he was traded for a hot dog eater. In that vein, it’s appropriate to remember everyone’s favorite perennial closer-in-waiting and what our own Jay Floyd called his “strange odyssey.”

What made Scott Mathieson so special? Despite not saying a single word of note to the Philly media and having no real outspoken personality in the vein of a Brett Myers or even a Vance Worley, Mathieson represented eternal rebirth and optimism, a kind of rubber band of a man who came back from a terrible cup of coffee in 2006, then not one but two Tommy John surgeries to lurk on the fringes of the major league roster for three seasons, yanked around, promoted, demoted, and DFA’d like a practice squad offensive lineman.

The New and Improved Mathieson added a splitter and moved to the bullpen, one of two common refuges for failed starters with a history of injury and/or control problems (the other being Out of Baseball). The list of such players who have gone on to become effective closers is long and distinguished; Dennis Eckersley, Mariano Rivera, Octavio Dotel, Eric Gagne, Ryan Madson, and more have made this transition to great critical acclaim. The bullpen is a refuge from a 200-inning workload and an opportunity to put extra effort into every pitch, which transforms marginal or unimpressive stuff into effective stuff. I had the highest hopes for Mathieson in this role, and while I didn’t expect him to show up on Opening Day 2010 and turn into John Wetteland, it didn’t seem unreasonable to expect him to form, with Madson, the core of a bullpen that would be, if not reminiscent of the 1996 Yankees, at least passable.

When, in 2009, the Phillies’ bullpen went from an undeniable strength to a terrifying liability, Mathieson was striking out 11 men a game across three minor league levels, but he wasn’t tapped to fill the void. That offseason, the Phillies traded for Phillippe Aumont, another enormous hardthrowing Canadian, leading me to remark that the back end of the Phillies’ bullpen in 2012 or so could very easily pass as a decent checking line.

But the next year, when Brad Lidge was more effective but no more comforting and the Ryan Madson Folding Chair Incident of 2010 left the Phillies with a disturbing lack of bullpen depth, Mathieson pitched only 1 2/3 innings for the team.

By 2011, we were pretty much convinced that Mathieson would never really get his chance to rise from the ashes and become an effective reliever. The Phillies toyed with returning Mathieson to the rotation in Lehigh Valley, where he plugged away like the dutiful soldier he’d always been, but in 12 starts, the command issues came back, and by the time he was returned to the bullpen, Mathieson could only register 5 innings with La Furia Roja.

That’s all Mathieson 2.0 got: 6 2/3 innings in the bigs. Allow me to quote my good friend Dash Treyhorn on the subject:

“Despite that,  fans viewed Mathieson as a prospect with unrealized potential and not enough opportunity. When he did get a call to The Show, he wasn’t used enough, or the team didn’t care about his growth, or he just needed another chance, and on and on.

For a while, it seemed like the fans felt as if though Mathieson was concealing some hidden talent and that the front office was wrong not to trust him with a significant spot on the big club. As it turns out, the brass was right, because Mathieson – despite having a blistering fastball and the makings of a great reliever – never really put it all together.

As it turns out, a mid-90s fastball with shaky control was not enough to get it done against professional hitters.”

Even though it slowly became clear that Mathieson wouldn’t ever get his shot in the majors, and didn’t really seem like he’d make much of it if he got one, at least with the Phillies, he still represented the hope of a second chance. The irony of it all is that the Phillies eventually got that failed starter with injury and command issues to anchor the bullpen, vice Madson. It just wasn’t Mathieson–it was Antonio Bastardo.

This seems a strange thing to say, given that Ryan Madson, Brad Lidge, Roy Oswalt, and Jimmy Rollins may have all played their last game for the Phillies, but I’ll miss Scott Mathieson a lot. Not as much as Rollins, but Mathieson leaves a palpable gap in my life as a Phillies fan. His resilience and tantalizing but unrealized potential made him relatable in a way that few pro athletes are, and for completely irrational and subjective reasons, he was one of my favorite Phillies of this generation.

So here’s to Scott Mathieson, the eternal prospect, the relief ace who never was. I genuinely wish him all the best and hope that this deal with an undisclosed Asian team is only another twist in what has to be the longest, most circuitous road to major league stardom in history.

We continue on with our 2011 Player Reviews with Domonic Brown.

This is a story of unfulfilled promise. Going into the season as the No. 4 prospect in the game, according to Baseball America, and coming off a season where he posted a .980 OPS between AA and AAA, Domonic Brown seemed poised to slide seamlessly into the right field void left by Jayson Werth.  The Phillies’ best offensive prospect since Ryan Howard, Brown looked set to do in the majors what he’d done at every level of minor league baseball: take his trebuchet launch of a swing and his howitzer throwing arm and bring those weapons to bear for no purpose other than to blast the opposition into oblivion.

Then the Domonator broke the hamate bone in his right hand on March 5, and everything seemed to go downhill from there. Brown didn’t get into the major league lineup until May 21. What’s worse, the broken hamate bone saps strength in the hand, and it usually takes a hitter months to recover his full power stroke. Brown, for his part, wasn’t particularly good, dialing in at exactly replacement level according to both Baseball Reference and FanGraphs, combining a .322 wOBA (not awful, but not exactly stellar for a corner outfielder) with pretty dreadful outfield defense, which, after 12 seasons of Pat Burrell and Raul Ibanez in left field, has apparently started to bother Phillies fans all of a sudden.

But the wheels came off in the later innings of a 4-1 loss to Oakland on June 25. Brown was thrown out to end the sixth inning when he didn’t run hard to first on a ground ball, then capped off the 0-for-4 night with the game-ending double play. Brown was booed by the fans, who turned on the onetime crown prince and painted him, overnight, as a wastrel. Brown continued to play, more or less, every day until the Phillies acquired Hunter Pence at the trade deadline. From then on, however, Brown was sent back to AAA, where he posted a .760 OPS before being recalled to the team’s expanded roster in September, where he found himself nailed to the bench, appearing twice, registering one at-bat and never playing the field. The Phillies then left Brown off their playoff roster, instead taking Ross Gload and Michael Martinez to St. Louis. Brandon Moss was chosen over Brown as a potential injury alternate, and the Phillies’ top prospect was sent home for good.

GRADE: 4.5/10 – I’m starting to get tired of arguing for more playing time for Brown, so let’s stick to what we know for now: despite the injury and the hustle ugliness that plagued him, Domonic Brown was at least marginally better than Ben Francisco or Raul Ibanez in 2011. That’s a fact, empirically proved. And because the idea of Brown rotting in AAA or on the bench for another year is unspeakably maddening, let’s focus on the positives: he’s still only 24, and he can’t possibly be any more unlucky going forward than he was in 2011. The worst is almost certainly over.

Mother died today.

-Opening line of Albert Camus’ The Stranger

The Phillies re-signed backup catcher Brian Schneider yesterday. I get worked up about a lot of baseball-related things that don’t matter, as you may know by now, and the Phillies overpaying for Jonathan Papelbon and sending Jonathan Singleton packing for Hunter Pence sent me into a blind homicidal rage that could only be sated by drinking the tears of a thousand Mets fans and the blood of a hundred innocent fawns. But when the Phillies re-signed their backup catcher to a one-year, $800,000 contract, I felt no greater emotional response to the transaction than Meursault did to his mother’s death in Camus’ 1942 masterwork.

Brian Schneider was a patently terrible offensive player last season. In 1962, the Mets acquired catcher Harry Chiti from Detroit for a player to be named later. In 15 games with New York, Chiti posted an OPS of .452 and, six weeks after the trade, was returned to the Tigers, making him, at the time, the only player in major league history to be traded for himself. Schneider was only marginally better than Chiti: a .502 OPS and, taken in concert with his defense (though an defensive rating based on 300 innings in the field is next to worthless, particularly for catchers) was nearly a full win below replacement.

But since $800,000 on a catcher to the Phillies is, proportionally, about what I’d spend on lunch, bringing Schneider back isn’t really an unwise expenditure of capital so much as it represents the inexorable march of time and the ultimate triumph of the absurd over humanity’s desire to find higher meaning in life.

I’ve always been a Schneider fan. He was one of those players in MVP 2005 for GameCube who would cost you next to nothing but could poke a fastball into the right field seats if you timed it right, and while he was with the Nationals, he had elevated the snap throw to third to an art form. There was really no reason to like him–he’s never been a *good* player, and has only seldom been a useful one, but Schneider on the Phillies has always been, to me, like the scar on the beautiful girl’s forehead: empirically ugly, but in the right context an intriguing artifact that brings a human character to a facade that, while beautiful, can often be otherwise distant and cold.

The Phillies were 27-8 when Schneider started, which sounds good until you realize that they were also 75-52 when he didn’t start. Apparently he throws well and handles pitchers well, but so does Carlos Ruiz, brings 300 more points of OPS to the table along with those hard-to-quantify defensive and intangible skills.

I would have preferred the Phillies signed Ryan Doumit, late of the Pittsburgh Pirates, as Ruiz’s caddy instead of Schneider, for two reasons: first, close the door to the room you’re in and shout: “DOUMIT!” It’s more fun that you’d think. Second, Doumit, a switch hitter, hit .303/.353/.477 last year in 236 plate appearances, while taking part in a Pirates catching situation so convoluted as to make identifying a starter as such next to impossible. The knock on Doumit is that he can’t catch. If he were going to be the starter, this would worry me more than it would if he were going to play, say, 50 games at catcher, 15 at first base, and 10 in the outfield. The Rangers proved that such an arrangement can work, with Mike Napoli last year, and the Red Sox appear determined to give Ryan Lavarnway a shot behind the plate rather than shipping him straight off to DH.

So when the Phillies, without even taking a second glance at a higher-upside candidate to be Chooch’s surrogate, settle on the same old guy, piling disappointment on thoughtlessness, it really ought to test the patience of even the most ardent optimist. In some alternate universe, sure, not only have the Phillies signed Doumit over Schnieder, they passed on Papelbon and held off on re-signing Howard in favor of making a run at Albert Pujols. But in our timeline, we’re left in a sort of bemused depressive funk that recalls Camus’ Meursault.

The position of backup catcher itself is absurd. Imagine not only devoting your career to the most intellectually stressful, physically demanding position on the diamond, but taking years off your career and points off your OPS (and, by extension, dollars off your paycheck) in order to do so. Now imagine being not only the catcher, but the catcher’s lady-in-waiting, a position less glamorous than the least glamorous position in the game. It’s a daunting task, a situation exemplary of the refrain in Ecclesiastes: “I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.” To do what Schneider does, and has done for more than a decade, requires not only the physical and emotional fortitude required to become a major league ballplayer, but the intellectual capacity to block oneself off from the thankless and Sisyphean task to which he devotes himself. It’s hard not to admire Brian Schneider, even as we question his sanity and mock his offensive production.

His position aside, the commitment to Schnieder is certainly not the kind of move that generates much press, but through the right lens it can shed a light on the absurdity, in the sense of Camus, of our relationship with sports. We look for meaning in everything from the length and monetary value of player contracts, because they are signaling devices. Because players and teams expose relatively little about their thought processes to the public, contract details are often the only objective measure we have to judge players’ value–not in the sense of what they are actually worth, but in the sense of what teams believe they are worth.

But the more I think about Schneider, his job, and his contract, the more I wonder if we can really look at sports this way. The Phillies made a clearly suboptimal move in re-signing Schneider, as much as Vance Worley may like him and as much as he may be alienated from his species-being by the menial nature of his work. But it’s the kind of suboptimal move that isn’t what James Joyce would have called didactic–instilling fear or loathing–as the Papelbon contract might have. Neither is it kinetic–moving the viewer to some sort of response–in any sense. I am not moved to frustration, or rage, or even more than a token disappointment by the prospect of having Schneider on the team again. Instead, I’m overcome with the kind of dispassionate irritability that led Meursault to shoot the Arab because the sun was in his eyes.

How can we search for meaning in moves like this, born out of risk aversion and path dependence? What possible good can come from viewing this or really any other player personnel move as anything other than an abstracted thing, a codified rejection of the assertion that any of what we gripe about on the internet really has any significance whatsoever. Personnel moves sort of float in the ether and often as not serve only to exemplify the disturbing divorce between the quality of process and the quality of results. I, for one, intend to embrace the absurdity of Brian Schneider going forward. I hope he hits .400 and the Phillies sign him to a five-year extension.

One last note: if you couldn’t get all the way through this post, that’s okay. I’m not really sure there was much of a point to it anyway.

Michael Baumann writes the weekly Dr. Strangeglove column, which appears every Friday on Phillies Nation. You can follow him on Twitter at @atomicruckus

The good folks over at The Good Phight have a device called the Ruben Amaro, Jr. Smug Advisory System, a machine that does exactly what the name would suggest. I bring this up because on Monday Rube produced possibly the most smug, self-satisfied utterance ever attributed to a major league general manager. Asked about his pursuit of a closer, Amaro said the following:

“I do not characterize my negotiations.”

Oh, snap.

I imagine Amaro sitting around a long table with reporters and other Phillies brass while making this statement. In fact, I’ve illustrated my mental image of the scene for you:

But when that statement was followed by rumors of a four-year, $44 million contract extension for Ryan Madson, I had an idea. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with RAJ refusing to characterize his negotiations. He’s doing his level best to construct a winning team and it really shouldn’t matter to him what we think. I actually kinda like the arrogance. I’m actually looking forward to the day when this happens at a press conference. In fact, I am so inspired by his refusal to characterize his negotiations that I’m thinking about doing the same.

I’ve been playing a lot of FIFA 12 recently, mostly in Manager Mode. I have a Manager Mode going with Arsenal, and three years in I found myself winning the league title but having constructed a team with a lot of redundancies and a few weaknesses. In soccer, as you may or may not know, players generally aren’t traded man-for-man, but their contracts are sold. So when Real Madrid acquired Cristiano Ronaldo from Manchester United in 2009, they didn’t send players in the other direction, they agreed with Man U on a price and cut them a check–a $132 million check–to purchase Ronaldo’s contract.

Well, because I couldn’t trade, say, Aaron Ramsey and Kieran Gibbs, for draft picks, I sold them. Other teams offered me ridiculous sums of money for players I would have otherwise kept, and I sold them too. So I wound up approaching the transfer deadline with a team I was mostly comfortable with, and $350 million to spend on players. So I bought. Without regard for how good a deal I was getting or how my new purchases might fit in with my team. Or a regard for the possibility that the money might I did this because it’s a video game and if my team blows up I can just start over.

This, I’ve come to realize, is how Ruben Amaro conducts his business. Let’s give an eight-figure contract to an aging utilityman. Let’s give one of the richest contracts in major league history to the third-best first baseman in his free agent class. Two and a half years before he hits free agency. Let’s develop one of the top pitchers in the league from the minors. Then trade for another. Then trade him, and bring in another top pitcher. Then trade for another top pitcher. Then sign the first pitcher you traded for but traded away as a free agent. Let’s let a power-hitting outfielder walk, then sign an older, worse player to a longer, more expensive contract.

Let’s develop a great young relief pitcher, but then sign an older relief pitcher to a contract the length and value of which send Braves fans into fits of laughter. Let’s develop a great young outfielder, then bench him in favor of Pittsburgh Pirates castoffs. Because we can.

Now, not all of those moves turned out badly. But it’s become evident to me that Ruben Amaro is working with only slightly more foresight and introspection than a two-year-old looking for something to brace himself against while he soils his diaper.

So my response is to follow our fearless leader’s example and refuse to characterize his negotiations. From now on, I’ll evaluate only, after the fact, rather than trying to predict or offer alternatives, because, frankly, trying to predict the actions of a general manager with a video game mentality is driving me slowly to distraction.

When there’s no-one else in sight
In the crowded lonely night
Well I wait so long
For my love vibration
And I’m Vanceing with myself

It’s hard not to like Vance Worley. He’s got a mohawk and funny glasses, and while he might not have the best long-term career prognosis of any Phillies pitching prospect, it sure looks like, between being hit by line drive after line drive and sweating like an inmate in a Turkish prison, he enjoys life in the major leagues more than any Phillies pitching prospect. The Phillies picked Worley in the third round of the 2008 amateur draft out of Long Beach State, a university that has, in the past decade, turned out great baseball players the way The U turns out great defensive football players with criminal records. Worley might not have been as highly-touted as, say, Jered Weaver, Evan Longoria, and Troy Tulowitzki were coming out of college, but after going into spring training as the seventh man in one of the most-hyped five-man starting rotations of all time, Worley came not quite out of nowhere, but close, to outshine quite a few household names.

What’s more, between Worley’s creative grooming and a Twitter account predicated largely on his enthusiasm for muscle cars and sneakers, the righthander injected some much-needed color into a clubhouse known not so much for its hijinks as its dedication to self-abrogation and businesslike approach to the game.

Worley finished the season with 2.5 fWAR in only 25 appearances (21 starts) and 131 2/3 innings, with a 3.66 xFIP, a K/BB ratio of 2.59, and none of the fluky BABIP silliness that usually attends such a surprisingly effective rookie season for a starting pitcher (like, for instance, J.A. Happ in 2009). Worley’s go-to pitch is the backdoor two-seamer, the floating plastic bag of out pitches that starts outside and curves back in over the black like a hyperactive golden retriever puppy that suddenly runs out of leash chasing a pigeon. The practical upshot of this approach is that Worley–and I’m basing this on absolutely nothing in the way of empirics–gets more called third strikes than any pitcher in the history of baseball, allowing him to rack up an impressive K/9 ratio of 8.13 without really doing anything special in terms of getting hitters to swing and miss.

With the contract status of Roy Oswalt and the health status of Joe Blanton very much up in the air, Worley is all but certain to start 2012 in the Phillies’ rotation. However, Worley’s long-term status is tied largely to how long that schtick of massaging the two-seamer back over the outside corner keeps up. Certainly, Greg Maddux, who threw no harder than Worley does, made a career out of tailing the two-seamer back over the plate, but Worley doesn’t have Maddux’s control, or his change-up, or his slider, or any of the other pieces that made Maddux one of the greatest pitchers of all time.

Still, Worley exceeded the expectations of even his most ardent supporters–including me–in 2011. Despite being yanked in and out of the rotation, he allowed the Phillies to cakewalk through Oswalt’s injuries and made a legitimate case to be the team’s fourth starter come playoff time. And as much fun as it was to watch Worley walk of the mound time after time before his two-out, two-strike fastball even reached the plate, Worley seemed even more jazzed than the fans. Apart from the dizzyingly hyperactive Hunter Pence and Shane Victorino, ain’t nobody having more fun on the field than Worley.

Grade: 8.5/10 Worley, fairly or not, gets graded on a different curve than the likes of Kyle Kendrick. While anything that Kendrick did above and beyond going out there and not getting torn to shreds was a plus, Worley had higher expectations as at least a nominal pitching prospect. A fan base that’s lived through Kendrick post-2007 and Happ post-2009 should no better than to get carried away with a pitcher who had a good rookie season without knockout stuff, but after the Phillies won every game he started in June, July, and August, it’s hard not to. For right now, Worley probably slots in as the team’s No. 4 starter in 2012, and even if he regresses a little bit, he should fill that role admirably. I intend to continue believing that he can go on dancing between the raindrops until he proves to us that he can’t.

Rumors of the video began circulating today, with Kevin Goldstein of Baseball Prospectus posting a review of a workout film that looked like it had been written by Bernard Malamud and directed by Michael Bay. It showed a 26-year-old Cuban defector with prodigious power and highlight-reel defensive ability in the outfield. Within hours, the interwebs were teeming with discussion of the man Goldstein called “arguably the best  all-around player to come out of Cuba in a generation.” As a five-tool center fielder built like a fireplug, comparisons to Angels top prospect Mike Trout began to sprout, but what do we really know about Cespedes?

Well, we know he’s built like Adonis, can bench somewhere in the neighborhood of 350 pounds, and the video claims he can leg press 1,300 pounds, which is roughly 2/3 the weight of a classic Volkswagen Beetle, for those of you keeping score at home. His 60 time is listed somewhere between 6.3 and 6.5 seconds, depending on whom you ask.

MLB Trade Rumors does a good breakdown of the hysteria surrounding “The Human Cespedes” as (near as I can tell) Twins blogger The Common Man has dubbed him. You’ll notice in that post is a list of the teams that have either had a presence at Cespedes’ workouts or plan to work Cespedes out privately. The Phillies are on both lists. Hold onto your butts, everyone.

Cespedes is expected, when he is declared a free agent in a few weeks, to command a contract somewhere in the neighborhood of the $30 million deal the Reds gave Aroldis Chapman in 2010. Given Cespedes’ reputation and career stats (a .333 batting average with 33 homers in 90 league games last year), that seems appropriate, and he’s certainly giving Yu Darvish a run for his money as the most intriguing international player this offseason.

Given that Cespedes is already in the prime of his career, any team that signs him would be well-served to plug him into the starting lineup immediately, but there are some red flags about Cespedes–or really any Cuban prospect–that need to be addressed before we start arguing about whether Shane Victorino gets moved to left field or Cespedes slots in there himself. First of all, and most obvious, is whether the talent translates from Cuban baseball to pro baseball. This might not be much of an issue, since Cespedes can certainly mash, given that he made the all-tournament team in the 2009 World Baseball Classic. But in truth, his reputation is as an elite defensive center fielder with the speed to steal 30 bases and the power to hit 40 home runs. That puts him in some elite territory, with Ken Griffey Jr. and Carlos Beltran in their primes as easy comparisons. That also makes me inclined to be more than a little skeptical–as a player, Cespedes might be too good to be true.

However, other Cuban position players have come over in recent years and been just fine, notably Angels first baseman Kendrys Morales and White Sox infielder Alexei Ramirez. So maybe Cespedes will hit in the majors, but most likely his final endpoint is somewhere better than “total bust” and somewhere below “prime Griffey.” That’s a big range, but it’s all we can say for certain.

The second red flag is that Cespedes claims to be 26. Age takes on a different meaning for Latin American ballplayers than it does for the rest of the human condition, with the rule of thumb for Cuban defectors falling in the same neighborhood as Chris Rock’s rule of thumb for women in his 1999 hit “No Sex (In the Champagne Room.” For instance, Livan Hernandez‘s birthday is listed as February 20, 1975, making him 36 years old. What a crock. It’s a well-documented fact that Livan Hernandez fought bravely alongside Hector and Aeneas in the siege of Troy, and that he is your paternal great-grandfather. If a team shells out $8 million a year for Cespedes’ age 27-31 seasons, it’s entirely possible that they could be shelling out that money for his age 30-34 seasons and not be aware of it.

No matter how many circus catches Cespedes makes in his ridiculous YouTube video, and no matter how spectacular he looks in his workout videos, the unknown is still the overwhelming quality of Yoenis Cespedes. This is coming from a guy who argued stridently that the Phillies should sign Aroldis Chapman at the time. Until we know more about him (and there are talent evaluators, such as Goldstein and Keith Law, who probably do already), it really boils down to how big a risk you want to take with your $30 million or more. On the one hand, you could get prime Griffey, which would be a bargain. But if you’re not financially or emotionally prepared for the possibility (however remote) that you might wind up with Chad Curtis for that money, maybe you ought to give Cespedes a miss.

“…for as far back as I can remember I have loved two kinds of teams more than any other. The first, of course, were the hometown teams, which for me were Cleveland teams, the Indians and Browns and Cavaliers, those heartbreakers I had inherited because my father found a job at a factory there before I was born.” –Joe Posnanski, “Game Six,” Oct. 28, 2011

I read that passage, in a typically-outstanding blog post by Joe Posnanski of Sports Illustrated, the dean of the kind of rambling, introspective, analytic form of sports column I love most. The post itself had little to do with the genesis of Posnanski’s own Cleveland fandom, but it got me thinking about how much my happiness is tied to the employment status of a 32-year-old man from Oakland, whom I’ve never met and probably never will.

I’m a 24-year-old man with a driver’s license and a postgraduate education, so I’m an adult by proclamation, if not so much by behavior, and for the first time since I had terrible acne, a squeaky voice, and thought Blink-182 was cool, I’m faced with life without my favorite baseball player on my favorite team. Jimmy Rollins has been a constant in my life for 11 years, a period of time in which I’ve graduated from middle school and high school and collected bachelor’s and master’s degrees. A period of time in which I had my first kiss, first girlfriend, and first bad breakup, and got engaged to a person who, at the time of Rollins’ major league debut, I wouldn’t even know existed for another five years.

In spite of my quest to be objective in my baseball analysis, I hope the Phillies re-sign Jimmy Rollins above all else, and while I’d be thrilled if he’d sign a contract with favorable terms to the team, deep down I don’t care what the cost is.

And the most unsettling part of all of this is that I feel so strongly about Rollins, more than anything else, because no one was building much of anything in North Carolina in the early 1980s.

Both of my parents are architects, fresh out of college in a depression, when the construction industry ground to a halt. My dad found a job in Rocky Mount, N.C., but without anything to design, their situation was tenuous until my mom took a job with the government in Philadelphia and they moved up north. That’s why I’m a Phillies fan rather than a Braves fan, because if the economy was prospering and my parents hadn’t moved, I’d have grown up around the Braves on TBS and people with accents out of The Dukes of Hazzard, never seriously considering the Phillies as the source of self-defining social belonging I consider them today.

But why the Phillies, rather than the Eagles or Flyers? Because, as a nine-year-old, I didn’t have the stamina to play soccer, the strength or lunacy to play football, or the money to play ice hockey. Because my parents valued literacy above all else, and no sport has more or better mythology than baseball. Because my dad, though only a casual sports fan, liked baseball better than other sports. Little things.

***

Jimmy Rollins was drafted by the Phillies in the second round (46th overall) of the 1996 amateur draft, three months after my ninth birthday, for reasons still unknown to me. Maybe the Phillies wanted to draft Brent Abernathy, who went two spots before J-Roll, and settled. Maybe they already knew what kind of player the then-17-year-old would turn into. I have no idea. I wouldn’t even know who Rollins was until years later, when he started showing up in the minor league sections of Baseball Weekly, and even then, I wasn’t sold on the Phillies’ would-be shortstop of the future.

You see, there was another minor league shortstop, Travis “Gookie” Dawkins of the Cincinnati Reds, that I always preferred to Rollins as a prospect. Dawkins, like Rollins, was drafted out of high school as a second-rounder, and fast-tracked to the big leagues, so while Dawkins was a year younger and drafted a year later, he made his major-league debut in 1999, while Rollins, still only 21 when he played his first game in Philadelphia, had to wait until 2000.

There were reasons I preferred Dawkins–Dawkins, not Rollins, was selected to the team of minor league all-stars that won gold in baseball for the United States in the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, a team that included Roy Oswalt, Ben Sheets, Doug Mientkiewicz, Brad Wilkerson, and, yes Brent Abernathy. The Seattle Mariners, in the process of trading an unhappy Ken Griffey, Jr., to the Reds in the winter of 1999-2000, zeroed in on a package that included Dawkins before their leverage evaporated before their very eyes and they settled for Mike Cameron, Brett Tomko, Jake Meyer, and Antonio Perez. To the 12-year-old scout, Dawkins, not Rollins, was the superior prospect.

Eventually, though, I got over my disappointment when Rollins stepped into the starting lineup as a 22-year-old rookie in 2001, hitting .274, leading the league in at-bats, stolen bases and triples, and making the all-star team. If Rollins hadn’t had the bad fortune to enter the league the same year as Albert Pujols and Roy Oswalt, he may well have been that year’s NL Rookie of the Year. But while I enjoyed Rollins, and grudgingly admitted that he was a better player than I had anticipated, I was still very much a Scott Rolen man.

***

Even after 900 words, we still haven’t reached the real question: why Rollins? Probably because I was never very good at baseball. The kids who were good at baseball pitched, played shortstop, and cranked home runs. I tried to do the best I could by walking a lot and being aggressive on the bases, and by throwing the ball in from the outfield as hard as I could (I had a pretty good arm, but because I was neither a preternatural talent nor the coach’s son, I pitched a grand total of one inning in eight seasons of organized baseball). Because I sucked so bad, I never really gravitated to the stars, but instead to the water bearers, the guys who showed up every day, went one-for-four with a stolen base and solid defense. Maybe I felt like I could identify with them better.

I know for certain that I thought it illustrated a staggering lack of imagination, even as a child, when, for instance, one of my buddies said his favorite hockey player was Eric Lindros (I preferred Mikael Renberg). What did that say, I thought as a ten-year-old, about a person’s character that he cared only about how good a player was? What about the guys who let him skate around with his head down all the time and fed him the puck? Like a good buddy movie, the fate of a sports team depended as much on the quality of the sidekick as it did the performance of the romantic lead.

Rollins, over the course of years, developed into the kind of player I enjoy watching most in all sports: flashy and nearly faultless on defense, aggressive and electrifying on offense, going about his business with either a self-assured smile or an intimidating scowl, depending on whether the inning and score called for humor or intensity. As an integral member of the 2001 Phillies, he, along with Pat Burrell, became the avatar for the youth movement that would set into motion the events that led from the doldrums of the Francona Era to the heights of 2008 and beyond. It was Rollins whose bold proclamation that the Phillies, not the perennially dominant Braves or the developing powerhouse Mets, were the team to beat in 2007. Rollins said this fresh off the last major league postseason in which the Phillies did not participate.

Rollins was the initial salient in the Phillies’ trench warfare against mediocrity. Where he pressed forward, Chase Utley, Ryan Howard, and Cole Hamels burst through to victory. It was somewhere during this process, after his rookie season but before the “team to beat” incident, possibly around the time he cut off those awful cornrows, that I declared my allegiance to Jimmy Rollins, and throughout the ups and downs, the injuries, the suspensions, the bad performance, I’ve stood by him.

***

Saying “setting aside the division title” about the Phillies’ 2007 season is like saying “setting aside the iceberg” to a passenger on the Titanic. I get that.

Setting aside the division title, 2007 was an incredibly gratifying season for me as a baseball fan. It was the year that the world bore witness to the greatness of my favorite baseball player, who had been overshadowed his entire career by Burrell, Abreu, Thome, Utley, and Howard. You remember the season: the 30-30 year, the 20 triples, the staggering 139 runs scored at the head of one of the most potent offenses in the history of the franchise. The all-star snub, followed by the gold glove, the silver slugger, and the National League MVP. The never-ending entertainment that, to someone who values narrative over empirics, could very easily be mistaken for the works of a man who, by sheer force of personality, willed his team, like Atlas holding the Earth, from the realm of possibility to genuine success.

I won’t tell you that J-Roll was the best player in the National League that year, because it’s statistically pretty evident that he wasn’t. By Baseball Reference WAR, Rollins wasn’t even the best player on his own team (Chase Utley had 6.6 WAR to Rollins’ 6.1 despite playing 30 fewer games), and Matt Holliday, Chipper Jones, Albert Pujols, and David Wright outpaced him by significant margins. I was just getting into advanced stats at that point, and every time I read something to that effect on Fire Joe Morgan, I seethed quietly to myself. How dare they, I thought. Sure, the stats aren’t there, but…he’s my guy, by God, and the world is just now waking up to what a great player he is.

***

Among Phillies position players since integration, Jimmy Rollins is third in career plate appearances, seventh in WAR, fifth in games played, third in hits, third in runs, second in doubles, first in triples, eleventh in home runs, and first in stolen bases, by nearly 100. For a man who brings so much to the table qualitatively, Rollins is in retired number territory when it comes to the sheer stats.

Travis Dawkins hit .163/.241/.204 in 110 major league plate appearances spread over four seasons. He had 16 career hits, four of them doubles, nine walks, and scored eight runs. His last major league hit was, believe it or not, against the Phillies. It was a one-out double off Brandon Duckworth in the bottom of the fifth inning of a 4-3 loss on Sept. 22, 2002.

***

Since 2007, it’s been a quiet time for J-Roll and me. It should be obvious by now that 2007 was the best season of his career, and nothing will ever top that. But I don’t resent the older, wiser, calmer, J-Roll. Frankly, the Rollins of 2007 might be too much to handle in concert with both Shane Victorino and Hunter Pence. Jimmy Rollins has evolved into a perfect elder statesman, a quiet team leader. He’s grown up, in short, and because of the time in which it happened, it seems like he and I have grown up together.

Being a Phillies fan is one of the three or so most important social identifiers in my life right now, as sad as it seems when I put it like that, and over the past 10 years or so, that social identifier has caused me to experience almost literally every emotion possible, from shock to rage to confusion to the kind of unbridled, innocent exultation that makes the very revolution of the Earth seem to slow down. Jimmy Rollins has been the constant, and for whatever reason, I’ve developed an emotional attachment to him that goes beyond the simple rooting interest I have in most of his teammates. I know at least some of you must feel the same way.

If the Phillies don’t re-sign Rollins, we’ll be losing a massive part of the team identity. A part of our history as fans. And for me, it will mean saying goodbye to my favorite ballplayer.

Michael Baumann writes the weekly Dr. Strangeglove column, which appears every Friday on Phillies Nation. You can follow him on Twitter at @atomicruckus

Rather well, actually.

There’s an axiom I heard articulated first by ESPN’s Keith Law, though I’m not sure it originated with him. It goes like this: there are three things a pitcher can do: miss bats, not walk people, and get ground balls. Do one, and you can pitch in the majors. Do two, and you’ll be a good starter. Do all three, and you’re Roy Halladay.

Anyway, Kendrick was supposed to be a guy who didn’t walk people and got ground balls. What he’s never done is miss bats, and he didn’t do that this year–opponents made contact on nearly 89 percent of swings against Kendrick in 2011, compared to the major league average of just under 81 percent, numbers that are more or less in line with his career averages, which led to a 4.63 K/9 ratio, which, for a right-handed pitcher, is simply unacceptable. Kendrick hasn’t really gotten ground balls either, inducing 45.3 percent ground balls in 2011, against a 45.6 percent career average. That would have been tied for 44th in the majors had Kendrick qualified for the ERA title.

Despite this, Kendrick went 8-6 with a 3.22 ERA this season, pitching 114 2/3 valuable innings for a team that, for all its starting pitching depth, still had innings to fill at the end. So while on the one hand, nothing was particularly different in 2011 compared to previous seasons, and Kendrick’s 0.2 fWAR and 4.55 FIP this season seem to speak to the fact that he’s still a somewhat fringy major league starter. But on the other, the results, fluky as they may have been, speak for themselves.

Grade: 8/10 It was interesting to see the Red Sox struggle to find even replacement-level starting pitching at key points this season, and Kendrick’s season proved a valuable luxury for a team that, despite significant injuries to two of their top five starting pitchers, never wanted for someone who could go five innings and keep the team in the game. Kendrick’s in line for a huge payday in arbitration, and given that the peripherals didn’t match the performance in 2011, the Phillies would almost certainly be better off sending Kendrick packing this winter. If he has pitched his last in Philadelphia, this was quite a way to go out.

Don't do it, Ruben. You'll thank me later.

This is an argument I’ve been making for close to a year, and while I’ve hinted at it, in both my post on Domonic Brown’s future and in my season review of Antonio Bastardo, but the Phillies have a need that might run counter to the big-splash mentality by which Ruben Amaro has seemed to run this team since taking over. With Brad Lidge and Ryan Madson entering free agency, the Phillies find themselves without a proven closer heading into the offseason. This presents a rather different conundrum for the team than does Jimmy Rollins‘ impending free agency or even Roy Oswalt‘s. This free agent class is unbelievably weak at shortstop and in starting pitching, which are, of course, two areas where many teams with designs on a playoff berth in 2012 have great need.

For shortstops, it’s Jose Reyes, then Rollins, then Marco Scutaro and Alex Gonzalez. That’s it. Almost every other free agent shortstop is either a replacement-level player or close to it, and if you’re going to put a bad player on the field, better to get that lack of production from a cheap source, such as Wilson Valdez , than to pay a premium to get the same production from a bigger name, say, Yuniesky Betancourt. For pitchers, CC Sabathia seems like he’ll opt out of his contract and re-sign with the Yankees, which leaves Oswalt–whose status for 2012 is still not certain–along with C.J. Wilson, Yu Darvish, and a littany of former stars (Aaron Harang, Brandon Webb, Jeff Francis, and others) to whom time and chance have been so unkind that they resemble their former selves only in appearance. Francis and Webb, who faced off in Game 1 of the 2007 NLCS, are no more ace starters than the sunken wreckage of the U.S.S. Arizona is a functioning ship of the line. That message seems to have reached the Phillies’ front office clearly.

However, this free agent class features a surfeit of proven closers. Even if the Phillies don’t re-sign Madson, they have Jose Valverde, Jonathan Papelbon, Heath Bell, Frank Francisco…if the Phillies want to splash big money to buy someone who’s racked up impressive save totals in recent years, they certainly won’t lack the opportunity.

But spending big money on a relief pitcher is a sucker’s bet, and the Phillies, who tend to be very hit (Roy Halladay, Chase Utley) or miss (Ryan Howard, Brad Lidge, Placido Polanco, depending on who you ask) with their long-term contracts would be extremely foolhardy to sign any relief pitcher to a multi-year deal.

First of all, it’s a bad idea to sign a relief pitcher to a long-term contract because quality relief pitching varies so much from year-to-year. Unless you’re Mariano Rivera or Trevor Hoffman, it’s really difficult to be a dominant reliever over long periods of time. The Phillies, in the past 20 years, really ought to know this better than anyone. Ricky Bottalico posted a 2.7-WAR season in 1995 as a setup man, then back-to-back 34-save seasons in 1996 and 1997, where he was a competent, if not Eckersleian, relief ace. Then, at age 28, he melted down to a disastrous 6.44 ERA in 1998 and was never anything more than a fringy bullpen arm for the rest of his career.

Jose Mesa was one of the best closers in the game in the mid-1990s with Cleveland, posting an astronomical 4.4-win season in the shortened 1995 season, when the Indians went 100-44 and Mesa finished second in the Cy Young voting. Then, after two years of regression, he suffered Biblically awful season in 1998, 1999, and 2000 before inexplicably rediscovering his schwerve for two years in Philly, at which point he totally lost it again.

Tom Gordon: great closer for Boston in 1998, ranged from above-average to terrible from 1999 to 2003, then, in his mid-30s, he enjoyed a three-year renaissance with the Yankees and Phillies where he pitched the best ball of his life. But by 2007, the magic was gone for good.

Brad Lidge: dominant with the Astros as both a setup man and closer until 2005, then he melted down in 2006, returned to form in 2008, and was never the same after that. His 2009 was among the worst seasons in major league history, and even when he was effective after that, Lidge needed to dance between the raindrops, his health hanging by a thread and his effectiveness balancing on the edge of a knife. Again, like Bottalico, Mesa, and Gordon, all of this happened without warning in any case.

It’s not the Phillies alone who have suffered the vagaries of the disappearing closer: Eric Gagne, who was for 18 months the best reliever ever to walk the face of the earth, dropped off the map faster than you can say les lunettes de sport. Jason Isringhausen followed eight seasons of 22 or more saves with a 5.70 ERA in 2008.

The fact of the matter is that relief pitchers are subject to the same forces exerted on other players: age, injury, team situation, and so on. But they walk a finer line than, say third basemen or outfielders because they face so few hitters per year. So even great pitchers can have aberrant seasons, while mediocre relievers can, for a year, channel Walter Johnson (see: Chad Durbin, 2008).

Because the level of variance is so great, and because every top-shelf reliever on the free agent market, with the exception of Francisco Rodriguez (who comes with his own baggage), is already on the wrong side of 30, I’d shy away from signing any of them to a big-money, long-term contract. And think about it–if Papelbon or Valverde hits the free agent market, why would strong teams with money like the Red Sox and Tigers let such a valuable asset go?

What makes it worse is potential draft pick compensation for a proven closer. Jonathan Papelbon, Matt Capps, and Jose Valverde are all would-be Type A free agents, which means that the Phillies would surrender their first-round pick to sign any one of them. In fact, the Blue Jays have been gaming this system for years, signing relievers to one-year deals, offering them arbitration, and collecting draft picks the way hoarders collect packets of Sweet & Low.

So what’s the alternative? The Phillies have several.

The first is to realize that the Phillies have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to young guys who throw hard. Make Antonio Bastardo the closer. But what if Tony No-Dad fails? Then give Mike Stutes a shot. If Stutes fails, you’ve got Justin De Fratus. If De Fratus fails, you’ve got Michael Schwimer. If Schwimer fails, you’ve got Phillippe Aumont. That’s five young, cheap arms with roughly the same amount of major leauge experience that Craig Kimbrel had going into 2011, which is to say not very much. The odds of all five of those guys turning into total turkeys is minuscule. Given the chance, at least one of them will close games for you–that I can almost guarantee.

The flip side of this is even though giving up big money and draft picks for a closer is inadvisable, the free agent market is still very much open. There’s a saying in baseball that there’s no such thing as a bad one-year contract, which rings particularly true for a rich team like the Phillies. With a one-year contract, even a bad one, any mistake or failed gamble will be gone and buried by the end of the season, which opens up some interesting possibilities for veteran arms. Joe Nathan, for instance, could be had on a one-year deal if the Phillies think he can bounce back from injury. The market is lousy with veteran lefties who, if they pay out, could be great, and if they don’t, could be waived. Mike Gonzalez, for instance, as well as Hideki Okajima, Javier Lopez, or George Sherrill. Certainly none of those are sure bets, but they all represent a relatively small commitment of resources, and really, how sure a bet is Jose Valverde anyway?

So that’s the smart way to construct a bullpen. I don’t expect it to actually play out this way, because I think Ruben Amaro is precisely the kind of person who would spend $39 million (including the buyout) over three years on a mostly worthless Brad Lidge, watch it blow up spectacularly in his own face, then turn around and sign another thirtysomething reliever with a spotty history to a long-term, big-money deal. Money is a finite resource, and while the Phillies have lots of it, whatever money they’d spend on a closer would better be used elsewhere.

Neither do I honestly expect to persuade any of you, because coming to a logical conclusion backed by empirical evidence does not appear to be the way sports arguments work. Mostly, I want it on the record, on the internet somewhere, that I think signing a closer is a terrible idea, so when, in 2015, the Phillies are on the hook for (to bring the battleship metaphor full circle) $18 million worth of useless, scuttled Jonathan Papelbon wreckage and can’t free up the payroll to make the move they need to catch the Nats, I can link back to this post and say I told you so.

EDIT: I forgot to link to this, but Bill Baer of Crashburn Alley made the same argument in a less-florid, more quantitative manner last week. Here it is.

There are a bunch of reasons to love Antonio Bastardo, from his bubble butt to his funny delivery to the incredible amount of joy I got from calling him “Tony No-Dad” all year. But the 26-year-old lefty, who was a middling starter prospect back in 2009 (which seems like ancient history), was quite possibly the most electrifying Phillies reliever ever, out of nowhere putting together a season that can only be described as fantastic in both meanings: excellent and resembling something from the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Over the whole of 2011, Bastardo went 6-1 with a 2.64 ERA and a 0.931 WHIP in 58 innings spread over 64 appearances, but that’s including a September that, due to fatigue or some undisclosed injury, was more latter-day Dennis Cook than latter-day Dennis Eckersley. Take out September and Tony No-Dad compiled an opponent slash line of .114/.204/.223. Over the course of the full season, Bastardo’s fastball was worth eight runs above average and his slider was worth 7.1 runs above average, good, between them, for a K/9 ratio that, in the finest tradition of Nigel Tufnel, nearly went all the way to eleven.

Bastardo was effective against lefties and righties and, despite being the team’s fourth-choice closer after injuries sidelined Brad Lidge, Jose Contreras, and Ryan Madson in order, filled in admirably in that role, saving eight games from nine chances and recording 32 FanGraphs shutdowns against only eight meltdowns. The only NL relievers with a higher net WPA than Bastardo were Tyler Clippard, John Axford, Jonny Venters, J.J. Putz, and Eric O’Flaherty. Bastardo’s final opponent OPS was the fifth-lowest for a Phillies reliever since integration.

Due respect to the voters who said that Ryan Madson should be re-signed over Jimmy Rollins, but not only will Madson cost more money than he’s worth, we should not be afraid if he walks away this offseason, because Tony No-Dad can fill in as the Phillies’ relief ace and, if his 2011 season is any indication, the Phillies won’t miss a beat.

Grade: 9.8/10 That awful last month cast a pallor over what was otherwise an unbelievable season, and made Bastardo’s 2011 outstanding, rather than historic. Still, the Dominican with the funny name and the prominent posterior went from middle reliever to folk hero this summer and deserves all the praise we can heap on him.

Except I can’t stand Tony La Russa and his smug self-importance and tedious overmanaging. Or the rest of the pressed-and-ironed St. Louis Cardinals, essentially Lance Berkman and a bunch of guys who are really hard to like. There’s Albert Pujols, the greatest baseball player I’ve ever seen and one of the most off-puttingly boring personalities in sports. There’s the battery of Chris Carpenter and Yadier Molina, two guys whose defenders would describe as “fiery” but are so prickly they make Nyjer Morgan look like Carlos Ruiz. Then there’s the legion of anonymous, dirty-jersey grinders who run into unnecessary outs and lay down more bunts than an unimaginative pastry chef. It’s horrific baseball, an Indian burn on the forearm of progess in baseball tactics, and it’s working.

Not that anyone would confuse Ron Washington for Earl Weaver, and while I find Josh Hamilton inspiring, Adrian Beltre riveting and C.J. Wilson charming, I can see why one might have the same sort of viscerally negative reaction the Rangers that I have to the Cards. But my spiteful Ranger bandwagonism nearly came under assault last night, if not for one of those razor-thin margins that so often define baseball.

Which brings me to something I noticed in Game 2. After taking the LCS off to collect myself, I’ve watched the first two games of the World Series and watched the Rangers come back to tie the series against the hated Cardinals on a couple of near-miraculous baserunning plays in the ninth inning. If those plays had gone wrong, the Cards would be up 2-0, but if a couple of similar plays had gone right two weeks ago, we’d be looking at an entirely different World Series altogether.

With no one out in the top of the first inning of Game 4 of the NLDS, with the Phillies leading the series 2-1 and the game 2-0 after 10 pitches, Hunter Pence broke for second with the count full to Ryan Howard, who looked at strike three from Edwin Jackson. Pence–a terrible basestealer, 62-for-99 on his career–was then thrown out at second by Yadier Molina, one of the best catchers in history at eliminating would-be basestealers, got Pence by mere microns at second, and the game had turned on the head of a pin. Instead of having a lead, a baserunner, no outs, and the cleanup hitter at the plate, the Phillies had given Jackson a way out of the inning. Sure enough, the Cardinals took the lead in the bottom of the fourth and the Phillies never got it back.

Then, in the top of the sixth, down 3-2, Chase Utley tried to take the extra base on grounder to short and was TOOTBLAN by five feet. This is precisely the kind of aggressive, too-clever-by-half move that makes Utley such an exciting player, but in his eagerness to make something happen while Troy was being sacked before his eyes, Utley ran into an unnecessary out when the Phillies could ill afford to give outs away.

The third baserunning event happened two days later, and it was described by Rany Jazayerli of Baseball Prospectus on Wednesday’s Jonah Keri Podcast. Keri was arguing that Texas, as the best baserunning team in baseball, would have an advantage in the World Series when Jazayerli said that Molina could neutralize that baserunning edge by himself.

The interview can be found here, and the section I’m quoting starts around the 11:50 mark.

“[Yadier Molina] had the huge throw to nail Chase Utley trying to steal in that 1-0 game. Chase Utley is the best percentage basestealer in the history of baseball with 100 or more steals, successful, like 88 percent of the time. And he took off for second base on a curveball, mind you…it didn’t get to home plate as fast as the fastball would have, and Molina had the absolute perfect transfer and throw and nailed Utley at second base to kill the rally in, I think, the seventh or eighth inning, and that was the last rally the Phillies had in that game. So yeah…if Ron Washington wants to stick with what got him here and is aggressive on the basepaths, that’s going to hurt the Rangers.”

Which, of course, it did not last night. Trailing 1-0 to the Cardinals late, with everything to lose and while running out of outs rapidly, Ian Kinsler, the Rangers’ version of Chase Utley, reached base to lead off an inning and tested Molina’s arm. While Utley was out by a fraction of a second, Kinsler was safe by an even smaller amount, and rather than killing his team’s last chance for a rally, he put the tying run in scoring position with no out.

It was a stupid play, even more insanely desperate, due to the scarcity of remaining outs, than Utley’s seventh-inning SNAFU in NLDS Game 5. But it worked. Four pitches later, Jason Motte grooved a fastball that a better hitter than Elvis Andrus would have hit to Illinois, but Andrus went the other way with it for a single and Kinsler went far enough around third to warrant a throw.

On the throw, Andrus, every bit as good a basrunner as Utley, took the same kind of insane chance that Utley himself took against Furcal and Pujols in Game 4 of the NLCS and it paid off. All of a sudden, two singles and two harrowing baserunning decisions had the winning run on second and no one out for Josh Hamilton.

Baseball, at its best, is a game that doesn’t resemble gladitorial combat so much as it resembles poker, a solution composed entirely of percentages, courage, and random chance. But what Kinsler and Andrus did last night wasn’t that kind of baseball. It was a berzerker rage.

I’m sure that if you’ve made it this far you watched all three games I’ve mentioned and seen all five baserunning plays and you’re wondering what the point is of recounting those painful moments.

Consider this: take out Utley’s disastrous first-to-third and the remaining four plays were all bang-bang. I’d warrant that the difference between safe and out in all four plays put together was no more than half a second. The temporal and spatial disparity between the Cardinals being up 2-0 in the World Series and out of the playoffs altogether is so thin it beggars belief.

Inches, if that, separated the Phillies from victory, and there, but for the grace of God, go the Rangers.

I wanted to say how nice it’s been to get along with the readership over the past few weeks, a state of affairs I’d chalk up to my being neither informative nor persuasive since the first week in September or so. Anyway, I wanted to get that out there, because I’m back to my old ways. I went into this offseason with almost no expectations. This offseason, my wish was really more that the Phillies do nothing rather than do something. I was prepared to make peace with whatever the Phillies did this offseason, provided the following things happened:

1. The Phillies don’t offer arbitration to Raul Ibanez.
2. The Phillies don’t sign any free agent reliever (including Brad Lidge and Ryan Madson) to any contract with a total value of more than $5 million.
3. The Phillies commit to getting Domonic Brown 400 or more major league plate appearances in 2012, preferably as the every day left fielder, but at least in some sort of platoon arrangement with John Mayberry.

Then Ruben Amaro announced that the Phillies wanted to get Brown a full season at AAA before bringing him up to the majors. I was absolutely mystified by this decision, though, judging by Ruben Amaro’s bizarre insistence on giving anyone but Brown a chance to play at the major league level in 2011, I can’t say I was surprised. Ever since he refused to include Brown in any sort of trade for Cliff Lee or Roy Halladay back in 2009, Amaro has, like Hamlet tormenting Claudius, seemed to take some sort of perverse pleasure in treating the Phillies’ top hitting prospect since Chase Utley like a yo-yo, tossing and spinning, and otherwise screwing with Brown for no reason other than he can.

Maybe there’s some sort of plan for Brown that the public is not privy to, and this is part of it. Maybe he’s being kept in the minors because there’s a flaw in his game that the Phillies are aware of but has escaped the eye of the extremely astute talent evaluators at ESPN and Baseball America. If that’s the case, maybe he’s being hidden so as not to harm his trade value. But I find that hard to believe.

I think I actually want this more than 400 plate appearances for the Domonator: to know what, exactly, that plan is.

Here’s are some of the arguments for keeping Brown in the minors, or at least the best ones I’ve heard:

• He’s a prospect, and therefore an unknown quantity.
• He’s bad defensively and doesn’t hustle.
• The Phillies can’t afford to waste at-bats on someone who might not produce.
• He’s been given a chance already and washed out.

Let’s unpack those one-by-one:

He’s a prospect, and therefore an unknown quantity.

Yes. I grant you this. But here’s what I do know about Brown: he’s hit .294/.375/.459 in 2,000 minor league plate appearances, including .303/.374/.546 in 433 AA plate appearances and .298/.390/.453 in 292 AAA plate appearances. Certainly, he hasn’t proven that he can hit major league pitching at these rates, but the logic of using that as a justification for sending him back down to AAA escapes me–regardless of what you think of Brown, how is he going to prove he can hit major league pitching when he only ever faces minor league pitching?

Brown is not a known quantity, for sure, but it’s best to consider prospects in terms of likelihood. It’s eminently possible that Brown, given the right environment, could grow into a Ken Griffey Jr. clone. In moments where I’ve been blinded by my own exuberance, I’ve said as much, but while Brown turning into Griffey is possible, it’s certainly not likely. It’s also possible that he could turn into the next Billy Ashley, but it’s not necessarily likely.

Let’s turn to what the folks at Baseball America say about him: going into 2010, he was their No. 15 prospect. Here’s the complete list of other outfielders in the top 20: Jason Heyward, Mike Stanton, Desmond Jennings, and Logan Morrison, all of whom have turned out to be perfectly acceptable major leaguers, given the chance. So while Brown isn’t a sure thing by any stretch of the imagination, the minor league stats suggest that he’s ready, and people who tend to rate good major league players highly as prospects seem to think well of Brown. Doesn’t that at least suggest he merits a chance?

He’s bad defensively, and doesn’t hustle.

Go ahead, write him off because he didn’t go full-tilt after a fly ball once. Certainly no team has ever prospered in spite of indifferent defense from its left fielder. Certainly not Manny Ramirez‘s Cleveland Indians, Boston Red Sox, or Los Angeles Dodgers teams, or Ted Williams’ Red Sox teams of the 1940s and 1950s. Or the 2008 Phillies, with Pat Burrell. Or even the mid-90s Braves, with Ryan Klesko. Or the 1970s and 1980s Phillies, with Greg Luzinski.

And Brown is not a nutcase like Ramirez, or a grouch like Williams, or even a klutz or a clod like Burrell, Klesko, and Luzinski. He’s a young enough player that he can still be taught to play defense, and a good enough athlete to get by passably if he doesn’t.

And that’s even assuming he’s a bad fielder: FanGraphs had him at -7 fielding runs in 451 innings in 2011, which is pretty bad. But UZR, the fielding statistic FanGraphs uses in WAR, takes a full season to stabilize, sometimes more. In terms of small samples, 451 innings is the blink of an eye when judging advanced fielding metrics, particularly for an outfielder. But as you’ll see, it’s tough to believe the argument that Brown’s defense kept him out of the lineup in 2011.

The Phillies can’t afford to waste at-bats on someone who might not produce

This is just empirically untrue. In 2011, the Phillies paid $11.5 million to literally the worst defensive player in the National League so he could post a .289 OBP in a corner outfield position. The Phillies gave $1.6 million to a player so broken-down he could barely run the bases, and sent him to the plate 118 times, where he posted a .266 wOBA. The Phillies gave 234 plate appearances to a player with a .540 OPS, who had only 10 extra-base hits in those 234 times to the plate. The Phillies are either absurdly stupid or pathologically unconcerned with their offensive production, because that’s the only explanation for the team with the second-highest payroll in baseball to give 927 plate appearances to Ross Gload, Raul Ibanez, and Michael Martinez.

Phillies management can’t be that oblivious, because they won 102 games in 2011, no small feat even before considering that the Phillies, by playing Gload, Ibanez, and Martinez, suffered the equivalent of a season and a third’s worth of Eric Bruntlett in their lineup. So if there’s any logic whatsoever to the burial of Domonic Brown, the alternative must be true: the Phillies don’t care if their left fielder doesn’t hit.

Brown, in 2011, posted a .245/.333/.391 line in 210 plate appearances. His OBP was 44 points higher than Ibanez’s. His OPS was 122 points higher than Ross Gload’s. Why did they get the playing time? Oh, yeah, and Domonic Brown was 23 years old for most of the season–it stands to reason that a 23-year-old would get better with more repetition, while Ibanez (39), Gload (35), and Martinez (29), will never be better than what they are now.

This is the most maddening part of the Domonic Brown Saga for me–people who want him buried in favor of Ibanez think that playing Brown would have hurt the team. This is almost certainly not true. Even if Brown never improves one iota from the player he is today, he was still better in 2011 than Ibanez was. The relationship between developing for the future and playing to win in the present does not need to be adversarial, and would not have been, in this case.

He’s been given a chance already and washed out

I don’t want people who are willing to write off a player after 280 intermittent major-league plate appearances (all but one before the player’s 24th birthday, and many of them marred, by the way, by an injury that can sap a player’s power for a year) to be anywhere near controlling my favorite team. If you’re willing to write off Brown now, consider the following: Roy Halladay, aged 23, through 231 major-league innings, was 13-14 with a 5.77 ERA and a WHIP of 1.71. Write him off. Mike Schmidt, aged 23, through his first full major-league season, had a .197 career batting average and a .690 OPS. Write him off too.

How can you possibly know anything about Domonic Brown as a major-league player after 280 plate appearances, most of which came as a pinch-hitter after rotting on the bench for days? Here’s all that we know, for certain: Brown has the skills to be called one of the top prospects in the minor leagues, and in limited major-league duty, he was slightly better than Raul Ibanez, who got 575 plate appearances from the Phillies in 2011.

That warrants an extended look and a long leash in the major leagues in 2012, and unless the Phillies have some  personnel move up their sleeve, or Brown has some issue they’re not telling us about, there’s no logical reason–none whatsoever–not to give that to him. So what’s the plan?

It took me five days to write this post, so I want to take you back to Friday night.

I feel like I ought to explain how I came to be sitting alone in my bedroom, tears welling up in my eyes, listening to “Nearer My God to Thee” over and over on Spotify. If you’re reading this, you’ve most likely done whatever approximates, for you, sitting in your pajamas, mourning the passing of the most remarkable regular season Philadelphia has seen in a generation, all while listening to the song the band played while the Titanic went down.

If anyone has a better idea, I’m open to suggestions. The pain has hardly dulled in the interim.

What hurts is not so much that it’s over–that was likely to happen at some point, no matter the means. It’s not the possibility of not seeing Jimmy Rollins, Ryan Madson, Roy Oswalt, or Raul Ibanez put on red pinstripes ever again. Neither is it watching your franchise first baseman and cleanup hitter end this season with a weak groundout, then possibly end next season (for him at least) with a torn Achilles tendon, all on the same play. Or the pain of seeing your team lose, though as a 24-year-old, I really shouldn’t be moved to tears by a baseball tea m losing. But I am. I’m not counting down the days to next season. I’m not getting more amped up for Flyers hockey, or the Eagles, or Arsenal, or South Carolina, or any of the other teams I follow rabidly–that is to say, with about 2/3 the tenacity and emotion with which I follow the Phillies–or even looking forward to the rest of the MLB postseason.

Friday’s loss was a gut shot for two reasons: first, because this season represented a bread-and-circuses-type distraction that we all need from time to time. When your world is not a pleasant place to live in, sometimes you latch on to whatever is going right and give it undue importance–in this case, the Phillies. Now it’s over, three weeks early and without even a moment’s notice. Second, because as much as I’ve tried to be hyper-rational and prepare for the worst, it never actually occurred to me that the Phillies wouldn’t win the World Series. I wouldn’t be surprised if I didn’t watch another minute of baseball for the rest of the postseason. I’ve already foregone both league championship series so far, and honestly, even though football and soccer have proven to be less diverting post-baseball endeavors than usual (such is life for Arsenal fans these days), I feel no urge to come back.

It’s almost as if, by refusing to watch, I can make believe this season isn’t over. Either that or I won’t have to think about Ibanez’s fly ball almost going out, about Chase Utley trying to do to much on the basepaths in Games 4 and 5, about Cliff Lee getting dinked and dunked to death in a Game 2 start where every ball that hit a Cardinal bat seemed to fall in for a hit. I did this once before, boycotting Super Bowl XXXVIII because the non-calls on Ricky Manning and Will Witherspoon, of Duce Staley being overthrown on that sideline route, and every other scream-inducing, shield-your-eyes moment of that disastrous 2004 NFC Championship game would flash through my mind every time I saw Jake Delhomme or Steve Smith on the television screen. I don’t care how these playoffs shake out anymore, as long as the Cardinals lose. And I’m content to read about it the next morning in the paper.

It was a defeat so improbable, so bizarre even for a Phillies fan that it literally tests the bounds of believability. This is a feeling unlike anything I’ve experienced as a Phillies fan–not the solemn pride at having watched a team perform at its best and be bested by a stronger opponent, as in 2009, nor the wry laughter of watching a Rube Goldberg machine of random chance and poetic overachievement, as in 2010. This time, no explanation was satisfactory.

This will be perhaps the most interesting offseason in recent memory for a Phillies front office that has made the interesting offseason its calling card, and I have strong opinions about Jimmy Rollins, the bullpen, first base, and various other questions that Ruben Amaro must solve between now and next April. Expressing those is the next logical step, and while many of us have already moved on, you’ll have to forgive me–I need a little more time to grieve.

So if we’re not exactly in uncharted territory here, we’re close. And like most unfamiliar things, the immediate reaction is fear. And so I find myself of two minds the morning of the biggest game of the season: on the one hand, cognizant of who is taking the mound in red pinstripes, and that he was brought to Philadelphia for precisely this moment. On the other hand, fearful of the possibility–no matter who’s pitching, it’s more likely than we’d like to think–that the best team might not win. Space is not, in fact, the final frontier–Game 5 is.
When you’re looking into the great abyss, you start to go a little nuts. I, for one, have been unusually itchy these past two days.

I’ve started tabulating bizarre and non-predictive stats in the hope that somehow I’ll be able to game chaos theory enough to give Roy Halladay another couple inches of drop on his change-up. For instance: I’ve tried to decide where I’m going to watch the game by tabulating the Phillies’ record in playoff games, since 2007, based on where I watched the game. But they’re best–with a two-game minimum–when I don’t watch the game at all. After that, at my college campus, where they were 11-6, but that’s 550 miles away. After that, a bar in South Jersey that’s close…but just burned down. So that didn’t make me feel any better. What about the Phillies in elimination games? Maybe I’ll feel better then…except the Phillies are only 3-4 in elimination games in my lifetime.

For those of you who think that I don’t experience baseball the way many of you do, just because I pay attention to advanced stats, the playoffs are the time I drop the pretense of being a rational observer and descend, in case you couldn’t tell, into unbridled, weeping, knee-hugging, maniacally-laughing hysterics. Sure, I still pay attention to in-game strategy, but the playoffs are not a time for rationality.

So in a sense, tonight’s game is what we all asked for when this season started. And Halladay, at home, against Carpenter on short rest. We shouldn’t be nervous. Right? Okay, that’s what I’m going to keep telling myself. No need to be nervous.