Philadelphia Phillies: Could Ryne Sandberg Replace Charlie Manuel in 2013?

With the Philadelphia Phillies firing the majority of their current coaching staff only hours after their final game, change has already begun for team who had won five straight NL East titles coming into 2012. 

The Phillies also promoted Triple-A Lehigh Valley manager and Hall of Fame second baseman Ryne Sandberg to coach third base and work as the infield coach. It is clear that the Phillies are leaning toward Sandberg replacing Manuel.

They only question left is, when?  

Charlie Manuel will enter 2013 in the final year of his contract. If Manuel leads the Phillies to another 37-50 record going into the All-Star break, is there much sense in letting him coach the team the rest of the year? Or should the Sandberg era begin early.

For the moment, the answer is hazy at best. Manuel did bring a world championship to Philadelphia, a city that was at the time starving for any type of championship. He is also the winningest coach in franchise history, but the Phillies will not even think about extending Manuel into 2014 if the Phillies do not return to the playoffs in 2013.

My gut says he will finish with the team no matter what happens in 2013. Then again, if owners David Montgomery and Bill Giles dish out a bunch more offseason dollars for a non-playoff team, Ruben Amaro‘s job as GM may come under the microscope. Most people in Amaro‘s position would much rather fire a coach than have the owners reevaluate their job performance.

Ryne Sanberg is clearly the heir apparent and Manuel seems pretty clear on his current situation, but does he want to play the lame-duck manager if things start to go south next season? It’s tough to answer; Charlie is a very prideful man. Does he walk away before he gets fired? Or does he have faith in Ruben Amaro to let him finish what he started and walk away on his own terms.

Amaro is going to have an extremely tough offseason here in 2012, he may have an even tougher one in 2013 with contracts expiring on Roy Halladay, Carlos Ruiz, Laynce Nix, Kyle Kendrick and Chase Utley.  

Read more Philadelphia Phillies news on BleacherReport.com

Phillies Rumors: Ryne Sandberg Makes for Ideal Manager-in-Waiting

Ryne Sandberg could and should be the next manager of the Philadelphia Phillies. That is, of course, as soon as Charlie Manuel is ready to step down.

After a tumultuous 2012 season in Philadelphia that was marred by injuries and disappointment, it was important that the Phillies inject some life into the organization. They did just that when they announced that minor league manager Ryne Sandberg would be brought on as the Phillies’ third base and infield coach. Ken Rosenthal of FoxSports reported the move on Thursday:

#Phillies name Ryne Sandberg their 3B coach and IF instructor. Could be their next manager. Manuel signed through 2013.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) October 4, 2012

What’s interesting about the move, as Rosenthal alludes to in the tweet, is that current manager Charlie Manuel’s contract is set to expire after the 2013 season.

Ryan Lawrence of the Philadelphia Daily News expanded on this idea, suggesting that Sandberg is potentially the heir apparent should the 68-year-old veteran manager decide to retire at the end of the 2013 season.

In the article, Phillies general manager Ruben Amaro Jr. is quick to point out that there is no agreement set in place for Sandberg to eventually take over.

“Obviously, that’s the sexy thing to think about,” Amaro Jr. said. “But the fact of the matter is he’s not the heir apparent. We’ve made no promises to Ryne Sandberg.”

But should he be the heir apparent?

Sandberg, who was inducted in the Hall of Fame as a player in 2005, would make the perfect manager-in-waiting for a Phillies roster that is a legitimate candidate for a bounce-back season next year. As a Hall of Fame player, he knows the ins and outs of the game and has always had a knack for the fundamentals.

Since 2007, Sandberg has been managing at the minor league level; the only thing missing now is coaching at the major league level. Serving on the revamped Phillies coaching staff next season will finally afford him that opportunity, completing his metamorphosis into a major league manager.

Count Charlie Manuel as a supporter of Sandberg. He told the Philadelphia Daily News:

I absolutely like everything about him…I’m really looking forward to working with him. In the dugout, he will be our defensive guy. He will work with the infielders, of course, and he’ll move the defenses. His responsibilities will be a lot more than coaching third base. Also, we’re going to use his hitting expertise because he’s a Hall of Fame hitter. He’s got some real good ideas and he talks a lot about hitting the way that I like. I think he’s going to be very valuable to us.

Manuel knows what it takes to win in Philly. He’s the winningest manager in the club’s history, so an endorsement from him should mean a lot to the Phillies fanbase.

With Sandberg‘s track record and reputation, the Phillies might want to consider Sandberg as the official manager-in-waiting before other teams try to sign him away.

Read more Philadelphia Phillies news on BleacherReport.com

Philadelphia Phillies: 5 Moves They Must Make to Be Successful in 2013

The Philadelphia Phillies just finished the worst season they have had in the past decade, finishing 81-81. But next year could have the Phillies back in the World Series, if they make the right moves in the offseason. Here are five moves the Phillies must execute if they want to position themselves to have another parade on Broad Street.

Begin Slideshow

Is Kevin Frandsen the Philadelphia Phillies 2013 Third Baseman?

Who will be the Phillies next third baseman?

At this point, all the Phillies fanbase can do is speculate.

A trade? A free agent signing? Or could the solution be solved in-house?

Kevin Frandsen came out of nowhere this season to become one of the biggest surprises in an otherwise dismal 2012 Phillies season.

In 195 at-bats—approximately one-third of a regular season—Frandsen batted a team high .338 with an OPS of .834.

Frandsen does not possess the power the Phillies would like out of a third baseman, but if they cannot make a big splash in free agency, the Phillies could give Frandsen a chance to be an everyday player.

Another upside to playing Frandsen is that he will come cheap. Much cheaper than any free agent signing or acquisition by trade. This would free up money to sign a quality outfielder and make serious changes to that Phillies’ bullpen.

Kevin Youkilis has been a name tossed around Philadelphia. He will turn 34 in March and made $12 million in 2012. You can expect Youkilis to look for a two to three year deal at around eight or nine million per season.

Youkilis finished the season batting .235 with 19 home runs and 60 RBI. Not terrible, by any means, but do the Phillies really need another player hitting below .250, who strikes out more than 100 times in a season? 

When you would have to overpay for mediocre numbers, acquiring Youkilis doesn’t seem like the best fit with the current Phillies lineup.

 

 

Chase Headley may be available via a trade. He’s one of the best third baseman in the game, coming off a great all-around season—.286 average, 31 home runs, 31 doubles, and 115 RBI.

He also stole 17 bases and played in 161 of 162 games this season. The Padres will have to be blown away by an offer the Phillies make to even consider moving him.

It is doubtful that GM Ruben Amaro will clear the farm system again. Acquiring Headley seems more like a pipe dream of Headley wearing Phillies pinstripes next season.

The Phillies also have two third baseman in the minor leagues that are both a year or two away from contributing at the major league level.

Cody Asche hit .300 with 10 home runs in a half season at Double-A.

Maikel Franco batted .280 with 14 home runs and 84 RBI in Single-A Lakewood.

It will be an interesting off season for the Phillies, but by next spring don’t be surprised if Kevin Frandsen gets a chance to start for the Philadelphia Phillies. 

Read more Philadelphia Phillies news on BleacherReport.com

Picking the Philadelphia Phillies’ All-Postseason Team

Well, this feels strange. 

For the first time since the final day of the 2006 regular season, there will be no postseason baseball in the city of Philadelphia. That’s right. Two teams from the National League East will be heading to the postseason and neither of them will be the Philadelphia Phillies. 

A third place finish here in 2012 will effectively end the Phillies’ string of five consecutive NL East titles and force them on the outside of the window looking in. 

But those five consecutive titles produced some excellent moments and highlighted a number of big time performers. They added to the Phillies’ rich postseason history and pushed most of this club’s core into Philadelphia sports history. 

Since there won’t be a postseason in Philadelphia this year, we’ll take a look back instead. We’ll use each of those postseason moments and other great games in Phillies’ history to build a 25-man roster of this team’s greatest postseason performers. 

Follow @Greg_Pinto

Begin Slideshow

Philadelphia Phillies: What Might Roy Halladay Be in 2013?

The Phillies have plenty of excuses ready for their just-finished 81-81 yard sale of a season. To hear Jimmy Rollins tell it, if they had been healthy, the Phillies would have won the division again.  

Well, Jim, we are not sure what season you just watched, but it is pretty hard to imagine that a full season of regressing stars Ryan Howard and Chase Utley would have meant 17 more wins. For that matter, JRoll, you yourself stayed healthy all season, which was a shock in and of itself.

Besides, the Phillies season was not decided by the games its stars missed. It was decided by what their stars did when they actually played.

Cliff Lee finished with a record of 6-9. Make your own joke.

Rollins was the only player with enough plate appearances to qualify for the batting title. He thus led the team in batting average by hitting .250. As a leadoff man.

Utley hit .256. Howard hit .219.

And then there was Roy Halladay.

Fresh off winning the National League Cy Young Award in 2010 and finishing runner-up in that voting last season, Doc posted this line: 11-8, 4.49 ERA, a half-dozen starts missed and a strikeout-to-walk ratio of 3.67, his worst since 2007.

The Phillies will pay Halladay $20 million next season, when he will be 36 years old. What will they get for that money?

Let’s look at some big-name pitchers and how they fared in their age-36 seasons.

Begin Slideshow

Philadelphia Phillies: Mediocre Season Leaves Unanswered Questions

Well, Phillies fans, it is finally over.

This disappointing season full of underachievement, heartbreaking losses and what-ifs came to an end earlier today, when Michael Martinez’ fly ball landed in the glove of Nationals‘ left fielder Corey Brown.

The five-time defending National League East champion Phillies ended with an average 81-81 record. They took a 21-game tumble from their remarkable 102-win season last year. There is not one big reason for this, but there are plenty of small ones.

Nobody expected Roy Halladay, a baseball god in the last two seasons, to put up a 4.49 ERA. Cliff Lee‘s numbers normalized, as he ended the season with a respectable ERA of 3.16, but the guy just didn’t pitch like himself in the first three months of the season, run support or not.

The Phillies’ offense as a whole scored 684 runs, for an average of 4.22 runs per game. This was by far the lowest total of any of Charlie Manuel’s Phillies teams, and the lowest offensive output for a Phillies team since 1997. This isn’t surprising when you consider that their leadoff hitter led the team in home runs and RBI.

We can officially start pondering the question that will haunt us all winter: Is the Phillies era of excellence over or was this season an aberration of bad luck with players having bad seasons at the same time?

I will attempt to construct an argument for both possibilities. First, I will take the negative side.

It is not impossible that the Phillies have reached the point of regression. Let’s face it, the Phillies are an old team. The reason for this? The Phillies were buyers from 2009 to 2011, and they chose to try to win at the moment rather than look to the future.

The acquisitions of Cliff Lee, Roy Halladay, Roy Oswalt and Hunter Pence sacrificed pieces that would now be useful to build a younger team.

The good news? All of these moves gave the Phillies a better chance to win the World Series, and they definitely made the team more exciting to watch for a couple years. The bad news? The Phillies never did win the World Series after their youthful 2008 season, and those moves are coming home to roost now.

Roy Halladay may never be the same. Roy Oswalt is buried in the ashes of his career and will be retired next year. Hunter Pence is playing on the other side of the country now. In an ironic twist, Oswalt and Pence both have a chance to win the World Series this year, but neither with the team that acquired them for that very purpose.

As it stands right now, the Phillies are possibly a rebuilding team without a farm system, an extremely unenviable position for a baseball franchise, and, often times, a recipe for years of malaise and irrelevance.

Now that all of you are flatly depressed, let’s take a look at the more optimistic possibility.

It is certainly a possibility that there were just too many things that went wrong for the Phillies in 2012 for this to be a sign of things to come.

As I mentioned earlier, Roy Halladay had about as un-Halladay of a season as possible. While he may never be at his Cy Young-level of 2010 again, it is nearly impossible to imagine the hardest-working man in baseball having two terrible seasons in a row.

While Vance Worley may have overachieved in 2011, I don’t think his mediocre 2012 season was his true form, especially knowing about the bone chips. Ruben Amaro learned a painful lesson this year and he certainly will not go into 2013 with a bullpen composed of minor leaguers.

Chase Utley and Ryan Howard will not both miss the first half of the season again. Yes, they are both more injury-prone now than they were in the past, but the odds of both of them missing so much time at once are astronomical.

Having Ryan play 150 games and Chase play 140 will give this offense a different identity, and having a 30-35 HR presence in the lineup is something the Phils sorely missed for all of 2012.

So what is my opinion?

While I agree with parts of both arguments, I am more inclined to fall on the side of this season being somewhat of a fluke.

Remember, while it did not feel like it for most of the season, the Phillies didn’t finish that far off this season. They were still an 81-win team. St. Louis clinched a playoff berth with 87 wins.

With all the crazy idiosyncrasies of this odd season, winning six more games this year wouldn’t have taken too much of a drastic difference.

Do I think the Phillies are going to reach the 102-win dominance of 2011 next year? No. They are not that team anymore.

Do I think that with a couple big signings at third base and the outfield, a few smart moves in the bullpen and expectedly better luck next year could net the Phils between 88 and 90 wins? I don’t think think it’s unreasonable.

The 2012 season is mercifully over. The 2013 offseason has begun, at least for the Phillies and their fans. The organization will now begin to look for answers, because there is no certainly no shortage of questions.

Goodnight, Phillies.

Read more Philadelphia Phillies news on BleacherReport.com

Philadelphia Phillies Fans Should Be Excited About Prospect Darin Ruf

Going into the 2013 season, the Philadelphia Phillies do not have one legitimate starting outfielder on their entire roster. Yes, I’m talking about Domonic Brown, John Mayberry, Lanyce Nix, Nate Schierholtz and Juan Pierre. None of which have the skills at this point in their careers to start for a championship-caliber team.

Insert Darin Ruf, a first baseman by trade, who is now in the process of moving to left field in order to earn a chance to play for the 2013 Phillies. His 2012 campaign has been a remarkable one to watch, he even blasted two home runs last night against the NL East Champion Washington Nationals, providing all of the Phillies’ lackluster offense. When is the last time another Phillie hit two home runs in a game? I couldn’t even tell you.

Between Double-A Reading and the major leagues, Ruf has hit 41 home runs and driven in 113 runs in 520 at-bats. Man, the Phillies could sure use those kind of offensive numbers in 2013, especially because they have no idea what they are going to get out of sluggers Ryan Howard and Chase Utley next season.

Ruf can provide a spark to an offense that none of the above mentioned Phillies’ outfielders can. Even if his defense is sub-par, having another bat in the lineup that can drive in 100 runs and hit over 30 home runs will be instrumental in rebuilding a dominant Phillies offense of years past. Besides, none of the other current Phillies outfielders are by any means a Gold Glove candidate. If the Phillies can win a ring with Pat Burrell in left field, why not Darin Ruf?  

In the 30 at-bats we seen so far from Ruf, an observant eye can tell you he is having quality major league at-bats: not swinging at bad pitches, getting ahead in the count and having total control of the inner half of the plate. It seems every time he step in the batter’s box, he has a plan on how he wants to attack the pitcher.

The Phillies are in desperate need to interject some talented youth into their organization. The Washington Nationals are full of young, hungry, players. In order to compete with them over the long haul, the Phillies are going to need a spark that will lead them back to the top of the NL East. That spark may just be the power-hitting Darin Ruf.

Ruf will play winter ball this offseason to work on his defense. Look for Ruf to takes names, and someone’s job come 2013 spring training.  

Read more Philadelphia Phillies news on BleacherReport.com

Final Regular Season Grades for All 25 Philadelphia Phillies

“Disappointing.”

That’s a word that you are going to hear a lot over the next couple of weeks when people talk about the Philadelphia Phillies, and it isn’t just going to go away after that time. Whenever the 2012 Phillies are discussed, that’s what they’ll be associated with—disappointment. 

It surely is not unjustified. This is a team that came into the regular season with the highest payroll in the National League. If you include Ryan Howard, Chase Utley and Roy Halladay, they were a team with an All-Star at seven different positions. Carlos Ruiz would later make it eight. 

Of course, counting Howard, Utley and Halladay isn’t easy. All three of those players missed a significant amount of time in 2012 and I don’t think it is unfair to say that not one of three performed up to their own, personal expectations. 

It’s hard to win when the middle of your lineup and the ace of your starting rotation are shelved, but when you refer back to that payroll, Plan Bs should be in place. Someone has to shoulder the blame. 

So while there were certainly some bright spots and pleasant surprises this season, without a doubt, the Phillies’ grades must reflect the one overarching emotion that fans are going to feel until spring training opens in February of 2013—disappointment. 

Begin Slideshow

Free Agents the Philadelphia Phillies Should Pursue in the Offseason

It’s been a season of flux for the Philadelphia Phillies this year, to say the least. Last year, though eliminated in the NLDS by the St. Louis Cardinals, the Phillies were the best team in baseball with a 102-60 record. This year, the tides have changed.

After having posted nine consecutive winning seasons, the Phillies are in jeopardy of not achieving their tenth straight season with a record above .500. If they plan on doing so, they have to win two of three in their upcoming series in Washington against the Nationals. Anything less, and it’s either .500 or a losing record, and either of the two ends the streak, which is the third-longest (second-longest if it persists) of its kind in the majors.

The attitude around Philadelphia concerning the Phillies has ostensibly changed. Last year, it was win the most games in franchise history and then the World Series. Now, it’s just to finish the season with a winning record.

However, there is one thing about the Phillies that has remained constant from last year to this one: they’re still a big market team. The Phillies have recent winning seasons on their side and their lack of a playoff appearance this year can at least somewhat be attributed to injuries to Roy Halladay, Ryan Howard and Chase Utley. Whether or not any baseball fans can be led to such persuasion is one thing, but perhaps baseball players looking to sign somewhere, such as Philadelphia, will feel the same as I’ve mentioned.

The Phillies’ free agency shopping list is no doubt comprised of the following: center fielder (possibly a corner outfielder as well), third baseman, and potentially a relief pitcher. A starting pitcher could also see his way into the fold, though that’s less likely given the Phillies’ internal options of Kyle Kendrick, Tyler Cloyd and possibly even Jonathan Pettibone. This list will focus on some options at those positions who will be free agents this offseason and could be a fit for the Phillies.

Let’s get to it.

Begin Slideshow

« Previous Page — Next Page »