Philadelphia Phillies: Are the Phillies Looking to Trade Vance Worley?

For as long as most Philadelphia fans can remember, the Phillies have been an offense-first, pitching-whenever team. 

There was a time when trading away Cory Lidle seemed like a mistake, acquiring Kyle Lohse helped the team and re-sigining Jamie Moyer was vital to the team’s success.

Which is why it seems so odd now to sit at the kitchen table, behind the wheel of the car or under a tree in the park, and listen to local baseball-talking heads discuss trading away young pitching prospect Vance Worley.  

After all, there was a time when Worley would have been a highly-coveted piece of the Phillies’ puzzle for years to come.

Vance Worley Fun Fact: Worley is currently the active leader in ERA for all pitchers with at least four starts, with a 1.24 ERA, which is good for a 322 ERA+.

But these are not your grandfather’s Phillies—or your father’s Phillies, or your Phillies for that matter.

These are the new and improved, alternate-reality, bizarro-Phillies—a team for whom Brett Myers, J.A. Happ and Worley are all on the outside looking in, somehow not talented enough to make a rotation that has four aces and Joe Blanton.

At the same time, Monday night’s offensive explosion notwithstanding, it is also a team in dire need of hitting.  

The Phillies’ hitting woes have been well-documented, so we won’t recollect them here, but suffice to say that the Phils’ could use another bat. And the prospect of squandering one of the finest rotations in baseball history because the offense cannot squeak across three runs per night must be keeping Phillies GM Ruben Amaro up at night.

To be fair, Worley will not continue to put up the numbers he has so far in his career; while we will not go so far as to call his 3-1 record, 1.24 ERA and 0.931 WHIP an aberration, this is simply not who Worley is as a pitcher.  

But it does appear as though Worley could be a quality major league starter, and major league baseball teams are often willing to give up quite a bit to haul in one of those.

For what it is worth, the major league rumor mills are not exactly alive with Vance Worley trade talk; thus far such propositions have been coming from guys like Mike Missanelli on 97.5 The Fanatic, which represents little more than expostulation.

At the same time, though, something about it does feel right. It just seems odd that this Philadelphia Phillies‘ team will soon trade away a future major league starting pitcher because they need a bat. 

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