Phillies-Dodgers: 10 Game Three NLCS Notes

10) Hideki Kuroda’s star-crossed year (Opening Day pitcher, DL’d for months afterward, intermittently dominant and maddening) might have ended tonight, because it’s hard to see how Joe Torre trusts him with any more innings this year. He had nothing, and you have to think that the Dodger manager has other options.

9) You’d never know from this postseason that Ryan Howard isn’t the best first baseman in baseball, mostly because left-handed pitchers either haven’t worked to him, or haven’t thrown him strikes.

He’s fielded his position well, legged out a triple like a runaway beer truck, and set a new MLB record with RBI in seven straight games. They’ve been playing baseball for a real long time, so setting that kind of record is kinda meaningful.

If Howard can keep up this hot streak for another couple of weeks, this marvelously flawed team could win it all again, and maybe make Philly a baseball town. (Well, OK, no. But it’ll narrow the margin a bit more.)

8) I like that they’ve got first base mic’ed up, and that we learn that Shane Victorino is as chatty as a little kid when he gets there. His parting “Good Luck” to first baseman James Loney had all the sincerity of what people say at the poker table.

7) Chooch Ruiz did it again tonight, going 2-for-3 with a walk, two runs scored and an RBI. He’s now hitting .625 for the series, and ended the game tonight with a nice leaning grab of a ball that was in the stands. The sweetest heroes are the ones you don’t expect.

6) It was, I have to admit, kind of fun to see Chad Billingsley get smacked around as well tonight, on the off chance that Dodger Fan wanted to think that this was just a matter of picking the wrong starter. The Dodgers‘ rotation really isn’t the team’s strength.

5) The worrisome thing about games like this one is that it feels like you’re going to need these runs tomorrow…but honestly, that’s not how baseball works. When you pound a team into submission, and draw seven walks and hit multiple big run homers, that’s more likely to show up again in a series than not. And it also doesn’t hurt that no one on the Dodgers has really hit in the first three games of the series.

4) No one will remember this later, but I thought that Shane Victorino’s first inning stolen base was huge. Had shortstop Rafael Furcal caught the ball further back and applied the tag correctly, maybe the umpire calls the play the other way, and Kuroda suddenly has two outs and no one on.

Instead, he wound up giving the Howard triple and the Werth homer, and with Lee looking sharp early and often, the four runs were all that were needed.

3) Did you catch Philly Fan serenading ManRam with “You Took Sterr – Oids!” during his at-bats? Moments like that make me proud of my home town, really. Especially since I’m pretty sure that he’s the only Dodger that Philly Fan really dislikes. According to the box score, the Bank was filled to 104.8 percent of capacity tonight. Hard to do, Harry.

2) At some point in this series, either Furcal or Jimmy Rollins will actually be worthy of being the leadoff hitter for either of these teams. Considering the struggles both had with the wood this year, maybe I’m waiting in vain, but it’s not like they both didn’t end the year hot.

1) Philly Fan’s Man Crush on Cliff Lee can’t be measured; that’s what happens when you go eight shutout innings with 10 strikeouts. Note that manager Charlie Manuel let him hit in the bottom of the eighth even though he wasn’t going to let him pitch the ninth, and Lee responded to the ovation with a base hit and a run scored.

This, on top of his earlier playoff heroism against the Rockies, and the man even stole a base earlier in October.

He works fast, he throws strikes, he can do no wrong. At least, not until he starts again. It’s a tough town.

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Top 10 Phillies-Dodgers Game One Takeaways

10) I’d like to sincerely thank MLB for allowing me to see the game, since as the NLDS and tomorrow’s game shows, that’s really not a given.

9) The fact that Davey Lopes is the Phillies’ first base coach and Larry Bowa is the Dodgers’ third base coach is making my entire childhood a lie.

8) Carlos Ruiz has the nickname “Chooch” from Philly Fan; after the three-run homer early in the game, it might need to change to “Chutch.”

7) Tonight’s home plate umpire, Randy Marsh, was clearly being paid by the number of three-ball counts.

6) You have to admire Skip Caray for continuing to use the word “Fisted!” despite all of the weeks of Internet giggling about it.

5) In the offseason, I seriously doubted Phillies GM Ruben Amaro for acquiring Chan “Crazy Eyes” Ho Park and Raul “Ancient Mariner” Ibanez, who merely provided a shutdown inning of relief and a three-run homer. In other news, I lost two of three fantasy leagues while drafting Jose Reyes and Grady Sizemore in the first.

4) In terms of betting this series, Take The Over.

3) After watching Jonathan Broxton destroy Ryan Howard, I’m still amazed that Matt Stairs took him deep last year.

2) A moment of serious analysis: The Dodgers had 14 hits and only two walks tonight to get six runs and were aided by uncharacteristically weak Philly defense. If you believe in clutch hitting, you’re really not believing in this Dodger team right now.

1) Brad Lidge still looks incredibly shaky and hittable to me, but he’s now three for three in the postseason and seems to think he’s back…and if he thinks it hard enough, who the hell are the rest of us to argue, really?

* * * * *

As for the longer analysis…ye gads, how does Phillies Fan stand this bullpen, really?

In tonight’s game, after Ibanez delivered a monstrous three-run bomb in the top of the eighth to make the game 8-4, my mind wandered to the lineup. Six outs for the Dodgers, so clean relief means that the game ends without seeing Andre Ethier and Manny Ramirez again.

So Ryan Madson comes in…and gives up three straight hits, the first of which was an inexcusable 0-2 single. When the inning ended, it was 8-6, and only after Madson had gotten Ramirez to ground out.

Given the two three-run homers from continuing playoff monster Ruiz and newbie Ibanez, and the fact that Cole Hamels has a dynamite lifetime record at Dodger Stadium, this really shouldn’t have been hard tonight. It should have been as easy a Game One win as you could hope for. Instead, it was nausea-inducing, and this isn’t even my laundry, really.

Tomorrow, it’s old friend Vicente Padilla against Pedro Martinez. Phillies Fan can only hope that the long layoff agrees with Pedro the way it seemingly has with Park, and that Padilla remembers that he’s, well, Vicente Padilla.

But when you win Game One on the road, you’re playing with house money…and it’s time to get greedy.

http://fivetooltool.blogspot.com—The Sports Blog That Loves You Back!

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Top 10 Things I Learned from the Phillies vs Rockies NLDS

10) Todd Helton may have rejuvenated his career with back surgery, but it doesn’t work against left handed pitchers.

9) Philly Fan shouldn’t complain about Charlie Manuel and his hunches ever again, but will.

8) The Rockies clearly needed more Kyle Orton.

7) Watching poorly timed baseball playoff games that are being covered by undiagnosed depressives is, somehow, even less fun than watching coverage on Fox or ESPN.

6) Colorado’s biggest failure was in not getting Cliff Lee’s wife pregnant and due to deliver in October.

5) No matter how good your stuff is or how hard you throw, there’s just something less than intimidating about guys named Ubaldo.

4) Any GM that trades away a player like Carlos Gonzalez needs to lose his job, or at the very least, his Super Moneyball Genius Status.

3) The last time I saw a hitter with a weaker season-ending effort than Troy Tulowitzki against Brad Lidge tonight, his name was Terence Long and Derek Lowe was grabbing his junk.

2) The middle of the Phillies order is really not ready to stop being World Effing Champions

1) The team with the closer that had a 7+ run ERA in the regular season has a huge advantage over the team with the closer that had a 3 run ERA

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Major League Fail

One of this site’s contributors is, in marketing terms, the absolutely ideal consumer for baseball. He loves the game, goes frequently, will travel to stadiums outside of his metropolitan area, and is the gateway to the next generation of baseball fans, seeing as he has three impressionable young’uns.

As he’s a Phillies fan, his children have grown up in the best era ever for that laundry and have taken to the sport in stages. He plays in multiple MLB fantasy games, and if an MLB playoff game is on, that’s where his television is tuned, rather than to the NFL.

(For the record, this person is not me. My girls were raised as A’s Fans, which means they don’t care about baseball at all. Nor should they, since the front office doesn’t. But I digress.)

How have the Lords of Baseball treated his fandom, and the possible future fandom of the next generation? As follows.

1) Schedule Game One of the NLDS during the work day, so that other media markets (Boston, NY, LA) would not be inconvenienced, because it’s very important for young baseball fans to learn early that some teams are more equal than others.

2) Schedule Game Two during the work day as well.

3) Schedule Game Three to start at 10:10 (!) EST on a Sunday, because what the hell, the one game in the series that might be viewed by working people should be kept as far away from a squash Sunday Night Football game as possible.

4) Schedule Game Four for 6 PM (!) EST, so that the game can possibly slide into the time zone before a drab Monday Night Football game (and, for all I know, the WWE, and maybe a very special episode of How I Met Your Mother).

5) Schedule Game Five, if necessary, for 8:07 EST on Tuesday, because you want to make sure that the deciding game in the sole competitive series in the first round is played by two teams that are playing their third game in three nights and fighting jet lag.

Note that every single one of these decisions makes a very small amount of short-term sense. MLB is killed by the NFL in head-to-head matchups, so avoiding it when possible is wise.

But in all of these moves, we more or less murder the notion that the next generation will give a damn about baseball. Last night, my friend’s eldest, a nine year old, wanted to stay up and watch the game with his dad.

Treating the playoffs as the rare and wonderful thing that they are to a Philadelphia audience, my man let him. And, in all likelihood, scooped up the unconscious child around the fifth inning, and told him who won when he woke up the groggy child for school this morning.

Baseball is a great game. It has to be to overcome the rank incompetents that run it. But no sport can do that forever.

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Phillies-Rockies: Top 10 Notes from Game Three

10) It’s awfully nice of MLB to show the defending World Series champions to the working man. Once. Provided he wants to stay up until well past 2 am EST. Bud Selig Blows Goats.

9) Brad Lidge got the save tonight and didn’t give up anything that was hard hit, but anyone that thinks Lights Out is back is out of their freaking mind. He was behind every hitter in the ninth, the fastball was up in the zone, and the slider wasn’t much. He remains a nightmare of worry.

8) Ryan Howard is a beast of a man right now, and his game-winning sacrifice fly was a thing of beauty. There isn’t a hitter in baseball you want to face less when he’s hot.

7) Carlos Gonzalez and Andre Ethier are both products of the Oakland farm system and are both in the state of their careers when even poor poor poor little old cashing the revenue sharing checks Oakland could afford to play them.

Luckily instead, we have Ryan Sweeney, Travis Buck, and a half dozen other guys that you could not pick out of a police lineup as baseball players. But remember, Billy Beane Is A Genius! (Also, Gonzalez is a Dykstra-esque animal right now. Yeesh.)

6) The game-winning run was scored by Jimmy Rollins, and it was the first run he’s scored this series. It’s kind of amazing that the Phillies are up 2-1 with that statement being true.

5) Forgotten in the relief of Lidge Not Failing tonight: thoroughly useful relief from Chad Durbin (three up, three down in the eighth) and fairly acceptable work from Ryan Madson (one inherited runner scored in a situation when he came in with major trouble brewing) and Joe Blanton (eight outs, one run).

4) I get that Matt Stairs is adorable, and his bomb last year against Jonathan Broxton will earn him eternal love and free beer in Philadelphia. But when you get blown away by the very middling cheese of Rafael Betancourt, it’s time to find a better option than a 41-year-old non-fastball hitter with no defensive position.

3) Rockies Fan (they exist?) has to be bent out of shape over Chase Utley’s ninth inning infield single that should not have happened. But before the puling gets too far in earnest, it’s not as if the umps missed an out there; had the play been called properly, Utley is still in the box. The Phillies got a break there, but it wasn’t the reason the Rocks lost, and on some level, you need to just reward the player for hustling.

2) Game Threes are almost always huge, and this one was no different. If Cliff Lee can continue his Game One mastery—and the Rockies’ seemingly eternal struggles with left-handed pitching—the Phils will close the books and be on their way to Los Angeles for the relatively short flight. If not, it’s back to Philly without a travel day for Cole Hamels and all hands.

1) Finally, this—every winning playoff team has a Secret Killer, and for the Phillies, it’s Carlos Ruiz. He was 2-for-4 with two RBI singles tonight, which brings his career postseason batting average up to .281—35 points higher than his career regular season numbers, 50 points higher in slugging, and about 50 points higher in OBA, too. If you project his postseason RBI rate to 600 ABs in the regular season, he drives in 85.

From the eight hole, from a guy that absolutely no one ever worries about.

Sabermetric baseball fan might not believe in clutch, but Philly Fan does—because he believes in Chooch.

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NLDS Playoff Picks: For The Want Of The Ninth Inning…

In the greater Philadelphia area, there is excitement for the Phillies with their attempt to defend their World Series championship. The team is better than last year’s squad in nearly every definable measure.

The outfield consists of three borderline All-Star selections. The infield has three recent MVP selections. Third base and catcher are manned by guys who hit well in the stretch run, provide top-drawer defense, and performed admirably in last year’s playoffs.

The rotation has strong left-handed pitching options, including last year’s Series MVP, the 2008 American League Cy Young winner, and a possible Rookie of the Year winner. Even the back end of the rotation has good options, with a wily veteran Cy Young winner and a control pitcher with 2008 heroics.

The organization has not rested on its championship; instead, it has moved forcefully (witness the Cliff Lee trade) to go for back-to-back crowns. No one has talked about how they’ve coasted, or that they’re fat and happy.

And yet, just about every observer is writing them off, and it’s hard for me not to as well.

The reason, of course, is the bullpen. It’s hard to say just how bad Brad Lidge was this year, other than this: while he might have had the best year ever for a closer in 2008, he might have had the worst year ever for a closer in 2009. The only reason he didn’t set a record for blown saves was that the club coddled him to avoid it late in the year.

They invented injuries for him to rehab and come back stronger; it didn’t help. They tried others in the role, only when all human patience had been exhausted; those options also didn’t work. (Though, for my money, showing considerably less patience with Ryan Madson than was warranted.)

Baseball fans have been here before. Red Sox Fan had his falling out with Keith Foulke after he more or less sold his soul and arm to get them the 2004 crown. Once 2005 rolled around, he was spent, never to recover, and they tossed him aside with speed for Jonathan Papelbon.

It is the nature of closers, and why fantasy players never pay for saves; for every long-term solution like Mariano Rivera or Trevor Hoffman, there are a million guys who blow up after big years. Your best hope, as a fan of a version of laundry, is that your team either chooses wisely and/or gets lucky, or has the ability to stock the farm system with people who can do the gig. (When the Phillies ran into ninth inning issues this year, they brought up… Tyler Walker. Rut roh.)

In the last decade, teams have won, despite anecdotal evidence to the contrary, without shutdown closers. Consider Bobby Jenks seizing the job away from Dustin Hermanson and Shingo Takatsu for the 2005 White Sox. Jason Isringhausen’s ordinary 3.55 ERA for the 2006 Cardinals, and BK Kim’s ill-timed meltdown for the 2001 DiamondBacks (and given Lidge’s performance, especially consider BK).

But none of those guys were flat-out terrible. Even Kim was solid until he made his fateful entrance into Yankee Stadium. Lidge has been terrible and will be terrible in the next few weeks. No amount of faith, hope or prayer will change that. The man’s slider hasn’t been sharp. The fastball has always been hittable, and there are no other tricks in the arsenal.

A creative and, to be fair, loyalty-free manager would have recognized this months ago. A front office that catches every trick should have provided options at the trading deadline. The A’s would have sent over some no-name guy that would have just gotten outs for prospects that don’t work out, just like last year’s move for Blanton. Even if they didn’t, there was always George Sherrill from the Orioles, who the Dodgers scooped up for a pittance, or perhaps backing up the truck for Heath Bell from the Padres.

The fan base recognized the problem months ago, and while still displaying an inordinate amount of good will towards Lidge, has agonized over it. It’s also telling that the extra half-dozen or more games that Lidge forced the team to win again meant that September was spent in a stress position, which probably didn’t help the rotation’s efforts to close the year on a high point.

In the last two weeks, none of them have pitched well, and while it’s a bit of a reach to say that an extra week of Triple A call-up action would have fixed them, it’s better than the alternative.

Having said all that… can they win? Sure. It’s baseball, after all. In my relative youth, a mediocre at best Dodger team with career retreads swept an apparently dynastic A’s team behind one at-bat from Kirk Gibson, two starts from Orel Hershiser, and one week of exposure to the catastrophic fail of Tony LaRussa. (Yes, he’s great, but when his teams lose, they go down like Shaquille O’Neal—kitten-soft sweeps.)

You don’t need to look hard to find teams worse than this Phillies team, after all. They are better than the Cardinals flash team of five years ago. They are better than the team that won last year in every way but one. They could just slug their way to enough wins, and they defend very well, so even if the late inning relief is giving up rockets, maybe enough of them find gloves. It could happen.

But no matter how hard you look, you can’t find a playoff team in the modern era with a worse end-of-game plan than this team. If they do win it all, it’ll be unique.

And with that.. on to the picks.

Colorado vs. PHILADELPHIA

Up to 10 p.m. EST on Saturday night, I really wasn’t liking this matchup for the Fightins. The Rockies were on their way to a historic rally to win the NL West, assuming they could complete the sweep against the Dodgers in LA. In Saturday night’s game, Jorge De La Rosa was matching an electric Clayton Kershaw zero for zero, and it seemed like the team was just going to replicate their buzzsaw run to the World Series.

And then De La Rosa was walking off the mound gingerly, and it all changed.

I’m going to assume that De La Rosa is unavailable for the next week, because groin injuries are rarely next-start things, especially when they are serious enough to make a man leave a meaningful start in which he’s been dominant. So you take the weakest part of the Rockies, and take away the guy who was probably going to get the ball in Game Two. Not good.

Ubaldo Jimenez gets Game One, and he’s fine—a 15-game winner with strikeout an inning stuff who keeps the ball in the yard. He’s got some control issues, but not unworkable. There’s a realistic chance that he can go seven-plus. Second game seems slated for Aaron Cook, which is a little odd given his WHIP, historical playoff record, and overall game, but they like him—so be it.

Then Game Three sets up for… Jason Marquis, who’s really not much more than a pitch to contact guy. Game Four either goes back to Jimenez or Jason Hammel, who is basically Marquis without a pedigree. If you want a wildcard, they could try Jose Contreras, which boggles the mind considering how erratic he’s been in his career, but he has pitched well since moving to AAA.

The Fightins “should” have an edge in starting pitching here. Cliff Lee and Cole Hamels, a month ago, looked like two dominant lefty aces in a league where just one usually wins you a five-game playoff series. But neither has been very good recently, and it seems highly likely that these games will go the bullpens… and that’s just looking all kinds of ugly as well, since the Rocks relievers, outside of Huston Street, haven’t been very good either. When your next best guys are the put-it-on-a-tee Matt Herges and Rafael Betancourt, it’s hard not to see how these games go to Slugfest Mode, especially when you consider the ballparks involved.

In a slugfest, it’s very difficult to predict anything with confidence. It’s basically a coin flip. In that case, I’ll take the team with the home field advantage in Game Five, more positive postseason experience, better options in the seventh and eighth inning, and stronger overall defense. That would be Philadelphia, in five.

ST. LOUIS vs. Los Angeles

Rarely do you see a home team as dismissed as this Dodger team, who ran away with the NL West in the first two months, then more or less puttered around and waited for the season to end. Yes, the Rockies gave them some pause, but they knew they were making the playoffs either way. When your early season division challenge came from a Giants team that scored less than the Amish, I can forgive you for not feeling Big Fear and/or a lot of focus to the 162 game job at hand.

If you are looking for the Dodgers in microcosm, it’s not Mannyworld, though his 50-game siesta and intermittent efforts since is a tempting target for analysis. Instead, look to lead-off hitter and full-time coaster Rafael Furcal, who spent most of the summer looking like his birth certificate was given the Dominican dating treatment, only to crank up his bat and legs in September. (At least, he was still on my roto roster when it happened. We’re still not voting you a championship share, Rafe.)

Was Raffy—and for that matter, the rest of the Dodgers—just playing possum? Truth be told, the old adge that you can’t turn it on like a switch seems like bunkum. You’d be crazy to think that Manny and Raffy are going to be bigger threats than Andre Ethier and Matt Kemp, who are the real studs here (thanks again for moving Andre away from Oakland, Genius Beane)… but I wouldn’t be shocked to see it.

The Dodgers are better than they’ve shown, especially if they can get any kind of lead late. George Sherill and Jonathan Broxton are a very nice way to end the game after the seventh.

The trouble for Jet Blue is that they’ve got a Cardinals team that has the best two starting pitchers in the series in Cris Carpenter and Adam Wainwright, and two game-changing hitters in Albert Pujols and Matt Holiday.

Pujols looks positively Ruthian in this series, and the only real question for me is whether the Cardinals can get enough men on base to make his at bats meaningful. I think they will; the Dodger pitchers nibble too much, and are prone to big walk blowups.

The Cards are not without weakness. We’ve mentioned LaRussa’s playoff history of flush. Pitching coach Dave Duncan is rumored to be leaving out of bitterness over how his son was sent out of town, and closer Ryan Franklin is the kind of regular season success (38 saves) that tends to fall apart in the postseason (44Ks in 61 IP).

If the Dodgers can somehow win with Randy Wolf in Game One at home, there’s a real chance of the chutes being pulled, the Dodgers stepping on the gas, and Joe Torre looking like his old New York self.

However, I just can’t go against Carpenter, and for that matter, Pujols. This is baseball. Stars matter, and when you’ve got the Cy Young and MVP on the same team, you should win. St. Louis in four.

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Why the Philadelphia Phillies Don’t Need Roy Halladay

A small point to illustrate what it’s like to be Philly fan:

In the past couple of weeks in the NL East, the Phillies have put it all together to rattle off a 10-game winning streak, their longest in 18 years. As I write this, they have a lead of 6.5 games in the NL East, where the three other “contenders” (Atlanta, Florida, and New York) seem incapable of getting over .500. That’s the second-largest lead in MLB for a division, behind only the Dodgers’ nine-game bulge in the NL West, and the push has given them the second-best record in the NL.

The offense is hitting on all cylinders with Jimmy Rollins having his usual second-half surge, and all three outfielders (Raul Ibanez, Shane Victorino, and Jayson Werth) performing at second-tier All-Star levels. Even marginal offensive players like Pedro Feliz and Carlos Ruiz are coming through with occasional utility. Combine this with health for the right side of the infield (Ryan Howard and Chase Utley have been disturbingly brittle over the past few years), and the fact that they are a fairly good defensive team, and you’ve got what might be the best roster of everyday players in the league. (If they aren’t, it’s only because L.A. is, but it’s close.)

The starting pitching has been buttressed by a solid start to what should be a long career for J.A. Happ, a hot streak from Joe Blanton, and the fact that Jamie Moyer is always more effective in the middle of a season, when guys are really not prepared to hit 75 mph pitches.

Hot teams always fall into a bit of luck as well, and for the Phillies, it’s the found money of vagabond Rodrigo Lopez, who is making the Pedro Martinez signing look like more luxury than necessity. So even the “Hangover Year” from Cole Hamels and Brad Lidge has been more nuisance than problem, so long as they pull it together in the late going, and both seem to be. Even the bullpen looks good now, with Chan Ho Park providing his first useful year ever in a hitter’s park, and the set-up men rounding into shape. Even if someone burns out down there, there’s good news, in that injured starter Brett Myers should return in August to give them another plus arm in the late innings.

We’re also talking about, well, the defending World Series champions, which really should count for something when it comes to Fan Happiness and Confidence. They play in a nice new ballpark. Their most bitter rivals (the Mets) are in an injury soaked ruin that has given full spotlight to the failures of the organization. The team that frustrated them for a decade (Atlanta) can’t match up with them for everyday talent. The last contender (Florida) has had its own injuries to contend with, and given that it’s Florida, should be selling off players to the highest bidder any minute now.

The farm system has more than a couple of properties (Kyle Drabek being the best-known name) that should provide value soon. They are in an MLB+ market where the home-grown talent hasn’t had to have been sold to the tyrants of the AL East. If a Yankee or Red Sox fan had even a third of these reasons to be happy (especially the series championship and the domination of their rival), they’d be beyond insufferable with the smugness of it all.

And Philly fans? Well, they worry that the winning streak is going to cost them Roy Halladay, because the team will get fooled into thinking it won’t need him, when it does.

No, seriously.

There is every possibility that Halladay is this year’s CC Sabathia—an AL pitcher that comes to the NL in midseason to become the best starter in the lesser circuit. But there’s also the possibility that he’s a rich man’s Tim Hudson, which is to say a guy that’s good, but not quite as good once you get him out of his quirky home park. There doesn’t have to be a 2008 Sabathia in 2009; there really doesn’t.

There’s also this: You won’t find CC’s name on the World Series championship roster for last year. As a matter of fact, this team—with most of the people being that Philly fan who is willing to do anything to get Halladay—beat him.

And, um, even if you do somehow pry Halladay away from the Jays for pieces that you aren’t currently using to have the second-best record in the NL, who do you demote to give him starts? Happ is the future of the rotation, and good right now. Blanton is on the best streak of his NL life right now. Moyer might be the most popular player on the team, and he might make everyone else in the rotation better by the change of pace; he’s also been winning consistently for months now. Hamels is the staff ace, and Lopez, while fungible, has given you no reason to bounce him.

There might not even be room for Martinez at the bottom of the rotation, let alone Halladay at the top, and that’s not even getting into the issues that a new huge salary brings.

I get why Philly fan are concerned; the playoffs are won by dominant starting pitching, not mere competence. But 4/5 of this rotation won it all last year, and the other parts of the club are far from broken. Besides, the playoffs are a crapshoot; they are won by teams that get home runs from AL pitchers (Blanton, last year), sudden crappiness by opponents under pressure (Chad Billingsley, last year), or other assorted foolishness. Blowing up your roster to be marginally better in a matchup is a recipe for long-term disaster.

Who needs Halladay? Teams that are chasing—but in the division, it’s not pitching that’s causing the rest of the NL East to fail, it’s injuries to their top everyday players. Halladay might make a huge difference in the Central, where the only team with a truly settled rotation is the punch-less Cubs; if he goes to St. Louis, the NL will have a third clear power team so long as Cris Carpenter stays healthy. If the Rockies somehow got him, and he didn’t implode in the Denver air, that’s your locked-up wild-card team, and a dangerous team to draw in the first round.

But the Phillies don’t need Halladay to win the division, and they don’t need him to have more than a fair chance at defending their championship. They also really don’t need him in 2010, when a cheaper Drabek and other farm arms will give them much more affordable insurance against age and injury.

So enough with the fever dreams, Philly fans, and your season-long concern about the rotation. The switch has been flicked, the division should be yours, and life is very, very good for you right now.

I know it’s an unfamiliar feeling, but act like you’ve been here before. Because, well, you have.

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