Philadelphia Phillies: Can Chase Utley Have a Vintage Second Half?

You might have heard that Chase Utley is back playing second base for the Philadelphia Phillies. When you are a 33-year-old man rolling a soul patch out, it sure helps if you are professional baseball player. That thing looks absurd. 

Regardless, in this interminable, hot, and mostly dull first half of the 2012 season, there has not been much to be excited about. Utley’s return is at least that. Phillies fans are looking for a big second half from Utley, and his reputation is that of a player who rises to the occasion as the games become more meaningful. So can Chase Utley have a “vintage” second half? 

It probably depends on how you define “vintage.”

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Philadelphia Phillies: Is Pursuing Ben Sheets a Smart Move, or Just Desperate?

Ah, rumors.  As Timex Social Club once deftly put it, “Look at all these rumors/Surrounding me every day./I just need some time/Some time to get away from/From all these rumors.” 

Have you heard the one about Ben Sheets?  According to Tim Dierkes of MLB Trade Rumors, he recently threw for several major league teams looking for starting pitching help, and the Phillies were there. 

Is pursuing Ben Sheets a smart move, or is it just desperate?  Maybe history can provide the answer.

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Philadelphia Phillies in 2012 Are No Day at the Beach

Baseball seasons, like days at the beach, are not created equal.  The 2012 Phillies season to date brings to mind a beach day you looked forward to, only to be alternately aggravated and disappointed by what you actually got.

You might say “who can complain about a day at the beach?”  The sun, the sand, and the waves. You imagine a breeze carrying a hint of salt air.  The gently tumbling surf serves as a white noise soundtrack, turning the workaday part of your brain off.  There might even be a cocktail after.  What is to complain about?

Days like today, that’s what.  For starters, it is hot.  Not “unseasonably warm,” not even “a trifle uncomfortable.”  No – it is brutally hot, the sort of heat you ordinarily only hear news stories about from places like Texas or Missouri.  Low triple-digit temperature, high double-digit humidity.  The absolute worst.

Compounding matters is that this is one of those days at the beach where the breeze comes stiffly off the land.  The breeze not only provides no relief, it makes you feel like a kernel of corn spinning in a hot-air popper.  

That same land breeze carries biting flies by the thousands onto the beach, and these flies are hungry.  Usually, if you can walk far enough into the water, the flies circle back to look for easier prey.  Not today.  You are up to your waist in the water and still flailing away, looking like you are fighting an apparition and getting more annoyed by the minute.

And it is not helping matters that your kids are whining about the heat, begging for ice cream, and asking when you can go back to the house.  Maybe staying on the boardwalk until 9:30 last night was not the greatest idea after all.

So, at 1:30 in the afternoon, it is decision time.  Are you going to stick it out?  Are you going to wait for the wind to turn?  It won’t be 100 degrees the whole day, right?  Maybe the flies will leave you alone if you slather on some more Off!  You paid good money to rent this place for this week.  Can you just call that money wasted for today?

This is the predicament of the Phillie fan nearly halfway through the 2012 season.

Tickets are bought and paid for.  Because of that, even if the vaunted sellout streak ends, 35,000+ fans will be in the seats for every game on the schedule until the team is mathematically eliminated from the wild card race or until the Eagles play their first regular season game, whichever comes first.

The question the Phillie fan needs to answer is whether it will be worth holding on to hope through what is shaping up to be a long, possibly lost summer.

Like the beach-goer waiting for the wind to shift in the face of mounting adverse evidence, the Phillie fan waits for Chase Utley and Ryan Howard to begin playing baseball.  The Phillie fan waits for Roy Halladay to come off the disabled list.  And for Cliff Lee to win a game, and for any middle relief pitcher to get a meaningful out, and so on into the endless regular season.

The Phillie fan needs more than that, though.  The Washington Nationals need to make a decision, and fast.  Either run away and hide in winning the division while laying waste to the Phillies’ competitors for a wild card berth, or come back to the pack and give the Phillies a chance to catch them.

The fans are not the only ones going crazy from the heat.  Charlie Manuel has had closed-door meetings.  He has told the press that other teams don’t fear the Phillies any more.  He has observed that his team does not defend like it used to.  Whatever you do, do not ask him about the way his team has hit.

Ruben Amaro Jr. is no sunnier.  Asked recently about when some of his injured stars might be back, RAJ somewhat bemusedly sighed that he wanted to stay away from timetables because they have proven inaccurate in the recent past.

So it is hot on the beach, and getting hotter.  Is it time to go home?  Or will you stay, knowing that while it may not get much better, it is unlikely to get too much worse?

Decision time is here.

Read more Philadelphia Phillies news on BleacherReport.com

Cole Hamels: Phillies Need to Learn from Brewers’ Mistake Not Trading Fielder

Cole Hamels should be traded, the sooner the better. 

It is the only way for the Phillies to keep their present backslide from turning into an outright collapse.  Coming off the heels of five terrific seasons, this team and this season have the feel of a once really great party that is now degenerating into chaos.

From 2007-2011, Phillies fans loved the five straight division titles.  They loved the 102 wins last season.  Heady days.  For the last five years, it was a bottle service blowout where miraculously the longer the party went on, the hotter everyone seemed to get. 

Every time the action started to flag, someone else better than the previous player walked through the door. 

“Brett Myers had to leave.  Oh, but look, it’s Brad Lidge.”  “Jamie Moyer said he was tired, he went home.  But Roy Halladay just showed up and brought Cliff Lee with him!”  “Chase Utley says his knee is bothering him and he needs to go crash in the back bedroom.  Thankfully, Hunter Pence’s date went home with a stomach virus so he came after all!” 

Time after glorious time, whenever it looked like the show might finally be over, Ruben Amaro Jr. came through with another signing, another trade, another move to keep the music playing.

Unfortunately, it is becoming horribly apparent that in propping the “we can win a title” window open for as long as possible, the Phillies exposed themselves to that phenomenon most party-goers can relate to.

For the Phillies, now, that same rollicking fiesta that carried them for five years has gone to a dark place.  It is 2:55 a.m.  The beautiful people who formed the epicenter of the good times have started falling asleep in corners or leaving altogether. 

Halladay is 4-5 with an ERA (3.98) that has not been this high since 2007.  Right now, of course, he is not pitching at all.  Lee is 0-3 and doesn’t even win when he shuts the Giants out for ten innings or is staked to three-run leads. 

And Utley and Ryan Howard sneaked out the back door; people are saying they are coming back, but you can only believe that if/when you see it. 

The Phillies are six games under .500.  Guests are leaving in droves: See the empty seats at Citizens’ Bank Park, which figure to be pronounced this week home to the Colorado Rockies.

Lee will win a game this season.  Halladay will pitch again this season.  Utley and Howard will play again this season.  Unfortunately, by the time they all come back to the party, the lights will already have been turned off.  It is over. 

It is not that they are nine games back in the division—they have to pass four teams to get back to the top from last place.  It is not that they are five games back in the wild card standings—they have to pass seven teams to get there.

There is no way to save 2012.  The time has come to work on saving 2013 and beyond.  Ironically, that process starts for the Phillies with trading this season’s most valuable player.  Cole Hamels must go.

He is both an elite talent and a proven playoff performer.  As the playoff contenders sort themselves out, teams will fight over Hamels.  They will do so as much to keep him away from other contending teams as they will to secure his services for themselves. 

The Phillies can jump-start the process of re-stocking their depleted farm system by igniting a bidding war for a World Series MVP.

This will be a bitter pill for the Phillies, as Hamels is home-grown.  Their fans will not like it any better. 

Trading Hamels will be the flying white flag the fanbase has not seen in almost a decade.  And he will be missed.  Here is the thing, though: Phillies fans can begin missing Hamels now or in November, when Hamels signs for eight years and $150M with the Dodgers, or the Yankees, or the Rangers.

If the Phillies need proof that this is the right move, they need only look directly behind them in the wild card standings.  There sit the Milwaukee Brewers, behind the Phillies only in winning percentage. 

The Brewers had the chance to sell Prince Fielder to the highest bidder at last season’s trade deadline.  They kept him, ultimately getting nothing of real value for Fielder when he signed with the Detroit Tigers in the past offseason.

The Brewers’ choice was defensible in that, with Fielder, the 2011 Brewers were an excellent team.  They won 96 games, they won their division, they won a playoff series.  With Fielder leaving, the Brewers likely knew that their 2011 iteration was their last best chance to win.  So they went for it. 

Conversely, the 2012 Phillies aren’t great…heck, they are not even good.

A year later, the Brewers are in a downward spiral and looking like sellers (Zack Greinke?) at the deadline themselves.

While they are at it, the Phillies could also consider parting with Shane Victorino and 2011 deadline darling Pence.  Whatever it takes to get younger, cheaper and eventually more competitive.

Nobody likes working through the housecleaning after the party ends.  Without it, though, stuff will really start to stink.

Read more Philadelphia Phillies news on BleacherReport.com

8 Reasons to Believe in Ryan Howard, Chase Utley This Season

As of this writing, the Phillies are three games under .500 and nine games out of first place.  Roy Halladay is on the disabled list, Cliff Lee does not have a win yet.  

Bleak stuff.  

And here comes a slideshow on why you should hold out hope for Ryan Howard and Chase Utley not for 2013, but for THIS SEASON.  There is a risk to sounding like the purser on the Titanic in putting this together.  

That’s not lost on me, but indulge me anyway.

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