Philadelphia, and their Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Baseball Team

Hindsight is a bitch Rube

A few years back, in the hey-day of this once great ballclub, the Phillies became the first professional sports franchise to lose 10,000 games. In other words, the only real grand tradition the Phillies have is losing ball games. They had a similar run of impressive teams from the late 70s to early 80s but otherwise the Phillies have run the gamut from laughingstock, to mediocre, to travesty and after they teased us with five straight division titles, have reverted back to their roots.

After the World Series win in 2008, it was easy to see why the Phillies became so nearsighted. The team was clearly still on the come up and obviously equipped to make another run at a title or three. Just think that the Phillies won in 2008 with Cole Hamels, Bret Myers, Jamie Moyer, and Joe Blanton starting the first four games of the World Series and try not to cry thinking about 2009-11.

So Ruben Amaro inherited a team with three bonafide superstar infielders and All-Star caliber players littering the rest of the diamond. He set out to win another World Series by bringing in marquee players and re-signing the ones he already had. Every significant move Amaro made, save the trading of Cliff Lee to Seattle after the 2009 season, was done in an effort to get this team back to the top of baseball. Here is a timeline of large moves Ruben made that you can’t argue with without the benefit of hindsight.

December 15, 2009 – Amaro trades prospects Travis d’Arnaud, Kyle Drabek, and Michael Taylor to acquire Cy Young winning pitcher Roy Halladay. d’Arnaud has become the Mets every day cather as of 2014, he’s hitting 226. Kyle Drabek pitched two innings in 2013 and has not played Major League ball in 2014. We all know what Roy did here.

April 6, 2010 – Amaro inks Ryan Howard to a 5 year contract extension for 5 year $125 million that will begin in 2012. A few people may have been skeptical about this deal at the time, but if you polled folks that day on whether this was a bargain or a colossal fuck-up a large majority would have gone with the former.

July 29, 2010 – Amaro sends JA Happ and minor leaguers Anthony Gose and Jonathan Villar to Houston for Roy Oswalt. Gose and Villar are both still very young players getting playing time for the Blue Jays and Astros, neither is hitting above .240 for their career. Oswalt was thought to be a missing piece for the rotation.

December 15, 2010 – Might as well have been declared a holiday. Cliff Lee took a discount on the free-agent market to come play for the Phillies for 5 years $120 million. Euphoric would probably be the term for the city’s state of mind for the next 9 months.

July 29, 2011 – Go for broke time. With the Phillies pitching staff dominating the league Amaro sent Jonathan Singleton, Jarred Cosart, Josh Zeid and Domingo Santana to the Astros for Hunter Pence. This is the worst move in hindsight (if we’re not counting Howard’s contract as “a move”) but I’ll tell you there wasn’t one person saying “No way we don’t win the World Series now” when Pence came aboard. Singleton would be nice to have playing first base this year, essentially giving you the same thing Howard’s giving you, but at the age of 22 for about $24.5 million less.

Truth be told if the Phillies had won another title in the three subsequent years they reached the playoffs after 2008 the burden on every one would be a lot lighter. Two titles is something you can really hang your hat on. There's not much room left for complaint after two titles, not until the entire regime that won them has moved on anyway. But obviously, that was not how it went down.

The memory of the end of the 2011 season is almost as painful for Phillies fans as the injury was for Ryan Howard. The Phillies were never the same, but that’s where it started. That’s where Ruben Amaro Jr couldn’t for the life of him understand the shifting environment his team was going through. This is where the Phillies really started to fail mightily as an organization.

Nobody really knows if it’s Amaro making all of the bad and questionable decisions or if David Montgomery is pulling the wrong strings as well, but make no mistake about it, the Phillies have not made a meaningful good decision in years. Amaro gets and assuredly deserves the bulk of the blame. There’s no doubt it takes some luck to get back to the pinnacle of baseball, but there’s still smart ways to go about and not-so-smart ways to go about it. Shrewd is actually a better word, and Ruben Amaro has proven he’s the antithesis of a shrewd baseball man.

The Red Sox were able to win the World Series in 2013 after finishing in last place in 2012 through a series of shrewd baseball moves. They sent large contracts packing (Carl Crawford and Adrian Gonzalez) and got lucky with older players still performing at peak levels. See Ortiz, David and Victorino, Shane.

So why aren’t the Phillies trying to follow a similar blueprint? All signs point to Ruben Amaro being delusional about the value of the decaying talent on his team. Amaro made no moves at the trade deadline for the second year in a row for a team that had no shot at contending. The reasoning for this is not complicated but it has layers. First of all, every player on this team with any value only has it in a marginal sense because they are past their prime. If a team were to take a chance on Chase Utley, or Marlon Byrd, or Jimmy Rollins it would essentially be a short-term rental because all of these guys are on the wrong side of 35 (not even 30, ha!). But therein lies the rub, Amaro structured the contracts for so many of his players with vesting options that could make the deals much longer and much more team un-friendly were they to vest. Was it really necessary to give Utley three vesting years in his 2 year contract?

Then there’s Amaro’s unwillingness to part ways with the players on his team without receiving something of close to immediate tangible value in return. As a fan, you can understand Ruben being gun shy about trading Cole Hamels or Chase Utley considering his track record in talent evaluation. If he sent somebody beloved packing and didn’t get anybody with Major League talent in return he knows he could finally get shown the door. Imagine how tough it is for Rube to walk around the city today and then imagine if he sent Cole Hamels packing without getting guys with serious potential. Yikes.

To prove Rube's lack of self-awareness, he stated that other teams "were not aggressive enough" when asked why he didn't make any moves at the trade deadline. Was he paying attention that day? From that kind of response it would appear that he wasn't. Did he not see big names changing cities by the hour from a multitude of teams? The Red Sox jettisoned their best two starters the year after they won a World Series because they run their team like it's a business. Ruben runs his team like it's a family business. That's not how it works.

Then there's Amaro’s biggest issue to date; and it is an organizational one. The Phillies do not know how to judge talent anymore. They nailed the following draft choices, fucking nailed them – Jimmy Rollins, Chase Utley, Ryan Howard, Carlos Ruiz, and Cole Hamels. You can win a title with that core, as we know. For the life of me, I can’t come up with one player the Phillies have drafted since Hamels that has had a significant impact on this team. So when Roy Halladay, Chase Utley, Ryan Howard, and Cliff Lee all shit the bed for either full seasons or what was left of their careers there is no one there to pick up the slack.

It’s naïve to think that Rube is the sole person responsible for the constant whiffing in the draft, but it’s also naïve to think he isn’t ultimately responsible. It’s like if Desean Jackson was still on the Eagles and got in trouble for speeding or causing an issue at a nightclub, it wouldn’t really be Chip Kelly’s fault but it reflects poorly upon the man in charge. Ruben is that man. Every last bit of talent evaluation below the Major League level has reflected poorly upon the Phillies and Ruben Amaro mostly, since he has taken over the top spot as GM. Meanwhile, he's turned every Phillies fan into Randy Quaid from Major League II. 

So there you have it folks, a sure fire archetype on how to turn a perennial contender into a team with little hope that can’t compete. Overpay and overextend contracts for past their prime players. Throw darts at draft boards and pray. And perhaps most of all, run into a serious case of bad luck with a precipitous decline in production from formerly top flight talent. If you had to bet, the Phillies won't be relevant again until Ruben is gone, and most likely for a few years after that. He is out of touch and the Phillies are out of options other than tearing down and rebuilding.