HAVE YOU EVER SEEN RUF IN A LIBRARY

His hands are so fat they cover the whole book

Guessing he has trouble with Braille

at Mayberry.

CLIFF LEE is the only player acquired by Ruben that has a WAR (Baseball Reference version) over 1.0.

Rollins has 10 XBH (1 HR) in June, July and August.

JFLNYC wrote:Rollins has 10 XBH (1 HR) in June, July and August.

And he is going to make a bargain 11 million the next 2 seasons

Give the guy a break. An injury or ten fewer, a couple hundred lucky bounces, and Ted Williams, and this is a playoff team.

I'd really like him off the banner, since I want to stab him in the fucking eye every time I see his picture.

He's made baseball so enjoyable to watch.

Trent Steele wrote:Today we can finally decide

What's to decide it's clear the Phillies have gotten worse every year since Ruben took over. We went from winning the WS to losing the WS to losing in the NLCS to losing in the NLDS to not even making the playoffs and we should be even worse this year.

Rubens obsession with pitching has killed this team year by year. Maybe had he not had a need to get Halladay after we got Lee and extended both Lee and Werth after the 2009 season we may have beaten the Giants in 2010 because we might have scored some runs

Ruben took a team that can score runs and turned them into a team that couldn't score a run to save there life.

UDHL wrote:

Trent Steele wrote:Today we can finally decide

What's to decide it's clear the Phillies have gotten worse every year since Ruben took over. We went from winning the WS to losing the WS to losing in the NLCS to losing in the NLDS to not even making the playoffs and we should be even worse this year.

Rubens obsession with pitching has killed this team year by year. Maybe had he not had a need to get Halladay after we got Lee and extended both Lee and Werth after the 2009 season we may have beaten the Giants in 2010 because we might have scored some runs

Ruben took a team that can score runs and turned them into a team that couldn't score a run to save there life.

This is such a lazy argument.

Look, there are a number of things you can beat up Ruben for, but the team certainly did not get worse every year since he took over. The playoff results may have, but that's not his fault. From 2009 to 2011 he was pretty easily one of the best GM's in baseball and most of the people who are ripping him now were on his jock and talking about how ballsy his moves were. Hell, 2011 was probably the best roster put together in the history of the franchise.

He put together the best team in baseball in both 2010 and especially in 2011. They lost to inferior teams in the playoffs for a variety of reasons, most notably their star pitchers giving up big leads they had been staked to, and their manager getting seriously out-managed by both Bochy and LaRussa.

Amaro has been god awful in the last 2 years, but let's not pretend he wasn't great in his first three years on the job. Everyone, even posters on here who despised him for years, praised him up and down for his moves in that time frame.

Brantt wrote:

UDHL wrote:

Trent Steele wrote:Today we can finally decide

What's to decide it's clear the Phillies have gotten worse every year since Ruben took over. We went from winning the WS to losing the WS to losing in the NLCS to losing in the NLDS to not even making the playoffs and we should be even worse this year.

Rubens obsession with pitching has killed this team year by year. Maybe had he not had a need to get Halladay after we got Lee and extended both Lee and Werth after the 2009 season we may have beaten the Giants in 2010 because we might have scored some runs

Ruben took a team that can score runs and turned them into a team that couldn't score a run to save there life.

This is such a lazy argument.

Look, there are a number of things you can beat up Ruben for, but the team certainly did not get worse every year since he took over. The playoff results may have, but that's not his fault. From 2009 to 2011 he was pretty easily one of the best GM's in baseball and most of the people who are ripping him now were on his jock and talking about how ballsy his moves were. Hell, 2011 was probably the best roster put together in the history of the franchise.

He put together the best team in baseball in both 2010 and especially in 2011. They lost to inferior teams in the playoffs for a variety of reasons, most notably their star pitchers giving up big leads they had been staked to, and their manager getting seriously out-managed by both Bochy and LaRussa.

Amaro has been god awful in the last 2 years, but let's not pretend he wasn't great in his first three years on the job. Everyone, even posters on here who despised him for years, praised him up and down for his moves in that time frame.

I think that's fair, but not complete. What I fault him for is sacrificing the future to put a 110 win club on the field rather than balancing present and future when anyone with a brain has realized what a crapshoot the playoffs are and therefore 93 wins are as good as 110. The Pence trade was a particular disaster in that vein. That's kind of a big part of the job.

nycphils wrote:The Pence trade was a particular disaster in that vein. That's kind of a big part of the job.

That's a fair example, one of very few specifics I've heard. But:

The Phillies led the NL East by 5 when they acquired Pence. I felt good about holding the other teams off, but it wasn't a lock by any means. They then won 28 of 37 to stretch the lead to 12 and take the division.

Also, can we wait for the Astros' prospects to sustain success in MLB (and for Joseph and Rosin amount to nothing) before proclaiming it a "disaster"? The other consideration is that Amaro and everyone else in July 2011 expected us to contend at least in 2012, if not 2013 and beyond. Pence could have been very helpful the past two years in a better/healthier lineup.

Again, no one here is saying Amaro has done a good job the last couple years. But the ease with which we could have "kept an eye to the future" and/or "reloaded" on the fly is being overstated, IMO. And yes, you can say "injuries happen," but getting nothing from Howard and Halladay for two seasons and Utley missing 100 games really, really hurt. Would anyone here have NOT extended Halladay and Utley (the first time) and allocated resources in 2011 to replace them?

I can't completely blame Amaro for not keeping this as a 95+ win team. People get old and bad things happen; I'm not sure anyone could have sustained that level of success for much longer. But the "what would you have done" argument is a strawman because none of us know what all of the options are. And the players he identified as "good moves" to help the core get to 85-90 win reflect a complete misunderstanding of how you score runs, win games, and allocate resources. It's less that I expected Amaro to pull off continued elite success. It's more that nothing Amaro has done over the last few years suggests he has the slightest clue as to how to make it better going forward.

Howard contract excepted of course

For the amount you are paying Howard, you could have outspent the A's, Dodgers, and Brewers for Puig, Cespedes, Ryu, and Aoki and still had money left over. Not saying you really would have done that, but you could have. But cost certainty is something something

At best, Rube was a guy who could land the big time player. But he's not demonstrated skill in any other area of the game. Gillick was good at picking up marginal guys who could contribute. Wade was good at arbitration. Now we need a gm who is good at rebuilding.

Trent Steele wrote:I can't completely blame Amaro for not keeping this as a 95+ win team. People get old and bad things happen; I'm not sure anyone could have sustained that level of success for much longer. But the "what would you have done" argument is a strawman because none of us know what all of the options are. And the players he identified as "good moves" to help the core get to 85-90 win reflect a complete misunderstanding of how you score runs, win games, and allocate resources. It's less that I expected Amaro to pull off continued elite success. It's more that nothing Amaro has done over the last few years suggests he has the slightest clue as to how to make it better going forward.

I actually agree with this post.

I disagree about "what would you have done" being a strawman, though. People post here with certainty about things they can't know all the time. If you're gonna say Amaro drooled his way through 2011-2013 when most any other GM would have kept raising pennants, which seems to be the general vibe here, I think you should offer some specifics. The only ones I seem to hear are Pence and "we should have spent a ton on the draft and internationally," as if the latter was an option for Amaro and he said, "Nah, I'm good."

Again, not defending Amaro per se. I'm very concerned. Just trying to provide context to some of the criticism.

Trent Steele wrote:Howard contract excepted of course

For the amount you are paying Howard, you could have outspent the A's, Dodgers, and Brewers for Puig, Cespedes, Ryu, and Aoki and still had money left over. Not saying you really would have done that, but you could have. But cost certainty is something something

What probably would have happened is 2/30+ for Beltran, assuming he would come here. Which may have pushed Brown out of here if we played well enough to avoid selling Pence off.

But either way, we'd be well positioned for Abreu now, assuming he would play here.

Fkkk

The signature Amaro move is to sign or acquire a guy in his early to mid 30s who was decent at one point, with underlying indicators that suggest he's in sharp decline, to a not unreasonable contract were the guy not in decline... from a modest "peak", actually. Polanco, Wigginton, Pierre, Baez, Durbin, Qualls: they almost all fail, and he doesn't learn from the mistake.

Add that to the misfires in the draft, and you see a guy whose sole talent is leveraging a money advantage in "buy" trades. This is not a skill he's likely to have much need for with the Phillies over the next few years.

Trent Steele wrote:It's less that I expected Amaro to pull off continued elite success. It's more that nothing Amaro has done over the last few years suggests he has the slightest clue as to how to make it better going forward.

Since Amaro became the GM in November of 2008, the only drafts that he has had under his belt have been from 2009 to today. Do you feel that these have been that weak?

He missed badly with the Larry Greene pick. Biddle, Morgan, Quinn and Crawford look like good ones at this point. There are others I'm sure. Dugan. Perkins. Some other youngsters. Tocci and Franco were under his watch. Oh Boy Oberto is at least putting up nice numbers to look at as did Herlis for a while. The Cuban Snag pitcher. Encarnacion. Maybe some of the other international guys will pan out. It's fun to follow Severance's stat line. Getting Lino and Simon for Thome's fast fading body was pretty good.

These are Amaro's moves. Don't really see the big disaster here. The current team is a disaster for many reasons. But all is not lost quite yet.

I wouldn't care a whit if Amaro gets fired Tommorrow. But I think using less hyperbole and more analysis would be helpful. Maybe now is not the time for that though.