bleh wrote:Fun exercise. Describe the job duties of these people currently employed by the Philadelphia Phillies:
Pat Gillick
Ed Wade
Dallas Green
Gary "Sarge" Matthews
Chris Wheeler
Charlie Manuel

Nice work if you can get it!

my comments on the phils news of the last couple of days:
i like the idea of charlie as an advisor. almost no one knows hitting like charlie does. any marginal improvement in the selection of hitters coming to philly via fa, trade, or draft is a good thing. plus, he'll maybe cancel a bit of the tendency of green to disrespect players without reason.

on the amaro interview and the subsequent demolition of his injury argument by murph...
other's surely have different choices, but for me this was the clearest ever evidence of pure baseball stupidity on the part of rubes.
it takes a great deal of such stupidity not to see that the age of the phils stars came with an injury risk, which is exactly why adding old and/or injured and/or expensive players at severa; key spots last offseason (adams, durbin, and the youngs) was exactly the wrong thing to do if he wasn't planning to upgrade those spots if everything else went right or dump them plus papelbon/rollins and maybe lee to accelerate the rebuild if everything went wrong. this time last year i was trying to be optimistic by hoping he had such a plan. and up till now i was kinda hoping the same for this year and that the only reason he didn't get at least paps dumped last season is that there just weren't any suckers to take any of our sunk costs last year so that dumping the youngs and durbs was all that could be done.

what sums it up for me is that he seemed to put roberto hernandez and jayson werth into the same category of guys with hidden value, despite an age difference of at least 5 years when joining the phils.

now i'm just about convinced amaro thinks that mag, hernandez, and bird have added 5 wins to an 85 win core, that he doesn't and shouldn't need to have a plan for what happens if lee or hamels or utley gets hurt, that howard and rollins playing nearly full time are an essential part of his optimal lineup, and the likes of ruf galvis and rupp and diekman and jdf should see less action in 2014 than in 2013.

rube clearly is far more clueless about the role of age in expected performance than i ever believed possible. thus, instead of maximizing the chances of things breaking right by giving galvis, cesar, ruf, rupp and younger pen guys lots of time to prove themselves while maximizing the rest and platoon split advantages of the regulars, and positioning the team to make a major upgrade in the rotation or outfield if things do break right, it looks more and more like i should count on older regulars and veteran pen/bench guys being run into the ground while the possible peak age value of younger players rots away without ever being used, no matter what sandberg may or may not think of that plan.

though i really do believe the phils are one fa pitcher away and an optimal roster usage plan from being legitimate playoff contenders, i now agree with others who think it's more appropriate to go with the low end win estimates of the projection systems.
i'll just asume 70-75 wins, occasionally wish/pray for a 1993ish fluke, and turn my attention to studying the farm and building theoretical phillies teams like i was doing between 94 and 04. sorry grote... i'm afraid you are the last even partial optimist left. siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh....

I'm optimistic. But I don't know anything.

bleh wrote:Fun exercise. Describe the job duties of these people currently employed by the Philadelphia Phillies:
Pat Gillick
Ed Wade
Dallas Green
Gary "Sarge" Matthews
Chris Wheeler
Charlie Manuel

Professor emeritus

Rube interview on MLB Network:

We win when Ryan Howard plays. Howard is in the best shape of his life.

We don't know anything about the Cuban kid pitcher. He does have a great arm though.

smitty wrote:Rube interview on MLB Network:

"We win when Ryan Howard plays. Howard is in the best shape of his life."

"We don't know anything about the Cuban kid pitcher. He does have a great arm though."

fixed.forgot the quotemarks

guess we can forget any grand ideas of a platoon

Who had January 16th for the "best shape of his life" reference?

Thank God

we win?

baller

somewhere the devil is grinning ear to ear

MattS projected he'd get $6.6MM in arbitration. Needs to update his formula to account for Ruben.

Great News!

CYLE THE BULLDOG

can't put my finger on one thing i'm looking forward to this season.

ReadingPhilly wrote:can't put my finger on one thing i'm looking forward to this season.

It being over.

What a dreadful offseason.

74-88.

Better chance they have a Top 5 draft pick next year than make the playoffs.

There, I said it.

Looking forward to watching my favorite baseball team win baseball games. That's all there is to say.