The Phillies Downfall


Sports / Wednesday, June 4th, 2014

This has been a long time coming. The Phillies are dead and it’s going to be a while before we see any meaningful baseball in Philadelphia. This team is a disgrace and I finally got disgusted the other night when I turned on the ball game and you could see the disgust on Chase Utley’s face as he watched his team’s performance. The team was shut out for the 7th time in their last 27 games including that lovely, unforgettable, abysmal, no hitter.

This team hasn’t been able to score in years. It just keeps getting worse and worse and worse.

They won the World Series in 2008 because the team could downright hit, plus they had a bullpen that was outstanding. But don’t forget how well the team could hit. They could smash; they had power from both sides of the plate. That team was never out of it. I remember always thinking that year that if we could get to any team’s bullpen, we were going to win the ballgame. Cole Hamels came into his own that postseason but our winningest pitcher was Jamie Moyersaurus. Pat Gillick’s philosophy was hitting and we were the best team in the world that year because of that philosophy. Rollins, Victorino, Utley, Howard, Burrell, Werth, Feliz, Senor Octobre. They could smash.

In 2009 right handed Burrell walks and he was replaced by lefty Ibanez who started hot, got injured and was never hot again. It’s hard for any team to win 2 in a row though. Ruben went out and acquired Cliff Lee which bolstered the rotation, they stormed to the Series and unfortunately couldn’t win it. They just were not the better team. The pen wasn’t as strong that year, the hitting wasn’t as timely that year but their pitching was no worse than the year before and it wasn’t the problem.

So in 2010, after we lost because we couldn’t outscore the smashing Yankees whose bats weren’t going to be stopped by any rotation, period, we swapped Lee for Doc Halladay and Feliz for Polanco. Really, not so bad but we came up against the eventual World Series champion Giants who were the hot team AND because we couldn’t score. Again.

Jayson Werth & Davey LopesSo we could’t score like we could in 2008 so what does Ruben Amaro do in 2010? He says, we have a tiny ballpark, we’re having trouble scoring, instead of building a team around our ballpark and play on what had been successful, he says let’s bring in more pitching. I mean, let’s take great pitching, put them in our smaller ballpark and take away their advantage, rather than bring in hitters that could use the ballpark to their advantage. He has Halladay, gets Lee back and eventually Roy Oswalt to pair with Cole. He wants his “Four Horseman”. But he lets Jayson Werth walk. That right there was the end. That was the Phillies downfall. I said it then and I’ll say it now. That was THE mistake. CBP can boo Werth all they want when he comes back but EVERY SINGLE PERSON BOOING would have left in that situation. Smaller market D.C. should not have been able to steal Werth from us. And don’t forget the other huge, huge, huge mistake. They let Davey Lopes walk over $50 and a bag of balls. The team that was having problems hitting before now lost another right handed power bat who was the only hitter who could actually work a count. And with Lopes leaving, the team was never effective on the base paths again. So we get to the playoffs and lose to the, this time, eventual World Champion Cardinals. Why? Because we couldn’t hit and scored 6 runs in our last 3 games. That last game was a shut out.

Downhill can’t even describe the team since then. It’s abysmal. A team based on hitting that won the series was turned into a pitching team that can’t make the playoffs. Why? Because they can’t hit. Remember that stat from earlier? The Phillies were just shut out 7 times in the last 27 games. You can’t have our ballpark and go all in on pitching. That’s handicapping your strength and just makes no sense. This is Ruben Amaro’s sword and he needs to fall on it. How he still has a job is beyond me. Let him go the Astros and let someone else try to rebuild this team. Ruben has screwed it up so badly we probably can’t even blow it up due to contracts but start rebuilding from the ground up so that when we can finally dump contracts, we’re ready. Just get rid of Ruben now, not later, now. This team hasn’t been decent in 3 years. They haven’t been good in 4 and it’s been 6 years since we’ve won. The Phillies are dead.