Phillies mired in one of baseball’s toughest situations
CLEARWATER, Fla. – It looked Friday morning like there may have been some good news coming out of Philadelphia Phillies camp, a place where organizations, ATVs, flexor tendons and hope go to break down.
The players’ union guys would be there – Tony Clark, Dave Winfield, et al. – which meant they’d bump into the Yahoo guy in four different camps over four consecutive days. They’d immediately contact the house lawyer to see about a restraining order. But that wasn’t the good news.
Chase Utley was to play. More accurate, for the first time this spring and the first time since he stepped on a baseball a couple months ago, Chase Utley was to bat. In a game. With people around. And teammates. They would keep score. He was to hit third as the designated hitter.
This would qualify as a happy day, and there are too few of those.
Camp hadn’t started with the best of vibes. The Phillies are a last-place team stuck between build, rebuild and pride. Jimmy Rollins is gone. Cole Hamels would like to be gone, and could be. Ryan Howard could be too. Cliff Lee has that elbow thing and might not pitch again, for the Phillies or anyone. The Phanatic’s little four-wheeler stalled and had to be pushed from the field, lending snout and furriness to the usual unintentional comedy.
Once, in the very best of scenarios, the Phillies were going to pitch a little at the top of the rotation and the back of the bullpen, but probably not score too many runs, and were likely to finish again in last place. But, you know, maybe they had that puncher’s chance, which maybe plays in Philly after a half-decade of dominance followed by three years of catastrophe. And then even that long shot wobbled and fell down. Because, well, not only is Rollins in L.A., but Marlon Byrd is in Cincinnati, and the top of the rotation took a hit before Ruben Amaro Jr. could pull the trigger on a trade. (And on Friday the team announced Aaron Harang, the journeyman who at the moment slots second – behind Hamels – in the rotation, was scratched from his Saturday start because of “lower back discomfort.”)
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Nothing has happened recently to alter the view of the Phillies as a team heavy in contracts, light in talent and in search of a way back. Indeed, the Lee sledgehammer – he said Friday there’d been no change in the way his elbow felt or the way he felt about the way it felt – only further battered an outlook that was limping along anyway.
They’re not going to win, it doesn’t seem. A few installments remain on those five NL East titles and the win-now decisions that took them to two World Series, and that’ll mean a fourth consecutive season of .500 or below (recently far below), and you wouldn’t be surprised if the clubhouse were divided between guys who weren’t around back then so don’t understand and guys who were around then and would rather not spend the rest of their careers paying for it.
That’s for them to sort out. Measuring clubhouse morale is generally a goofy enterprise anyway. In March, it’s an exercise in fiction. So you’d have to guess that players have the capacity to look around and understand the depth of the problems here, and have read the papers, and get that Washington, Miami and New York seem to be heading in one direction while they’re headed in the other.
“The whole dynamic has changed,” Howard was saying happily on Friday. “We’re all moving in the right direction.”
Or that.
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Nobody likes change.
(Unless you’re in front of one of Florida’s unmanned, coin-only toll booths, then you’d sacrifice your watch, ring, phone, wallet, small child, anything – throw ’em all in the bucket – for change. Ever hear one of those toll-runner sirens? Prison breaks get less attention.)
You do get the sense change is coming to Philly, however. If not soon, then pretty soon. Someone will come hunting for Hamels at the very least and pay big, because pitchers are fragile and Hamels makes every start, is very good, and is not unreasonably paid – $114 million – over the next five seasons. And then the slog that is the Phillies, along with the notion they are trapped between what they were and who they could be, begins to turn. Slowly.
That day wasn’t Friday. On Friday, Chase Utley had two at-bats. Against Tampa Bay right-hander Chris Archer, he struck out in the first inning and lined a hard single to center in the fourth. Recovering from the sprained ankle, he ran without issue to first base, then jogged without issue home when Howard homered to right field. He spent the rest of the afternoon on the bench with teammates, there until the final out, and afterward said, “It feels pretty good.”
These are tough days in Philly. The Sixers have won 14 games. Nobody’s too sure what Chip Kelly’s doing. The Flyers won’t make the playoffs, doesn’t look like. So when the 36-year-old second baseman rides a fastball through the middle and lives to play another day, and the 35-year-old first baseman hits a changeup over the wall and says he feels pretty good, and opening day is still weeks away so nobody’s lost a game yet, then that’s good enough news for now.
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