Totally out of their league

It's a good thing that Phillies GM Pat Gillick is openly discussing how he can improve his Phillies ball club. After watching the Phillies play during the last week, it is becoming more and more obvious that this team needs more than minor tweakings to even consider themselves on par with the Boston Red Sox and the Angels (the whole name is too long. You guys know who they are) if they are seriously considering making a run at just their second World Series Championship in (GULP!) 125 years.

It's no secret that as the Phillies offense goes, so does their team. So as their "potent" offense has apparently seemed to take a week long bender in Atlantic City, one must have to wonder if 1) The Phillies are just hitting a slide that commonly happens to teams every year with the exception of very few teams in MLB history (see 1984 Tigers, 1986 Mets, 1998 Yankees). After all, they uncharacteristically came out of the gate pretty strong in April, so maybe they are due for a rough skid. Or 2) as former Flyers Coach Terry Murray once said in the 1997 Stanley Cup Finals: "Basically we're in a choking situation."

The Phillies are playing the cream of the crop of Major League Baseball during the last week, and to say they've come up small during these interleague games is a vast understatement. This was supposed to be the week that the Phillies were to make a statement to the rest of Major League Baseball: We ARE for real. We CAN compete with the big boys. As fate would have it, the only big boy's the Phillies competed with last week were the customers in line at the Bob's Big Boy's buffet, because they sure as hell didn't do it on the diamond. And in familiar fashion, Phillies fans were left not with a vote of confidence about their team, but if, when, and how they can graduate from boys to men in the grand scheme of reaching baseball's Mount Olympus. No matter how you look at the previously mentioned scenarios, the Phillies have been outhit, out pitched, and outclassed in virtually every category imaginable during the last week. With the exception of men LOB in last night's game: one can only imagine how last night's 7-1 debacle would have been if the Angels actually scored all of those potential runs. I may get my house egged for this, but Chase Utley does deserve part of the blame for the sputtering offense. If you're going to chastise Ryan Howard for his ridiculous strikeout total, or Shane Victorino for famously popping out to third base after valiantly working 3-0 counts, then you have to just sit back and ask yourself why Utley picked some of the biggest games in recent memory for this ball club to go into the biggest hitting funk of his career. Underlooked is the fact that Utley vanished last October as well. Utley will hit again, but one can only hope that this is just a funk, and not a recurring problem when the team needs to step up. Champions deliver when it matters. And right now, the look of champions has not yet been distributed to the Phillies.

If the Phillies were indeed fortunate enough to get past a Diamondbacks pitching staff in a five game series come October, and fool everyone by beating a Cubs team that may actually stand the chance of a World Series berth, the suits at MLB would have to seriously consider changing the World Series format to three games instead of four. Watching our starters last week was reminiscnent of the Francona squads of 1997-2000, when you would sit back, hold on for dear life, and hope that our AA pitchers who Bill Giles tried to convince us were "talented prospects" routinely got their lunch handed to them game after game. It's not AS bad as the 1988-1989 "AAA teams", but were not kidding anyone when we think that Brett Myers is going to get it together. Adam Eaton was due for a bad start last night, but then there's Kyle Kendrick. One can only imagine why Kendrick had a major meltdown on Wednesday afternoon. He is no stranger to pressure- ALL of 2007 was a pressure cooker for him. Do YOU feel comfortable going to the postseason with our starters? I sure as hell don't. To sit back and actually consider these guys as potential champions borders on the absurd to borderline disillusioninal.

In closing, they made me do it. I didn't want to be here writing this article as I mentioned in my previous blog last week. The Phillies however, will do that to you. They had the girl of their dreams sitting next to them at the bar, and they just sat back and didn't say a word to her. We hope that last week's below caliber play of our eternally tragic heroes is just indeed a slide that came at absolutely the worst time possible. We also hope that the brass will indeed step up to put this team at least in the running to be a serious contender to get to the playoffs let alone World Series. However Phillies fans, if anything, are realistic (complete the sentence as you want). Or better yet, fill it in at the end of October. Let's hope not September.

To quote the great Jim Mora: "Playoffs?! Playoffs?!"