After watching last night’s pathetic 3-hit performance by the Phillies, I couldn’t help but wonder who’s responsible for half the lineup being triple-A caliber players. Greg Dobbs, Ross Gload, Wilson Valdez. In fairness, this team is dealing with some injuries right now but watching the likes of Dane Sardinia is becoming hard to impossible.

While a decimated farm system may be adding to the Phils’ inability to replace Utley, Polanco and Ruiz, it is the GM of the team that has made the minor league system the bare cupboard it is. He’s also the one responsible for the fact that the best pitcher in the American League is no longer a Phillie. And he’s the one saddling the team with Raul Ibanez’s absurd contract for an octogenarian hitting under .250. He’s the guy responsible for Ryan Howard’s wildly over-market contract and its impact on the team’s impending unwillingness to resign Jayson Werth. Ruben Amaro is responsible for the Phillies’ awful bullpen, choosing to leverage the future of the team on Roy Halladay’s right shoulder while doing nothing to address an aging bullpen that trots out Mike Zagurski in extra innings. So other than the signing of Placido Polanco as a tally in the “good move” column, I ask: what has Amaro done for this team and if he were the GM of the Red Sox or Yankees, is there any way he’d still have a job?

Roy Halladay will get the ball for the Phillies tonight as they open their series at home with the Atlanta Braves. The Phils are currently 5 games behind the Braves in the standings and are coming off an embarrassing series loss to the Pittsburgh Pirates, a team 22 games under .500. The All-Star break rolls around next week, giving the Phillies a few days to rest their thumbs, toes, hips and heads. But before that happens however, they’ll have to show some life against a team that could put them in a very deep hole if this series doesn’t go the Phillies’ way.

Insofar as it’s reasonable to say a series in July is a must-win, this 3-game set against Atlanta is a must-win. If the Phillies lose the series they will be, at best, six games behind Atlanta. Coming to town for 4 games immediately after the Braves series will be the NL Central-leading Cincinnati Reds, a team that just last week won their series with the Phillies. Adding to the Phillies standings’ woes is the fact that sandwiched between themselves and the Braves is the Mets, making 2 teams with which the Phils will have to contend.

Because we know this team so well and because of the success they’ve had in the past 3 seasons, we feel a sense of confidence that they can rebound in the second half of the season. But the Phillies aren’t the only ones who’ll have something to say about that; such is life when you’re in 3rd place. If the Phillies are going to position themselves to make a postseason appearance, it’s reasonable to say they’re going to have to start with their ace tonight. Coolstadings.com has the chances of the Phillies reaching to playoffs at 22.7% (based on statistical models). You can only imagine that getting lower if they reemerge in the 2nd half more than 5 games out.

As JGT pointed out earlier in the day, Dan Haren is rumored to be on the Phillies’ wishlist. Haren is struggling this season in Arizona and has the poor record to show for it: 7-6 with a 4.56 ERA (for as mediocre as that W-L record is, it has fewer demerits than Roy Halladay’s). Goodtimes seemed to shrug-off the huge upside of landing Haren by saying he’d be an “upgrade from (Kyle) Kendrick.” He certainly would, but to describe Haren as a better fit in the 5-spot than Kendrick is to ignore the fact that Haren has been one of baseball’s better pitchers over his 8-year career.

As far as how he’d fit in with the Phillies, Haren’s career numbers make him a rival to steal the #2 spot from Cole Hamels. Haren has a marginally-better career ERA to Hamels (3.69-3.71), a better strikeout-to-walk ratio (3.9-3.5) and a slightly better WHIP (1.19-1.193). That’s several blocks from the Kyle Kendrick neighborhood.

While Hamels’ career winning percentage is higher (.574-.558), that’s probably more a product of playing the majority of his career on a playoff-caliber team whereas Haren’s spent the past six years in Oakland and Arizona. And for whatever it’s worth, Haren’s highest finish in Cy Young voting was 5th and that was last year. Hamels’ best finish in CY voting was 6th in 2007. To boot, Haren has pitched in 3 All-Star games to Hamels’ 1.

I don’t bring this up to disparage Cole Hamels, rather to point out how good Haren is. For a guy buried in relative obscurity in Arizona, his addition to the Phils’ rotation would make their top-3 competitive with the top-heavy rotations in Atlanta, St. Louis and San Francisco. Keep in mind that Haren has a better career WHIP and a higher strikeout-to-walk ratio than the Phils’ staff ace, Roy Halladay.

I don’t know what the Phillies would have to offer Arizona in trade; the D-Backs seem to always be in rebuilding mode so they’d presumably want young talent and we know what that cupboard looks like around here. Haren is under contract for another 2 seasons after 2010 (plus a 2013 club option) and he’ll average between $12.75 and $15.5 million the next few years. That’s a big price tag for a Phillies team that wasn’t willing to spend $9 million on Cliff Lee.

But if Ruben Amaro wants to erase his collosal, blunder-filled offseason (and help people forget about the fact Chase Utley is probably gone until September), pursuing Haren wouldn’t be a bad place to start. This kind of midseason move is what a 2-time defending N.L. pennant winner embroiled in a bitter division race should do. I know Jamie Moyer has been very good this season and that Haren’s isn’t cheap. But I’d rather see him on the mound in September and October.

The 5.5-game deficit the Phillies currently enjoy is a direct result of their front office’s business-first approach to baseball. And it’s your fault, too. With an eye toward the 2010 season, this organization correctly leveraged your blind faith against their coffers and they’ve come out on top. They figured they didn’t need to overspend because they knew they’d fill their seats and that your closet would always have room for another maroon and white t-shirt.

After realizing there was no rational way to euphemize the destruction of their farm system, the botching of Cliff Lee and the forced departure of Chan Ho Park, Ruben Amaro wagered the future of this team on a ridiculous contract to Ryan Howard. Why? For the same reason they do everything else the way they do it: as a p.r. move. In the offseason they did nothing to improve their awful bullpen or their shaky starting rotation other than off the remaining prospects in their farm system in order for Ruben Amaro to demonstrate that he had big enough onions to finalize the acquisition of Roy Halladay. And for as good as Halladay is his occupancy of the #1 spot is, at best, a negligible improvement over what they already had.

Fast forward to a few weeks into the season, and you’ll see another marketing move that had to be made once they realized their rest-on-our-laurels approach to personnel wasn’t translating to success on the field. So Amaro pulled his pants down again and made it rain for Ryan Howard. So far this mismanagement of the team has landed them three games over .500 approaching the halfway point of the season.

At this point the Phillies know something the Eagles have known for years: they’ve got you by your balls. The Eagles have left mouths agape for years by refusing to make even the most obvious personnel moves when they’ve needed to and yet you’re still at all their games. Now the Phillies are doing the same thing. Like football, baseball is a show that’s dependent on you buying a ticket. And once the house has punched your stub, it doesn’t matter much to them how good the product on the stage is.

Today’s installment of the Worst Minds Philadelphia Has to Offer comes from WIP caller, Tom. Obviously inflated with a sense of irrationality sparked by the exuberance over Roy Halladay’s perfect game, Tom took issue with Howard Eskin’s obvious and correct statement that right now Ubaldo Jimenez is the best pitcher in the National League.

Homers will be homers, but come on. Jimenez is 10-1 with a 0.78 ERA and a WHIP of .90. And he pitches at Coors Field where balls fly out of the park like gonorrhea flies around a whorehouse. While Halladay’s ERA is a stellar 1.99, it’s more than a point higher than Jimenez’s and Halladay has fewer wins (7), more losses (3) and a higher WHIP (0.99) than Jimenez; both pitchers have 70 strikeouts and in the interest of full disclosure, Jimenez does have 26 walks to Halladay’s amazing 12.

None of those facts were available to Tom when he made his ridiculous claim (of course) so when presented with the reality, he reacted by saying “well, yeah, but Halladay just threw a perfect game.” True, but does that mean Dallas Braden is better than Jimenez right now?

Oh, and one other thing, jackass: Jimenez also has a no-hitter on his sheet this year. Please folks, try to pay attention to reality when discussing sports instead of simply reacting to the ill-considered machinations of your personal preferences.

Roy Halladay’s improbable perfect game against the Marlins last night was amazing. Of course, the perfect game is probably the greatest anomaly in sports so when it does happen it has people a little worked up. And there is no place on earth where excitement over sports takes on a little bit of, shall we say, excess than right here in Philly.

So I present you the stupid Philadelphia sports/WIP line of the week: a caller to the radio station today was talking about how great Halladay’s perfect game was. Naturally, he drew the conclusion that Doc’s perfecto portends a Phillies win over the Rays in the World Series. And here’s the kicker: when asked whether he wanted to play the Yankees instead to avenge last year’s Series loss, the caller responded in the negative noting that the 2009 Yankees were a “flash in the pan.”

A flash in the pan. The New York Yankees. Winners of more championships than any team in the history of North American major professional sports. I’m still trying to process the myriad, onion-like layers of stupidity contained in that statement. Either that guy’s Werner Heisenberg or I need to spend my afternoon meditating in a hot yoga room.

Tonight’s snoozefest at Citizens Bank Park will pit Roy Halladay against the hapless disgrace that is the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball club. The Pirates as an organization are an embarrassment and the product they put on the field is accordingly awful. It has now been 17 seasons since they’ve had a winning record. This level of organizational dysfunction is rivaled only by Omar Minaya and the One Hundred Years of Solitude enjoyed by the Cubs.

But I digress. The Phillies are now 24-13 and they enjoy a 5-game lead in the division. With the National League being as awful as it is, I’m going to make the following statement: the division race is hereby over. The Phillies are simply that much better than any other team in the division and there just aren’t enough good teams in the N.L. to stack up losses for the Phils.

The problem with this, for me, is that games become less interesting. Watching the game last night was about as devoid of interest as the the NBA offering. It sounds obnoxious to say this, but the competitive disadvantage the Phillies enjoy is making the quotidian practice of catching all their games less exciting this year than it has been in the past.

It looks like the city that all 4 major sports leagues have been intentionally conspiring against for the past 100 years may be getting a break after all. The late June series the Phillies would have played in Toronto against the Blue Jays has been moved to Philadelphia on account of security concerns surrounding the G8 summit in Toronto. This means that Roy Halladay’s return to Toronto will be postponed at least until next year (unless the teams meet in the World Series). It also means that the Blue Jays will lose the competitive advantage of playing at home against a much better Philadelphia team.

In the grand scheme of things, nobody really cares much about this other than the 250 Blue Jays fans in Toronto. One viable solution would have been to play the game at Coca-Cola Field in Buffalo, New York (pictured above). Buffalo is more or less right across Lake Ontario from Toronto and it would have been fun to see the Jays travel to downtown Buffalo on a giant hydrofoil. It also would have made sense because Coca-Cola Field was built as an expansion-ready Major League park with a capacity of 18,000, well in excess of the 15,207 fans the Rogers Centre in Toronto is averaging this season.

After all, when the Astros-Cubs series wasn’t able to be played in Houston a few years back because of a hurricane, MLB moved it to a “neutral” site in Milwaukee, not to Wrigley Field. Clearly MLB now loves the revenue-generating Phillies and hates the scum living north of the border. And throwing the G8 into the mix means that world leaders are now on the Philadelphia band wagon. So no more bitching about how everyone hates us, folks.

Things could not be any worse for the Phillies’ bullpen than they already were coming into the season. Their closer, Brad Lidge, was coming off an historically-bad 2009. J.C. Romero has been in some kind of interminable injury limbo. And the best Ruben Amaro could offer in the offseason was the acquisitions of Danys Baez and Jose Contreras. Fast forward to now: Brad Lidge has returned and shown himself to be as questionable as ever. In 1.1 innings pitched this season, Lidge has compiled a 2.25 WHIP and an ERA of 6.75.

No matter. Amaro and the Phillies’ pitching-challenged brain trust have had their backup plan in the works for a while. No, we’re not talking about an aggressive free agent signing during the winter. We’re talking about Ryan Madson, a guy who’s appeared in 9 games this season and has (yes, this is possible) a worse ERA than Lidge: 7.00. Madson’s season highlight is blowing a 3-run, 9th inning lead against Atlanta and in the process spoiling a desperately-need great start from Kyle Kendrick. The silver lining in all this is that Inquirer writer, Matt Gelb, is reporting that Madson will miss “significant” time due to a broken right toe sustained when he kicked a chair out of frustration in the San Francisco visitors’ locker room. As a result Jose Contreras will assume the closing duties.

The blame for the bullpen’s amateurish incompetence rests solely on the shoulders of Ruben Amaro. He has known all along that even with a competent bullpen like the one the Phillies fielded in 2008, his manager is incapable of using them properly. The only reason the Phils weren’t exposed during that stretch was the unworldly perfection of Brad Lidge at the back end. But with questions of age and declining talent going forward, the Phillies have done nothing to improve the part of their team that is as glaring as a strawberry-sized lip herpe.

While Amaro has spent the better part of the last calendar year pulling his pants down to show the world what a potentate he is, his two big deals have done nothing to improve this team. Roy Halladay is a great pitcher, but the role that he occupies on this team is something they already had covered in the person of Cliff Lee. And Ryan Howard would have been here anyway had he not been resigned to a mammoth contract.

So when the Phillies line up tonight against the N.L’s. best team, Amaro can reflect on the fact that the team they’ll face has a combined ERA of 2.52, good for best in the league. While names like Jaime Garcia (the rookie who stoned the Phillies last night) may not shake down the thunder, the Phillies may take notice of Adam Wainwright, who will start tonight with his 2.13 ERA. Wainwright has recorded quality starts in 23 of his last 24 outings and the Cardinals as a team have gone 12 starts where their starters have gone at least six innings and not recorded more than 3 earned runs.

That mastery of the starting rotation means the Cards’ bullpen is less of a factor, something that gives them a decided advantage over their opponents (they’ve won 8 of their last 9). With yet another question mark taking the hill for the Phillies tonight in Cole Hamels, the tipping point of the bullpen’s entry into the game is likely to be earlier than later. And that, Mr. Amaro, is not a good thing.

We’re not going to let the lingering stench of Jerseyites puking on little girls ruin an otherwise exciting start to the 2010 season for Ruben Amaro’s trophy pitcher, Roy Halladay. After silencing the Braves’ bats for 8 innings last night in Atlanta, Halladay did what it looks like most Phils’ starters are going to have to do in order for this team to have a chance: trot back out to the mound and finish the game. Halladay scattered 5 hits and 1 walk over 9 innings last night to get the win.

In doing so he single-handedly overcame the two obstacles that had plagued the Phillies over the last 4 games. One, he prevented the bullpen from losing the game and two, he pitched so well that the sputtering offense’s measly contribution of 2 runs was good enough for a tally in the win column. Halladay is now 2 outs short of averaging a complete game for each of his 4 starts. And in that time he’s gone 4-0 with a .82 ERA, a league-leading 28 strikeouts and, get this: 3 walks.

The Phillies offense is clearly stuck in neutral as they’ve begun to face Major League pitchers following the Nationals and Astros fell-good tour that opened the season. Tonight they’ll have to deal with yet another real hurler in Derek Lowe. But some fortuitous rotation scheduling in their upcoming series against Arizona and San Francisco means they’ll miss Dan Haren and Matt Cain (though they will face Tim Lincecum on April 28). That may be just what the doctor ordered for this lineup to get themselves into midseason shape. After all, Roy Halladay can’t pitch every night.