Espn.com is reporting that Roy Oswalt has agreed to be traded to the Phillies. The Astros will receive J.A. Happ and two prospects in return for Oswalt. Making the deal even sweeter for the Phillies is the fact that the Astros will pay almost half of what Oswalt is due through the 2011 season.

This deal has to be considered a big win for the Phillies, much in the same way the Angels got the better part of the Dan Haren trade. There doesn’t appear to be too much of a downside for the Phils in this one; the only question that jumps out is where to insert Oswalt in the rotation. You can check out Oswalt’s career stats here. Now if the Phillies can do something about the bullpen, they may be around in October. Complimenti, Rueben.

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?

News of Chase Utley’s arrival on the 15-day DL is hardly being received warmly by Phillies fans. To add insult to injury, Placido Polanco will be on the same list as Utley. This means that the Phillies now have 7 players on the DL (Utley, Polanco, Antonio Bastardo, Chad Durbin, J.A. Happ, Ryan Madson and Carlos Ruiz). Making matters worse is the Ruben-Amaro-talent-free-zone (aka the Phils minor league system) which will produce the two replacements for the holes generated by Utley’s and Polanco’s injuries: Greg Dobbs and Brian Bocock (currently hitting .179).

Just about simultaneously, the Boston Red Sox found out they’ll lose their MVP 2nd baseman, Dustin Pedroia, for weeks with a broken foot. Both the Red Sox and Phillies are mired in division battles involving more than 2 teams. And both Utley and Pedroia have won a World Series. So let’s take a moment and see how the Sox’ and Phillies’ heart-and-soul 2nd basemen stack up against each other.

Utley has played 8 Major League seasons to Pedroia’s 5. Utley’s career average is .294 whereas Pedroia’s is .305. Utley’s career OBP is .380 and Pedroia’s is .370 while Utley’s OPS is .898 to Pedroia’s .831. Utley averages 105 RBI per season to Pedroia’s 74 and has almost twice as many home runs as Pedroia, averaging 29 to the diminutive Pedroia’s 16. Both average 110 runs per season. Utley averages 39 doubles to Pedroia’s 49 and Chase averages 15 stolen bases to Dustin’s 16. So with the exception of average and doubles being in Pedroia’s favor and home runs and RBIs in Utley’s, they’re pretty similar hitters in terms of the numbers.

In the field, both are terrific. Utley’s career fielding percentage at 2nd base is .981. As terrific as that is, Pedroia’s is even better at .991. Utley aveages 10.6 errors per season with Pedroia averaging an infinitesimal 4.6 errors each year. And Utley will turn, on average, 73 double plays each year to Pedroia’s 68. So both are superlative in the field as well as at the plate, with Pedroia getting the slight edge statistically on the defensive side.

This season, of course, Robinson Cano of the Yankees is the class of MLB 2nd basemen. He’s hitting .359 with 15 home runs and 55 RBI in 75 games. And his fielding percentage is an unworldy .997. To add to his gaudy numbers, Cano has only committed one error in 2010.

But Cano isn’t injured like Pedroia and Utley are. And while he’s in the thick of a deep divisional race too, Utley and Pedroia are the leaders on their respective teams. Unfortunately for Boston, Pedroia figures to be out significantly longer than Utley will. Either way, the Red Sox and Phillies fates may likely be decided by the way their teams are able to hold down the fort while their leaders are out.

Domonic Brown and Greg Dobbs combined to deliver the go-ahead run and one for the road in last night’s Lehigh Valley IronPigs victory over the Durham Bulls. Brown is the only prospect left in the Phillies’ system after Ruben Amaro’s cheap ass burned the entire farm to swap frontline starters in the offseason. Brown represents rebirth in the soon-to-be Jayson Werth-less Phillies’ circle of life.

Greg Dobbs, on the other hand, embodies the other end of the spectrum. He is slowly dying as a ballplayer, slumping back towards the earth whence he came. The ironic pairing of these two opposites in the 9th inning box score of last night’s win just isn’t right in the eyes of the baseball gods. These two are like cheese on a burger. You can’t have life and death sandwiched between two buns. It just isn’t kosher.

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.

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.

As I’m writing this Tim Lincecum is about to bat for himself in the bottom of the 8th inning, a fact that doesn’t translate to a likely win for the Phillies. And don’t look now but if The Freak can get three outs in the ninth, the word “Philadelphia” in the above standings will be underneath the word “Washington.” Good thing Amaro swapped one ace for another in the offseason.

UPDATE: The Phillies’ season is still alive as Giants’ management decided to remove their best player from the game and replace him with their worst. The Phillies subsequently rallied to tie the game.

A day after signing a contract that could keep him in Philadelphia until 2017, Ryan Howard can comfortably look around and see only Alex Rodriguez in the same room. That’s because A-Rod is the only player in baseball with a contract that pays him more in terms of guaranteed annual salary, on average. As for Ruben Amaro (a GM who seems to relish big-ticket players), he’ll be able to make the claim that this team is serious about winning and serious about its future. But what is serious is the nature of the questions about this signing.

Anyone reading this can rattle off 10 players who are better than Ryan Howard. That is not to say that Howard is not a terrific player, but he’s not Albert Pujols nor is he Mark Teixeira, A-Rod, Hanley Ramirez or Joe Mauer. Most poignantly, he’s not Chase Utley. So why pay so much money for a big-framed 1st baseman that will be locking you down in 2015 to the tune of $25 million? We’ve seen plenty of cases of players like David Ortiz and Mo Vaughn whose big bodies have aged poorly; assuming that happens to Howard, the Phillies will have an untradeable commodity on their hands in a few years.

Furthermore, a front office that admittedly does not use statistical analysis in its decision making process seems to be living in the past with this one. While Ryan Howard’s average has been on a steady decline over his career, his HR and RBI numbers haven’t. And while it’s hard to argue with Howard’s home run totals, RBI is a number that’s the result of hitting in good position on a good offensive team. So why use them to forecast a huge investment in a guy who fits the model for rapid age-related decline?

I’m not going to sit here and argue that Ryan Howard is not a terrific player. But two things come to mind: the first is the fact that he’s going to make $10 million more money than the best player on this team. How does Utley feel about that and how will he feel after his contract expires in 2013? Secondly, why put yourself in a position to be overpaying a 34, 35-year old power hitter who fits the physical mold for mid-30s decline and fits the contractual mold of an untradeable player if that decline does come to pass?

This contract also portends the definitive end of Jayson Werth’s time in Philly. He’ll be looking for Jason Bay money in the offseason and the Phillies will now certainly not be paying him that.

Look, Ryan Howard is an excellent player whom you don’t want to get rid of. But there are very serious questions about how long he will be able to produce like he has been. And with a guy who doesn’t excel defensively (to be fair, he does deserve credit for becoming much better with the glove), you don’t get much for your $25 million if he stops putting 45 home runs over the fence each year. I’m not saying I don’t think Howard should be on this team or that I don’t love the way he hits but experience should tell Amaro that paying the kind of money he’ll be paying Howard in a few seasons is an incredibly risky proposition.

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.

Kyle Kendrick’s career may have been ruined last night. After out-pitching Jamie Moyer in spring training, Kendrick was relegated to bullpen duty to start the 2010 campaign. Joe Blanton’s abdominal injury forced Kendrick into the starting rotation and after two starts he was not looking good, amassing an ERA of 17.47. So needless to say, last night’s start against the Braves was probably a chance for him to right his ship and begin to show the organization that keeping him around makes sense.

But in the end it was the organization that let Kendrick down. All he did last night was pitch 8 complete innings, allowing no runs and giving up 4 hits and 2 walks. Those are numbers that you’d expect from Roy Halladay, not the 5th-and-a-half starter. Kendrick did his part and fans were probably feeling good about his teammates’ ability to get three outs and nail down the win with a 3-run lead going into the 9th.

Sure as turnips fall off trucks, however, Ryan Madson came in to close the game and promptly gave up consecutive home runs in to Jason Heyward and Troy Glaus. Not to be outdone, medieval retread Jose Contreras gave up the game-winning dinger to Nate McLouth in the 10th. The grand irony of watching the Phillies bullpen collapse was the fact that Billy Wagner pitched a perfect 10th inning for the Braves and got the win.

In the offseason when Ruben Amaro was trying to show the world he could imprint his name on a World Series winner, every ounce of energy was poured into signing Roy Halladay. For good measure, Amaro added Placido Polanco so that the Phillies could improve upon their already ostentatious offensive numbers. But in a series of non-moves that reeked of ignorance, Amaro did nothing to improve the one area of the team that has been awful for the past two years: the bullpen.

Had it not been for Brad Lidge’s unworldly perfect season in 2008, that team may well have not won the World Series because of how shaky the pen was (excepting Lidge, of course). And last year’s bullpen was downright awful. So what should the G.M. do as a follow up? Well, for starters lets shitcan our best long reliever, Chan Ho Park. Then let’s go into the season with a closer who blew 11 saves last year, a set-up guy in J.C. Romero who hasn’t seen rubber in ages and a few 54th-round fantasy baseball draft scrubs as offseason pickups.

If this team does not win the N.L. East, it will be because of its bullpen. Plain and simple. It is the part of this team that has been bad for multiple seasons and Amaro’s inability to address it with anything other than Danys Baez and Jose Contreras is a sign of either ignorance of an unhealthy obsession with putting all his eggs in the Halladay basket. So going forward, let’s hope Kyle Kendrick and the rest of the rotation can expect a little more help from organization than they got last night.