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On July 29th, the Phillies were riding high.\u00a0 Very high.\u00a0 They’d won 19 of their previous 22 games to take a 7-game division lead over the second-place Marlins, and on that morning they made the biggest trade deadline splash in the league, acquiring Cliff Lee without giving up any of their top three prospects.\u00a0 At that point, the only questions about the team were whether or not they were better than the Dodgers or good enough to win the title again.<\/p>\n
Just under two weeks have passed and the Phillies are 3-8 since the Lee trade was announced.\u00a0 Suddenly, the Marlins are just 3.5 games back and it’s no longer completely safe to assume that the Phils will waltz to the finish line with a third consecutive division crown.\u00a0\u00a0Lee has\u00a0certainly\u00a0held up his end of the bargain, winning both\u00a0of his starts so far, but the team as a whole has been terrible.<\/p>\n
I’m not suggesting that the Phillies won’t win the division.\u00a0 It’s hard to imagine\u00a0a team with this much talent and experience getting taken down by the Marlins.\u00a0 But it does seem as though the\u00a0team may be buying into their own hype a bit too much.\u00a0 It’s one thing for us fans to sit back and assess whether or not\u00a0the Phillies have the most talent in baseball, it’s another for the players to be putting themselves in that class.\u00a0 They won the World Series last year and now they’ve added a Cy\u00a0Young-caliber pitcher, but they didn’t win that World Series by sitting around talking about how good they were, like they\u00a0did following the Lee trade<\/a>.\u00a0 I know it’s the dog days of August and I know they still have a comfortable cushion in the division, but the team\u00a0needs to get back to playing attacking, all-out-effort baseball if they want to\u00a0ultimately get back to where they were\u00a0in October.\u00a0 You don’t get\u00a0there on talent alone.<\/p>\n The Phils will be trying to get back on track on a short, but potentially difficult, road trip to Chicago and Atlanta.\u00a0 Pedro Martinez will make his Phillies debut tomorrow night at Wrigley\u00a0Field on ESPN.\u00a0 Charlie Manuel and his staff have made the right decision in sending Jamie Moyer to the pen to make room for Pedro.\u00a0 Also, Chad Durbin is back from the DL and ready to go.\u00a0 The bullpen injuries have definitely been part of the problem in the last couple of weeks, but Ryan Madson and Brad Lidge have looked great at the back-end, and when everyone is healthy (i.e. J.C. Romero and maybe Brett Myers), the pen should be really good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On July 29th, the Phillies were riding high.\u00a0 Very high.\u00a0 They’d won 19 of their previous 22 games to take a 7-game division lead over the second-place Marlins, and on that morning they made the biggest trade deadline splash in … Continue reading