Cliff Lee rejoined the Philadelphia Phillies—there is no bigger story in baseball’s offseason. Quad Aces is a pretty stellar hand in Texas Hold’em poker games and in baseball too. That’s just what he gives the Phillies who already had Roy Oswalt, Cole Hamels and Roy Halladay. It’s Lee’s second go round in Philadelphia. He had one shining season and a World Series appearance there and was promptly offloaded so they could land Roy Halladay. Now, a year and another World Series appearance later (for Lee with the Rangers not the Phillies) he’s back. Sometimes when a team jettisons a player to get other studs only to see him quickly return as a free agent people wonder about a backroom agreement. It’s easy to imagine a team saying, “Look we can trade you now, get something huge in return, and then sign you up as a free agent later,” and maybe some think the Phillies said just that Lee. Only problem is this bold line of thinking works with a guy who might be a “lifer” for the team not somebody that stopped by for a cup of team. Hard to imagine he’d be complicit in such a scam in such a short amount of time. It’s true, Lee fell in love with the city and the fans in their Phillies World Series run and was willing to take less money to come back but planning this stretches the imagination. It wasn’t really a fair race as the Yankees own fans probably did their chances in by heckling Lee’s wife when they played the Rangers. Maybe it was a good thing for Philadelphia San Francisco kept their fans from running into Lee’s wife. Even as the Yankees shot themselves in the foot the Phillies also overcame the better offer from the Rangers. Not only that, the Rangers offered much closer proximity to Lee’s home but still it was the Phillies that offered Lee the best chance to get a ring. By winning the Lee sweepstakes, the Phillies find themselves in that enviable spot of only being able to compare their players to history not to other rotations in the league. Course, they haven’t played one full season together yet, so the Phillies would be wise to not count their chickens before they’ve hatched, but let’s look at recent history. In comparing them to great groups of pitchers, a steadying point to make to those foaming at the mouth fans, is they only have three Cy Youngs between them (Halladay two and Lee one). Greg Maddux and Roger Clemens both had more than that themselves and anchored rotations with other Cy Young winners. Maddux’s joining the 1993 Braves is very similar to Lee going with the Phillies of today. He joined them after they made two trips to the World Series and already had a hell of an arm supply. He also turned down more money from the Yankees. Those Braves had Tom Glavine, John Smoltz, and Steve Avery. They would go on to win five more Cy Youngs and pace the Braves to the longest string of Division titles ever. The Phillies pitchers don’t have the youth of that team, and sometimes older pitchers can suddenly just lose it. Kevin Brown signed for a lot of dollars at one point in his career and had lost it. The converse is also true, Curt Schilling and Randy Johnson were just a pair, but for Arizona, they were enough to carry them to a World Series title. Arguably, the Phillies have four guys that would be number ones on the rosters of most of the teams in the league. When the Mets of 1989 added Frank Viola, the Cy Young winner, to David Cone, Ron Darling, Dwight Gooden, Sid Fernandez, and Bob Ojeda, they too had number threes and fours that would be number ones almost everywhere else. Course, that team had plenty of mis-steps the next year and not near the same level of success as the Braves enjoyed. So the Phillies have a clear idea of what to be and what not to be. To put a criticism on the Phillies signing of Lee is to point out that it wasn’t pitching that was their undoing this year, it was hitting. They lost part of their order with Jayson Werth taking flight and they’ve not added anything to it. The hope is their pitching alone will win them three or four games, every series, but even Lee and Halladay, as great as they were last postseason, weren’t perfect. The Phillies are going to still need runs, and they might learn what the Braves did over ten years with one great staff. Pitching can get you to the playoffs but you still got to hit to win.
Maplegambling is a primary source for MLB Betting information. Review the
MLB Betting
section for up to date and insightful MLB baseball betting information.
