The Rotation (11 page)

Priceless mementos had been destroyed. There were pictures and home movies, some with Roy pitching as a youngster. Gone. Oswalt had given his parents his 2005 National League Championship Series MVP trophy. Gone.

“I actually pushed up pieces of it with the bulldozer,” he said.

The Astros made a duplicate NLCS MVP trophy for Oswalt. The local
photography studio that had taken high school portraits of all three Oswalt children still had the negatives on file and made reprints after the originals, which had hung on the wall.

“In a small town, everyone tries to help each other,” said Oswalt, who also used his bulldozer to help neighbors clear rubble. “People have a way of picking right back up. There's a good spirit in our town.”

Oswalt didn't feel the spirit in Houston. The Astros had not made the playoffs since 2005, had not finished better than third in the National League Central since 2006, and had not enjoyed a winning season since 2008. He knew he wouldn't pitch forever and he knew he wouldn't win in Houston, so he requested a trade during the 2010 season. He made his desires known privately before eventually taking them public.

“He wanted a chance to win before his contract was up and he took it back to the farm,” Houston General Manager Ed Wade said.

Agent Bob Garber told the Astros that Oswalt wanted to be traded to Texas or St. Louis because of their proximity to his home. Wade told Garber he would try to find a match with the Rangers or Cardinals, but he also made it clear he would not force a deal to those teams. Wade had been down that road when he was the Phillies' GM. Curt Schilling demanded a trade in 2000 and told the Phillies he only would accept a trade to Arizona. Wade sent his ace to the Diamondbacks for the uninspiring package of Omar Daal, Nelson Figueroa, Travis Lee, and Vicente Padilla.

“Lesson learned,” Wade recalled in 2011. “OK, you don't want to go where we want you to go? Then stay here.”

Oswalt didn't have as much leverage as he might have thought.

Wade started making calls around the same time the Phillies started making calls. The Phillies were looking for a starter or a reliever, depending on what made the most sense. But they also were struggling, falling seven games behind the Atlanta Braves and a half game behind the New York Mets in the National League East on July 20. So they were making calls about possibly trading Jayson Werth, too.

Phillies General Manager Ruben Amaro Jr. made one of his first calls to Seattle Mariners General Manager Jack Zduriencik, who was trying to trade
Cliff Lee. The Phillies had traded Lee to the Mariners in December 2009, but Seattle's plans to compete in the American League West had imploded and there seemed to be no reason to keep him because he was not going to re-sign with the Mariners once he became a free agent.

“What would it take to bring back Cliff?” Amaro asked Zduriencik.

“It would have to start with Domonic Brown.”

“Can't do it, Jack,” Amaro replied.

Brown was the organization's top prospect and the Phillies projected him to be one of their everyday outfielders, potentially as early as 2011. If the Phillies did not trade Brown to get Lee from Cleveland in July 2009 or Halladay from the Blue Jays in December 2009, they were not going to trade him to Seattle, knowing Lee could sign with another team in a few months.

The Phillies and Astros started to talk.

There were multiple reports that Oswalt would not go anywhere other than St. Louis or Texas, which had teams wondering if they might be wasting their time. Those teams asked Wade about Oswalt's willingness to play elsewhere, and he told them he didn't know.

“You just need to proceed,” Wade told clubs. “If there's something that makes sense, then we'll be in a position of presenting it to him.”

Wade had a feeling much of Oswalt's demands were acts of gamesmanship. While he might have preferred St. Louis or Texas, based on what had been expressed privately, Oswalt would not kill a deal if it meant staying in Houston. He wanted out.

“He was very vocal about it,” Wade said.

Wade read Oswalt correctly. As Texas and St. Louis faded from the picture and the July 31 trade deadline approached, Wade got a sense from Garber that Oswalt was open to exploring other opportunities, “particularly Philadelphia.”

The Astros needed somebody to replace Oswalt's arm in the rotation, so the Phillies agreed to send them left-hander J. A. Happ. They also included outfielder Anthony Gose and shortstop Jonathan Villar, a pair of minor-league prospects. The Astros did not need Gose because they figured they had enough outfield depth in their system. They needed a corner infielder and they targeted Brett Wallace from the Toronto Blue Jays. The Phillies tried to include the Blue Jays in the deal, trying to make it a three-team swap. But Wade, who was talking with Blue Jays General Manager Alex Anthopoulos on other trade matters, took over those discussions and agreed to swap Wallace for Gose separately.

The Phillies believed Happ, Gose, and Villar were expendable because they had comparable players elsewhere in the system. They had more than a season of Oswalt, who would replace Happ. They had Tyson Gillies in Double-A Reading. He made up for the loss of Gose. They knew Villar had a lot of talent, but he was years away from the big leagues and Freddy Galvis could step in earlier.

The Phillies and Astros had agreed on the talent, but they also needed to agree on the money. Oswalt was owed $7 million for the rest of the season, plus $16 million in 2011 and a possible $16 million in a mutual option in 2012. The option included a buyout: $2 million if the Phillies declined their side of the option or $1 million if Oswalt declined his side of the option.

In addition to Oswalt, the Phillies received $11 million from Houston in the deal. That raised some eyebrows around the game, but it was the price rebuilding Houston had to pay to move a veteran who didn't want to be there, add some young talent, and gain some salary relief.

“It shows you what the market was like,” Wade said. “We took money back on (Lance) Berkman, too. We traded two iconic players and, in order to make the deals work, we had to take back money on both of them.”

That is the price for acquiring young, controllable talent, even when that team is giving up an ace in return. The Astros got Happ, who finished second in the 2009 National League Rookie of the Year voting. They got Wallace, who would be Houston's first baseman, and Villar, who could be Houston's shortstop of the future. The Phillies needed some money in return to offset their 2010 and 2011 budgets. They wanted payroll flexibility.

Houston presented the offer to Oswalt and Garber, who then spoke with Philadelphia. There had been multiple reports Oswalt would not accept a trade to Philadelphia unless the Phillies picked up his $16 million option for 2012. It turned out to be bad information. The Phillies did not pick up the option, but instead added $1 million to Oswalt's side of the buyout, making it $2 million either way.

Oswalt took roughly 24 hours to think about it. He finally accepted.

“There was definite talk about the option,” Garber said. “But to get to a team like Philadelphia that has a chance to win a World Series, I think that was more important to Roy than the money.”

Oswalt was headed to Philadelphia, which was further from home than St. Louis or Texas.

But Weir would never be far from his heart or mind.

S
cott Proefrock hung up the phone in his office and looked at his boss, David Montgomery, the leader of the Phillies empire, who sat quietly on his couch a few feet away.

It was December 13, 2010, and team officials had reached the end of the line with Cliff Lee. They had talked on the phone and exchanged countless emails and text messages with his agent, Darek Braunecker, over the past 120 hours, but remained agonizingly short of an agreement that would return Lee to Philadelphia to form one of the greatest rotations in baseball history. Proefrock, Montgomery, and other Phillies officials had been at Citizens Bank Park that Monday night for the annual Phillies Charities dinner when Proefrock returned to his office to talk to Braunecker on the phone. Braunecker was pissed. He had better offers on the table from the New York Yankees and Texas Rangers, but had kept them in limbo for days while he tried to finalize the last-minute, cloak-and-dagger negotiations with the Phillies, the team his client so badly wanted to join. And now, just inches from the goal line, the deal was falling apart over a few million dollars.

Contracts crumble in baseball every day, but feelings had entered the equation as the two sides talked money, club options, and performance bonuses.

This had become personal.

“You broke my heart once, Ruben,” Lee's wife, Kristen, told Ruben Amaro Jr. in a conference call a day earlier. “Don't break it again.”

But on that Monday night in December, heartbreak hung in the air as Braunecker expressed his frustrations to Proefrock.

“I can't believe you're going to allow this thing to slip through your fingers over a few million dollars!” he said. “We knew this would happen!”

“Look, Darek,” Proefrock said calmly. “You've got two very competitive people and they're each trying to play last hit. Don't fly off the handle. It's not going to help.”

Montgomery listened as Proefrock tried to soothe the agent's nerves. The two parties had painstakingly rebuilt their relationship following bad blood that developed when the Phillies traded Lee to Seattle in December 2009. Nobody wanted things to fall apart again. Not now. Not when they were so close to performing a baseball miracle.

Proefrock hung up the phone. Montgomery sighed.

The gravity of the situation had weighed on him. The Phillies were astoundingly close to bringing a fantasy rotation into the real world, and Montgomery knew he had the power to make it happen. He just had to say yes. But Montgomery, a Roxborough native who had risen from the ticket office to the club presidency, also had to think about the long-term viability of the franchise he had run since 1997. He had to consider the risks, which were considerable, of handing a 32-year-old pitcher a five-year contract worth $120 million. As his inner businessman weighed the wisdom of the deal, the lifelong Phillies fan inside him said:
Do it. Make history happen.

He looked at Proefrock.

“I can feel the waves crashing over me,” he said with resignation.

Clifton Phifer Lee—Clifton is his maternal grandfather's name; Phifer is his mother's maiden name—had made a fine Plan B.

Ruben Amaro Jr. had doggedly pursued Roy Halladay for weeks, but as the July 31, 2009 trade deadline approached he could not part with Domonic Brown, Kyle Drabek, and other prospects to bring him to Philadelphia, when he could get Lee, who had won the American League Cy Young a year earlier, for considerably less. So instead of catching his Moby Dick, Amaro caught the next biggest fish in the ocean on July 29, when he sent prospects Carlos Carrasco, Jason Donald, Lou Marson, and Jason Knapp to the Cleveland Indians for Lee and outfielder Ben Francisco.

In a fairy-tale debut, Lee threw a complete game July 31 against the San Francisco Giants at AT&T Park. He went 5-0 with a 0.68 ERA in his first five starts and 4-0 with a 1.56 ERA in five postseason starts—including a complete game, 10-strikeout victory in Game 1 of the World Series against the New York Yankees at Yankee Stadium—to solidify his rock-star status in Philadelphia. Fans embraced Lee like they had Jim Thome when he'd arrived as a free agent before the 2003 season. They might have liked him more. He was talented. He was cool. He was theirs. In a column on the eve of the 2011 regular season, the
Philadelphia Inquirer
's Maria Panaritis, described the city's love affair with Lee this way: