The Rotation (2 page)

Now, let's not kid anyone here. There wasn't a lot of play on Thome that winter. Most of the big-market teams were set at first base, and the Cleveland Indians, the team for which he had played a decade and bashed 334 home runs, were looking to go young and cheap, and that was reflected in an offer that didn't come close to the $85 million that the Phillies ultimately gave Thome. In a lot of ways, the Phillies were the only open chair—or certainly the most richly appointed—when the music stopped that winter. But what did it matter? A premium talent chose Philadelphia and that meant something, especially after stars like Rolen and Curt Schilling had run from the place and a kid named J. D. Drew refused to come.

Jim Thome helped make Philadelphia a baseball destination long before Roy Halladay, Cliff Lee, and Roy Oswalt carved that label in stone. Thome created a buzz, an electricity, a credibility, a feeling that baseball was on its way to mattering again in Philadelphia, just as it did in the late 1970s and early 1980s and again, for one enchanting season, in 1993.

Thome's impact was brief. After just three seasons, he was traded to clear the way for young slugger Ryan Howard, one of the most exciting players in franchise history. Howard solidified himself as part of a core of players that included shortstop Jimmy Rollins and second baseman Chase Utley. That group of young, homegrown players began to gel as the Phillies opened the doors to Citizens Bank Park, which, in time, became
the
place to be for
Philadelphia sports fans and an economic boon to the franchise. General Manager Ed Wade, who'd helped build the team's talent core, was let go after the 2005 season and veteran executive Pat Gillick, a two-time World Series-winning GM in Toronto, was brought in to push the team over the goal line.

Baseball finally blossomed once again in Philadelphia in 2007. Rollins ignited the buzz before the season when he proclaimed the Phillies as the team to beat in the NL East. Rollins' confidence was admirable, but in many ways his prediction was audacious, even foolhardy. This team hadn't been to the postseason in 14 years.
Fourteen
. What balls this kid had!

Indeed. What balls Jimmy Rollins had. And what a ball he had winning the NL MVP Award as the Phils won the division title on the final day of the season. A year later, with some valuable postseason experience in their satchels, the Phillies finally got over the goal line. Led by 24-year-old left-hander Cole Hamels and perfect closer Brad Lidge, they blazed through the postseason, won the World Series for just the second time in the franchise's 126-year history, and rode down Broad Street to the delirium of two million people, some of whom wore red shirts emblazoned with a word that said it all:
Phinally
. Finally, after 25 years of 0-fers, Philadelphia had a pro sports champion. The once irrelevant Phillies owned the town, and Manager Charlie Manuel, an unpopular hire who'd been kicked around like an old football since arriving in 2005, was suddenly royalty.

On one of the parade floats that day rode a kid from Northeast Philadelphia, Rhawnhurst to be exact. Ruben Amaro Jr., then 43, was the team's assistant general manager and apprentice to Gillick. In just a few days, Gillick's contract would run out. His dual mission—to show an organization how to cover the final miles to a championship and groom Amaro for the GM job—was complete. Now it was Amaro's turn to run the team's baseball operations. In a sense, he had been born for the job. His father, Ruben Sr., had been an infielder for the club in the 1960s. As a youngster, Ruben Jr. had been a batboy for the club and he played for the team in the 1990s.

When Ed Wade took over as GM late in 1997, he was handed the keys to a Yugo with an AM radio and windup windows.

Ruben Amaro Jr. was handed the keys to a loaded Mercedes. And he had just enough confidence—arrogance might be a better word—to sit tall behind the wheel and blast the stereo as he maneuvered the team through its best run in franchise history.

Amaro's playing career brings to mind that great old Jim Palmer quote. When speaking about his former Baltimore Orioles manager, Earl Weaver,
Palmer said, “All Earl knows about big-league pitching is that he couldn't hit it.” Palmer was wrong in some ways. Weaver actually knew plenty about pitching. He knew it was king in baseball. “The only thing that matters is what happens on that little hump in the middle of the field,” Weaver once said. Amaro, a lifetime .235 hitter in 435 big-league games, knew the importance of pitching long before he started working for Gillick, but his commitment to it was made even stronger during his time under Gillick, a pitching-first guy. Not long after becoming GM, Amaro said, “Pitching rules the day.” It became one of his favorite aphorisms. He didn't just say it. He lived it. He had an obsession with pitching, an obsession that led to The Rotation.

Trying to parlay Philadelphia's newfound status as a destination city for ballplayers—it's amazing how far the shine of one of those World Series rings can radiate—Amaro spent part of his first season as GM trying to make a trade for the best pitcher in baseball, Roy Halladay, the 2003 American League Cy Young Award winner. When that deal fell through, he landed Cliff Lee, the 2008 AL Cy Young winner.

Lee helped take the Phillies back to the World Series in 2009 and helped increase Philadelphia's luster as a destination city for top talent. Within the next nine months, Halladay and Roy Oswalt both waived no-trade clauses to come to the Phils. Philadelphia used to regularly appear on players' no-trade clauses. Now, to hell with those private jets, they'd hitchhike to town to be fitted for red pinstripes.

Of course, the lure all started with the winning.

Things have changed, John
.

“I remember when I first came up,” said Rollins, who debuted in 2000, when the team was still in Veterans Stadium and finished tied with the Chicago Cubs for the worst record in the game. “We'd have a meeting the first day of spring training and the GM would say our goal was to win the World Series. We'd kind of look around and think, ‘Yeah, right.' But now we have that meeting and we all believe it.”

To fully grasp what great baseball times these are in Philadelphia, you have to go back to a darker day when the Phils played in front of thousands of empty seats at the Vet.

During spring training in 1997, Curt Schilling practically pleaded for a contract extension. Three months later, before the deal even officially kicked in, he was raising his hand, offering to waive his no-trade clause. The Phillies went 4-22 in June of that year. During a three-game series at Camden Yards in that ugly season, President Bill Clinton came out to a game. Security rules dictated that all players be in uniform when Clinton came through the clubhouse for a pregame visit. Before Clinton arrived, a security force swept through the clubhouse. The room was packed as Clinton made the rounds.

The scene provided a perfect opportunity for the sharp-tongued Schilling.

“You'll have to excuse me if I seem a little nervous, Mr. President,” Schilling said as he reached through a crowd to shake Clinton's hand. “I'm not used to being in my uniform in front of this many people.”

There was no greater critic of the Phillies in the late 1990s than Schilling. Though he could often be self-serving, he pitched his ass off and there was never a doubt that he wanted to play for a winner. He'd often spoken of how great Philadelphia was in 1993 when he pitched for the surprise NL champions, but by 1996 those days were long gone, and by 2000, when Schilling finally forced a trade to Arizona . . . well, as he said a few years later, “We had fourteen big-league players on those teams.”

The Phils' payrolls in the late 1990s were in the bottom third in the game, and Schilling took every opportunity to criticize ownership for not spending what it took to put a contender on the field. In 1999, the Phils opened the season with a $28-million payroll. In May of that year, before a game in Montreal, Schilling told reporters it was time for Phillies ownership to do more or sell the team. Schilling's stinging remarks were so calculated it was surprising that he didn't issue a script in French, just for the Montreal media.

Rolen got so fed up with the losing and the direction of the team that he turned down a long-term contract worth about $90 million from the Phils on his way to being traded to St. Louis.

In the late 1990s there was little for baseball fans to get excited about in Philadelphia, and when there was, the team occasionally went out of its way to reel in the excitement. In May 1998, Mike Piazza was traded from the Los Angeles Dodgers to the Florida Marlins. Florida was just a way station for Piazza. The Marlins made it known that they intended to quickly spin him off in another deal. Phillies fans began salivating. Piazza, one of the game's premier sluggers, had grown up in the Philadelphia suburbs. He idolized Mike Schmidt and made regular trips to Veterans Stadium as a kid. He was the perfect Phillie, except for one problem—there was no way in hell he was going
to be a Phillie. Team officials put a quick end to any fairy-tale dreams. They preemptively reached out to reporters who covered the team to tell them that Piazza was “not a fit,” which was code for the team's saying it didn't want to spend the money needed to extend his contract.

As sad days in franchise history go, it wasn't Black Friday, not even close, really. But the dousing of enthusiasm surrounding Mike Piazza's availability that spring was a sad reminder of how microscopic the Phillies had become on the baseball landscape.

Baseball was so grim in Philadelphia in the late 1990s that the people who ran radio station WIP for several years would not allow their hosts to talk about baseball. Imagine that—an all-sports radio station eliminating an entire major sport from its list of discussion topics.

It turned out that Phillies management had a plan. They could not compete with baseball's big boys while playing in Veterans Stadium. They needed one of those modern ballparks that people wanted to come to and, more importantly, spend oodles of money in. It probably wasn't right that for a good many years the baseball product became secondary while the team, along with the city and the state, figured out a way to get a new stadium, but those dark days gave birth to this Golden Age of Phillies baseball. David Montgomery always said that when the Phillies got their new stadium and their revenue streams improved, the club would have a payroll commensurate with its market size and be in the running for elite players.

He kept his promise.

But even as the doors to a new stadium opened in 2004, there were problems. Pitchers on both sides of the field complained about the stadium's cozy power alleys. John Smoltz ripped the place and David Wells ridiculed it. One rival coach called it “Williamsport.” Jake Peavy said “that new park in Philly might be the worst in baseball.” The Phillies will never attract an elite pitcher to that ballpark, the critics howled.

Baseball relevance did not automatically come with the new ballpark. Before spring training in 2005, in an effort to drum up some buzz for the coming season, the club invited media members to Citizens Bank Park to meet the team's new coaching staff. Meanwhile, on the same day 100 miles to the north, the Yankees were introducing the newest member of their starting pitching rotation, Randy Johnson.

Oh, yeah?

Something was still missing. The Phillies still weren't ready to be one of baseball's big boys.

Only winning would complete the transformation. Only winning would fill the seats and give the team the revenues it needed to be one of baseball's big boys.

They got to the doorstep in 2007. They broke the door down in 2008.

“I think we changed the culture and the feeling around here,” said Pat Gillick, surveying the Phils' ascension in the spring of 2011. “It was always like Philly was behind New York and now I think that's changed. At least I think we're even with New York and maybe a little ahead.”

In New York, they agree. After years of eating turkey on the card table in the den, the Phillies now sit at the adult table. Pass the cranberry sauce, Mr. Steinbrenner.

“I don't like that description because it sounds arrogant,” said Brian Cashman, the Yankees GM. “I just look at it this way: Philly has graduated to a big-market team. They've jumped class. It shows what can happen if you go about your business the right way. They've done what the Red Sox did. Those red hats are all over the place. Red Sox Nation, Yankee Universe, Phillies Whatever. They're there. They've built a great brand, a great park, a packed park, and worldwide support. What they've done—you have to genuflect to it.”