Putting this in more serious terms: It’s a huge deal. Lee would have made either the Yankees or the Rangers into a much, much better ball club, and easily a World Series threat heading into next season. For the past few weeks, all the media chatter centered around the question: “Rangers or Yanks?”
The Phillies came so out of nowhere, RADAR didn’t even pick them up. And the impact of the move could be tremendous. For one thing, the loss of Lee sends the Rangers and Yankees scrambling to find other pitching help.
But, much more importantly, it gives the Phillies a starting rotation headlined by four aces: Lee, Roy Halladay, Roy Oswalt and Cole Hamels.
The amount of media coverage about this you’ll see and hear in the coming days, weeks and months will be enough to make anyone outside of Philadelphia take a Louisville Slugger to their HDTV. So much of it will be overkill.
The most important thing you need to know is this: On paper, the Phillies have one of the best starting pitching rotations ever.
That is not an understatement, not in the least. And how they got to this point makes things even more interesting.
Last offseason, Philly fans were … shall we say, “disappointed” … when the Phils let Lee walk away after he had spent the last few months of the 2009 season in Philadelphia and had pitched some of the best postseason baseball ever pitched. Primarily, the Phillies front office let Lee walk because they acquired Roy Halladay from the Toronto Blue Jays and wanted to re-acquire minor league prospects for Lee instead of paying him for the final year of his contract.
This let down the fans, who saw the potential for a rotation including Halladay, Hamels, and Lee. It let down the Phillies players and coaches as well, for they knew that such a starting rotation would’ve made them World Series favorites a year after losing to the Yankees — in part due to pitching.
Phillies’ General Manager Ruben Amaro was OK parting with Lee last year because he felt his team would be good enough with the addition of Halladay, but by midyear it became evident that the rotation still needed a boost. So Amaro learned from the Lee mistake and wheeled a deal for Oswalt, the Houston Astros´ long-time ace, giving the Phillies the most formidable 1-2-3 punch in the bigs.
Down the stretch, the Big Three were terrific. But they and their Phillies’ teammates ran into a piping-hot San Francisco Giants team in the playoffs with starters who could go toe-to-toe with Philadelphia’s studs, and Philadelphia’s weak fourth option, unsure bullpen and ice-cold bats doomed them. It was a crushing blow to a team that was trying to become one of very few National League teams in history to reach the World Series in three straight seasons.
Still, going into the 2011 campaign, the Phillies looked set to make another run at the Series with “H2O” — Halladay, Hamels and Oswalt — atop their rotation.
And then this morning … the Big Three became “the Phantastic Phour.”
Truly, they could form an all-time rotation. There have been some great pitching staffs in history, but very, very few with credentials such as this one’s. In recent history, the early 2000s Oakland A’s boasted the trio of Barry Zito, Mark Mulder and Tim Hudson, and the 2001 Diamondbacks had the 1-2 combination of Curt Schilling and Randy Johnson. The mid-to-late 1990s Braves had an incredible staff year-in-and-year-out, with the nucleus of John Smoltz, Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine joined by Steve Avery at the front end and Kevin Millwood at the back end of their NL East dynasty.
Reaching back, the Yankees had a number of great staffs, from the three-peat teams with Cone, Clemens and Pettitte to Whitey Ford’s Yanks, all the way back to the 1927 staff which was part of one of the best teams ever. The 1960s Dodgers, with Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale and Don Sutton should appear on any all-time list. The 1980s mets teams, led by Doc Gooden, were pretty darn good as well. Then there are the 1971 Baltimore Orioles, the only team to ever have four pitchers win 20 games in a single season.
But has there ever been a foursome this stacked — on paper — than this Phantastic one? Maybe if you put Tiger Woods, Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player on the same Ryder Cup team.
In Lee, the Phillies acquire an old-school bulldog whose career numbers, while impressive, fail to tell the full story. He had one excellent season during his first few in the bigs, then he started dominating in 2008 and hasn’t looked back. In 2008, he won the Cy Young Award by going a staggering 22-3 with a 2.54 ERA and 170 strikeouts in 223.1 innings — in the juiced-up American League East, no less. From that year to now, Clifton Phifer Lee has pitched for four teams and compiled these numbers: 48 wins, 25 losses, 17 complete games, three-year averages of 222.1 innings pitched, 178.6 strikeouts (5.65 to every walk), and a 2.96 Earned Run Average with a 1.12 WHIP (walks and hits over innings pitched). Those numbers are, as Derek Zoolander would say, “Really, really, ridiculously good-looking.”
Lee is a monster at the top of his game, like The Thing. He joins “Mr. Fantastic” Halladay, “The Human Torch” Oswalt, and Hamels — “The Invisible (Wo)Man.”
All corny Marvel Comics jokes aside, the Phantastic Phour look to be a real-life superpower. Their combined regular-season record is 481-275 — a .636 winning percentage. They have a group ERA of 3.47 (almost all of it compiled during the Steroid Era), 105 complete games and 36 shutouts, over 5,000 strikeouts, a 3.46 strikeout-to-walk ratio and a 1.20 WHIP. Between them, they have six 20-win seasons, fifteen 15-win seasons, 13 All-Star Game selections, 14 Cy Young top-five finishes and three Cy Young Awards. They all average over 218 innings pitched and 168 strikeouts per 162-game seasons for their careers.
And in the postseason, they’re even better. Their combined record of 20-8 (.714 winning percentage), 2.86 ERA, 8.27 strikeouts-per-nine-innings, 4.23 strikeouts-per-walks numbers and 0.998 WHIP speak for themselves. Add to that two League Championship Series MVP awards and one World Series MVP award, five complete games, Lee’s Hollywood-worthy performances against the Yankees and Rays the last two years, and Halladay’s throwing of only the second no-hitter in postseason history.
Add to that the fact that they’re all in their primes, play in a stadium with a tremendous home-crowd advantage, and have a terrific defense and normally potent offense behind them. (Last season, the Phillies struggled at the plate more than in previous years.)
But — and there is a “but” — all this is on paper. It’s a common “but” in sports, and the situation’s no different here. If one or more of them get injured, it goes down the drain. The same happens if one of them pulls a Rick Ankiel, a Plaxico Burress or a Tracy McGrady — i.e., become useless to the team overnight.
Additionally, plenty of great pitching staffs have come up short in the postseason. Look no further than last year’s Phillies team, the 1954 Cleveland Indians (who had three future Hall-of-Famers and got swept in the World Series), and the 1993 Braves (who lost to the Phillies in the playoffs).
There are even times when a supposedly great group, pre-season, simply turns into a bust. Take the 2005 Yankees’ rotation, which featured Randy Johnson, Carl Pavano, Jaret Wright, Mike Mussina and Kevin Brown. All those guys had the credentials, but that season it fell apart like a game of Jenga.
Should that happen this year, with these Phillies? No. This group has been too good and too consistent — with the possible exception of Hamels — to completely lose its dominance for no reason. Injury, by far, represents the greatest threat to this squad, but these guys have all been extremely durable on top of their proficient pitching.
It’s easy to say that — on paper — anything can happen, and all this is conjecture.
But you know what? On paper, the Phillies four aces sure look Phantastic.
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