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Michael/Male/26-30. Lives in United States/Pennsylvania/Wexford/Christopher Wren, speaks English. Spends 20% of daytime online. Uses a Fast (128k-512k) connection. And likes baseball /politics.
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United States, Pennsylvania, Wexford, Christopher Wren, English, Michael, Male, 26-30, baseball , politics.

Monday, November 05, 2007

Monday Morning... 

Former Phillies Triple-A Manager John Russell is getting the nod to succeed Jim Tracy as the Pittsburgh Pirates Manager for 2008 and beyond. Good luck, John, you’ll need it.

Apparently Curt Schilling has indicated that the Detroit Tigers and Phillies are on his short-list of teams he’d like to play for in 2008. I wouldn’t mind seeing the Phillies do a one-year deal for $11-13 million for Schilling. If Schilling is great, then it is money well-spent. Moyer, Schilling, Hamels, that is a deadly 1-2-3. And the team gets a pitcher with a proven track record in the playoffs. If not, then the Phillies cut their ties with him and turn to Carlos Carrasco and Josh Outman in 2009. Win-win.

Scott Boras apparently thinks that his guy (A-Rod) is going to get $30-35 million a season. Good luck. That pretty much rules the cash-strapped Phillies out of the mix and makes the Anaheim Angels the front-runner for the soon-to-be 2007 AL MVP's services.

The Arizona Fall League is well underway and the Peoria Saguaros, which has Phillies like 3B Mike Costanzo, OF Greg Golson and P Joe Savery on the roster are off to a 7-15 start. Ugh.

One of the reasons why I am opposed to the Phillies investing major amounts of money on free agent pitchers is that they have lots of talent currently in the pipeline and the success of the Boston Red Sox teaches us that teams are better-off developing their own talent from within rather than buying it on the marketplace. Teams are going to overpay if they pursue Freddy Garcia and Kyle Lohse, because the scarcity of quality pitching means that many dollars will be pursuing few goods on the market. Savery, Outman and Carrasco are going to be Major League-ready in 2009. Why make a major investment in free agents when cheap, home-grown talent will be ready in a year?

A turn to Football: Andy Reid needs to take a sabbatical from coaching and deal with his issues. It was painfully obvious that the Eagles play-calling has gotten absurdly predictable. The Cowboys leaped on every screen the Eagles tried to run to Westbrook and got into McNabb’s face all night. They never bothered to establish a running game and looked out of sync all night. With games coming up against the Redskins, Dolphins and Patriots, the Eagles need to revamp some things and return to the winning football they played at the end of 2006, when Marty Mornhinweg called the plays and the Eagles actually established a running game. Bottom-line, unless they keep Tom Brady and the Patriots off the field when they play, it is going to be a 52-7 Patriots laugher.

A turn to History: The Hardball Times John Brattain wrote a nice article ("Ghosts of World Series Past") about the 1950 World Series, which featured the Philadelphia Phillies in what was probably the hardest fought sweep in World Series history. Readers of this blog know that I wrote a series about the 1950 Wiz Kids last fall. Click here for the article about the World Series.

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