A few years after his firing, former Phillies General Manager Ed Wade seems to have benefited from a little revisionist history — c.f. this concilliatory entry on Beerleaguer, which deems Wade’s six year contract for Pat Burrell as a definite positive. Though he might not have been terribly successful at making key trades (consider his trading away many of the Astros’ prospects for Miguel Tejada the day before he appeared in the Mitchell Report), and gave away long-term contracts with full no-trade protection to the likes of Bobby Abreu and Mike Lieberthal which hamstrung the team, but he did manage to oversee the development of most of the franchise’s cornerstone players (including Burrell, Utley, Rollins, Howard, Hamels and Kendrick … don’t get me started on Brett Myers). Still, I have to admit that I felt a giddy thrill when I heard that irate Astros pitcher Shawn Chacon “was suspended indefinitely by the team Wednesday for insubordination after reportedly grabbing general manager Ed Wade by the neck and throwing him to the ground.”
In other baseball news, I was lucky to have missed most of the ugly details of the Phils’ recent six-game losing streak, but tonight’s John Cage-style aleatory lineup (Werth, Utley, Rollins, Burrell, Howard, Feliz, Vicorino, Coste, Bruntlett) — which purportedly features five players in batting order positions they’ve never been in before — seems to be rather effective at playing small ball … or at least as of the top of the 4th, where they’re leading 3-0.
Ps— shame to see Utley miss out on the natural cycle (especially since he got the hard part out of the way), but a very impressive 4-5 performance offers a considerable amount of hope that this team will turn itself around. I want to see this lineup (or a variant which swaps Greg Dobbs for Pedro Feliz) again tomorrow!
