But after the New Year, things get grim. Particularly in a year when the soccer team you follow is suffering its worst season in more than a decade, and the mention of the club’s best player and the historic season he’s having elicits not joy but soul-crushing depression at the knowledge that he’ll leave for Manchester City or Barcelona in the summer. Just like all the best Arsenal players do. Sure, the Sixers are on a nice run, and I love hockey, but without baseball, it’s not enough. This is the time of year where I try to psych myself into caring about the effect of the near-ubiquitous duckbill nose in the coming Formula 1 season. Early February is a rough time for me.

Which brings me to my point: all winter long, people I follow on Twitter (mostly women, for whatever reason, though that might just be a product of who I follow and is not meant to convey any sort of commentary on gender politics in modern sports fanhood) have been counting down to the start of spring training. “93 days until pitchers and catchers!” they said, back when that distance was so great as to be depressing. Now we’re within two weeks of that blessed day: “pitchers and catchers.” And I cannot bring myself to get excited about it. At all.

It seems like we fetishize training camp in baseball more than in other sports. I love soccer and hockey, but I have no idea when Arsenal starts their summer workout regimen, or even when they start playing exhibition games. The same for the Flyers–I went to a preseason game this past fall, but I have no memory of what month that game took place, even though Tom Sestito’s brutal, if massively illegal, hit on Ranger center Andre “Bel Biv” Deveaux was one of the highlights of my sporting 2011. No sport except for football, which magnifies and fetishizes everything, places such stock in its preseason. I think the name “pitchers and catchers” is part of the problem. It sounds cool and somehow in-the-know to say “pitchers and catchers,” I think, so we do it.

There’s also something to spring training marking the beginning of, you know, spring. Baseball is, perhaps more tied to the seasons than any other popular American game. Football has been played professionally in the United States in spring, summer, and fall. Basketball, a largely indoor undertaking, is almost devoid of seasonal or meteorological context, and ice hockey, for all the nostalgia about skating on frozen lakes with your buddies, in 2004 crowned its champion in June, in Florida, and holds its world championships in the summer. As for soccer, most of the world’s leagues play roughly a basketball schedule, August to May, while in the United States, Russia, and Scandinavia, the game runs through the summer.

So much for seasonal context.

But in baseball, weather and history dictate that we have “spring training,” the “boys of summer,” and the “fall classic.” The start of baseball, more than the equinox or warm weather, marks the start of spring, a sentiment captured by the poet Donald Hall. It’s beautiful stuff, and I appreciate that. I get that the trip down to Clearwater makes a nice spring vacation, and an opportunity to see the stars in a closer and more relaxed environment than you might find during a regular season game. At least I’d hope so, because if it weren’t a great baseball trip there’d be no rational reason to get that close to Tampa. I just don’t get the hysteria over practice. Not a game. Practice.

“Pitchers and catchers” makes for a nice temporal landmark, but from a baseball perspective, doesn’t mean anything. The entire team doesn’t even work out together for a full week after pitchers and catchers report, and doesn’t play an exhibition game until a week after that. Everyone’s been counting down to wind sprints, long toss, and weightlifting. They’ve been doing this all winter, folks. The only difference is that they’ll have called each other before coming to work and decided to all dress alike. Even if they wanted to play a game, they’d be seven guys short.

Then spring training games start, and after a couple days of watching Matt Rizzotti mash meaningless taters, we start to get down to business. Then we get to see who might be on form for the coming season, who’s developed a new pitch or altered his swing, and which unknown is set to make the leap and contribute in a big way. To say nothing of the return of Jim Thome and the first look at Jonathan Papelbon. That time, around the second week of March, is when I start getting excited about baseball–when something worth talking about happens.

Of course, if you do get all worked up for pitchers and catchers, more power to you. I certainly don’t think getting excited for preseason workouts is stupid or anything, and I’ll certainly be paying attention when it happens. It’s just hard to work up the enthusiasm, even for a deranged sports addict like me.

Blog Battle: Wilson Valdez Trade [Phillies Nation]

You can follow Ian on Twitter at @ianriccaboni.

I’ve written before at Phillies Nation about the complex and emotional relationship I’ve enjoyed with another Phillies shortstop, Jimmy Rollins, and in a way, my Phillies fandom regarding Exxon, as I’ve come to call him, has been even more emotional and and complex. I’d like to talk to you briefly, now that Exxon is no longer with us, about that relationship, and about the tenure of one of the more intriguingly polarizing athletes to come through Philadelphia in recent years.

I was in the stands for the home opener in 2010, when Jimmy Rollins unexpectedly injured himself on the dugout steps before the game. He was replaced in that game by Juan Castro, but the Phillies needed a new utility infielder if Castro was to take over full-time for Rollins at shortstop. On April 14, 2010, the Phillies called up Wilson Valdez from AAA Lehigh Valley. Now, when this happened, I had never heard of Valdez before. I texted a couple friends to tell them the news, and made the first of what must have been dozens of Exxon Valdez oil spill puns (“I hear he’s a slick fielder”) and thought that Valdez would, like thousands of other career minor leaguers, be up for a couple weeks while J-Roll got better.

But he didn’t. He stuck. And over the course of the summer of 2010, I came to hate Wilson Valdez in a way I’d never anticipated. It wasn’t so much that he wasn’t very good at baseball–after all, he was, like all pro ballplayers, the best player he was capable of becoming–it was the way, for some reason, fans took to him. People started voicing the opinion that Valdez was a preferable alternative to Jimmy Rollins going forward, that as a rookie he had more to offer than Rollins. Never mind that Valdez was actually six months older than Rollins and, at 32, hadn’t been anything resembling a prospect in nearly a decade. Hearing about how “clutch” he was, for the double he hit in the 11th inning to put the Phillies ahead against the Giants on April 28. For the single he hit to put the Phillies ahead against the Diamondbacks on July 29. They raved about his throwing arm (which we’ll get to later), and called him a great defensive player, even though no one had gathered any significant data on his range or ability to convert chances once he got to them. Soon enough, in my mind at least, Wilson Valdez was the poster child for confirmation bias and the shortsightedness of a fan base too stubborn or lazy (or whatever) to realize that Exxon not only had an OBP well below .300, but was grounding into double plays at a historic rate.

I called him Exxon not out of the same sense of fun, glee, and adoration with which I call Roy Halladay “Doc” or Antonio Bastardo “Tony No-Dad,” but with malice in my heart and the glint of hatred in my eye. I dreaded his trips to the plate. I once went to a bar and wound up screaming a string of obscenities and statistics at a friend of a friend who suggested that he’d rather have Exxon at the plate with the game on the line than Jayson Werth, who was at that time in the midst of both the best season of his career and a bizarre and fluky slump with runners in scoring position. Then there was that nonsense about Wilson Valdez being the team’s MVP. Give me a break. All the while I tried to keep calm and spread the gospel: Wilson Valdez Isn’t As Good As You Think He Is, culminating in this post, on Sept. 29, in which I wrote the following:

“And how about this–he’s come to the plate with a runner on first and less than two out only 82 times this season. In those plate appearances, he has 20 GIDP, and only 18 hits. I’ll repeat that for the cheap seats: with a runner on first and less than 2 outs, Wilson Valdez is more likely to ground into a double play than he is to get a hit. “Dreadful” hardly does that statistic justice.”

Complex and emotional indeed. The comments for that post, unfortunately, were deleted when Phillies Nation underwent its site redesign last year, but there were more than 100 of them before the furor died down. To Exxon’s credit, he came to the plate once more that season with the opportunity to ground into a double play, and he got a hit.

After 2010, however, order was restored. Jimmy Rollins was healthy and reasonably productive, and Wilson Valdez was returned to a role more suited to player of his talents: utility infielder. Of course, Chase Utley missed the first eight weeks of the season or so, but there was always a sense that he’d come back soon enough, and if he didn’t, the Phillies would be screwed no matter who replaced him.

Two days after Utley returned, on May 25, 2011, the complexity of my relationship with Exxon grew tremendously.

By this point, Wilson Valdez had gone from unknown quantity, to minor nuisance, to my personal Moby Dick, then back to nuisance and minor curiosity as his role with the team was reduced. I still feared the medium-speed ground ball to second that seemed to come every time he came up with a man on, but after a while, with Utley on the mend, Exxon was set to return to obscurity. Or so it seemed.

Paul Boye and I went to the 19-inning game together, and, well, in short, it was the best experience I’ve ever had at a live sporting event. That was, of course, due in large part to seeing an infielder pitch–and more than that, the infielder upon which I’d heaped so much attention and anger. I remember sitting in the stands, jumping up and down, clapping, screaming, and chittering like a schoolgirl at the sight of the man whose mere existence sent me into a homicidal rage. I had turned the corner. I had caught Valdez Fever.

After that night, after those of us who stayed up until 1 a.m. to watch the game had seen a below-average utility infielder retire not only the National League’s hottest hitter but the National League’s reigning MVP, shaking off Sardinha and recording 380-foot outs. It was remarkable theater, and one of the highlights of a season that would ultimately end in disappointment.

I loved Wilson Valdez.

It seems silly to speak of legacy for a player who played a marginal role for a little under two seasons, and wasn’t much more than passable in that marginal role, but for some reason Valdez took on a larger-than-life quality. It still baffles me why. He’s not the first light-hitting backup shortstop to get a key hit or two, or the first one to have a weird goatee. Maybe he was lovable for the same reason Bill James said Pedro Martinez was great–a multitude of small advantages that compound each other. I really couldn’t tell you. I never could stand him as a player.

But the fact of the matter is that we can’t judge Exxon as a player alone. It’s almost as if we have Wilson Valdez, Infielder, who’s a replacement-level player, but then we have Wilson Valdez, Literary Hero, who’s capable of bringing joy to the masses through legendary feats of sporting averageness.

In the end, I’m amazed that Ruben Amaro was able to ship off a 33-year-old utilityman who can’t really hit to a club on the verge of contention for a 26-year-old lefty who looks like he could be worth a damn. In July 2010, I would have open-mouth kissed anyone who told me that the Phillies would one day trade Exxon for someone like Jeremy Horst. This trade is an excellent baseball move. But seeing Wilson Valdez sent packing, now that I’ve embraced the joy and absurdity that comes with watching him play, fills me with sadness. I’m not even sure I’ll miss him because I’ll miss hating him. I think I may have genuinely caught some of that Exxon fever, and now that he’s gone, I’m not sure watching the Phillies will ever be the same.

This news, however, does warrant jumping off a cliff, because indications look good that one of two things will happen to Hamels: 1) He’ll re-sign with the Phillies next year for one of the richest contracts ever given to a pitcher or 2) He’ll sign with the Yankees for one of the richest contracts ever given to a pitcher. What appears almost impossible now is that he’ll sign for something along the lines of the 5 years and $85 million the Angels gave Jered Weaver last summer, or the 5 years and $77.5 million they gave C.J. Wilson last month.

In the winter of 2008, Sabathia was entering his age-28 season, a left-hander who had posted a career 120 ERA+ over 1,659 1/3 innings. Up to that point, he’d posted a K/BB ratio of 2.66 and accumulated 33 wins above replacement, according to Baseball-Reference. Hamels, in the winter of 2012, will be entering in age-29 season, and if he slides back to his career averages, he’ll have posted a 128 ERA+ and a 3.74 K/BB ratio over a little less than 1,400 innings, good for about 27 WAR in half a season less than Sabathia. When Weaver signed with the Angels in August, ESPN’s Jerry Crasnick, among others, suggested that Weaver’s deal would make a good starting point for a Hamels extension. Now, after a breakout season, and with another year’s worth of uncertainty resolved, Hamels could easily make half again what Weaver made in overall value. With another season like 2011, when he posted a WHIP under 1 and struck out more than four times as many batters as he walked, Hamels will raise his price to the point where Weaver’s contract will look like Evan Longoria‘s. Even in a strong pitching market, bidding could start at Cliff Lee‘s 6-year, $147.5 million deal and end up looking like Sabathia’s 7-year, $161 million contract from the 2008/09 offseason, adjusted for inflation.

Of course, there’s nothing to be done about this now–the time to act was after 2009, when Hamels’ public perception was at an all-time low, but his peripheral stats remained unchanged, or after 2010, when Hamels was once again the front-line starter who was voted MVP of the World Series at age 24, but before he turned into the kind of molten lava-flinging cartoon superhero he was in 2011.

Locking up top homegrown talent long-term has become almost a reflex action for Major League Baseball’s smarter franchises. The Rays signed Longoria in 2008 to a contract that allows them to pay, on average, less than $4 million per year for one of the game’s best two-way players until the end of the 2016 season. James Shields will cost the Rays an absolute maximum of $44 million between 2008 and 2014, and this offseason, they signed rookie starter Matt Moore to a 5-year, $14 million contract that could run to eight years for $40 million.

The key to those contracts is signing players with great potential early. The longer a team waits to sign a player, the more certainty exists over his value. So a team like the Rays can approach Longoria or Moore before either has established himself as a quality major league player and offer to lock them up to a long-term extension with multiple team options. If Longoria had flamed out, he’d have cost the Rays less than 3/4 of what Ryan Howard will make this year, but instead, the Rays have locked up a perennial all-star third baseman for roughly the same annual salary as Kyle Kendrick. Likewise, Moore, who has thrown only 9 1/3 regular season innings in the majors, is projected to become one of the top left-handed pitchers in the game, comparable to Hamels, David Price, and their like. If he blows out his arm in April and never pitches again, the Rays have lost less than what Cole Hamels will make this year. If he fulfills his potential, they’ve picked up a bargain–an ace lefty for about a fourth, give or take, of his market value.

The Rays, as you know, are characterized by their extreme relative poverty, so their reliance on signing players long-term and early is extreme. The Phillies can afford to be more conservative, but they’ve overshot the mark with Hamels. The advantage to signing young homegrown players long-term is that they can be had for less than what the free market would dictate, and for a term that would end before the decline phase woes that make teams gunshy about thirtysomething free agents like Jayson Werth and Albert Pujols. This is what the Phillies did with Chase Utley before the 2007 season, and what the Cardinals did with Pujols when they extended him in 2004. Those were instances of teams locking up players after they’d become franchise players, but before they demanded to be paid as such.

The Phillies have missed that opportunity with Hamels, and this $15 million deal is evidence of that. As Longoria, Shields, Moore, Utley, Weaver, and Pujols all showed is that young players are willing to sacrifice earning potential for financial security. As their quality becomes evident, their value goes up. Now, there Hamels has no uncertainty for the Phillies to buy out. He knows he’s a star, he knows he can make nine figures over six years if he wants to, and he has no incentive to take a discount for the Phillies to give him long-term security. If they’d tried to sign him a year or two ago–or even five months ago–he might have, and failing to pounce on that opportunity will likely cost the Phillies somewhere on the order of $40 to 60 million, if it doesn’t cost them Hamels himself.

So as far as the one-year arbitration buyout is concerned, that’s fine. Hamels is well worth front-line starter money, and he’s making a little bit less than that, so he represents, as I’ve said, a minor bargain. But when all is said and done, that this contract is only for one year and not for six could very well lead to Hamels playing out the best years of his career in pinstripes of a different color, and that could cause the Phillies’ run of dominance to unravel quite a bit more rapidly than it might have otherwise.

As the news broke, my Twitter feed was dominated by reactions to the Kendrick signing, ranging from resignation, to fear, to what I assume is a potshot at Darren Rovell, to mocking incredulity, to more mocking incredulity, to unbridled snark, to a dose of placid rationality with an unflattering comparison. For a while, my window to the internet was almost entirely dominated by Kyle Kendrick, with a little bit of France Football‘s Philippe Auclair musing about the political legitimacy of credit rating systems.

The point is, no one seems to really like that the Phillies re-signed Kyle Kendrick.

So what of Kendrick and his contract? Well, Bill wrote earlier this afternoon in big friendly letters, “Don’t Panic,” and I’m inclined to agree with him. In fact, there’s an argument to be made that Kendrick, an extremely durable swingman who never walks anyone and goes from the rotation to the bullpen to Lehigh Valley without ever uttering a word of complaint, is more valuable a piece than we might realize. Perhaps no team relies more on (or expects more from, at any rate) its starting rotation than the Phillies do, so having a Kendrick to plug in for 15 starts might come in handy if one or the other of Joe Blanton‘s elbow or Vance Worley‘s two-seamer prove to be less reliable than expected. If nothing else, we know that Kendrick can come in and pitch slightly-better-than-replacement-level ball for six innings or so on very little notice.

I probably wouldn’t be making this argument if not for the 2011 Red Sox, who, I would argue, missed out on the playoffs last year for want of a pitcher like Kendrick. While the Red Sox went into the season with a projected rotation of Jon Lester, Josh Beckett, Clay Buchholz, John Lackey, and Daisuke Matsuzaka. That group included the reigning AL ERA champion (Buchholz), one of the four or five best young left-handed starters under 30 (Lester), two guys who, while wildly overpaid, were expected to at least be mediocre (Lester and Dice-K), and Josh Beckett. Not a bad group, on the whole.

Well, in the blink of an eye, Buchholz and Matsuzaka were out for the season, Beckett missed a couple starts (though he went on to post the best season of his career, by ERA+ and bWAR), and Lackey suffered what I’ve come to call the Alex Fernandez Injury. In Game 2 of the 1997 NLCS against Atlanta, Marlins pitcher Alex Fernandez blew out his arm but stayed out on the mound at least an inning after it became clear that someone had set off a grenade inside his elbow. After being horrified and fascinated by this incident, I’ve thought of Fernandez every time I’ve watched a pitcher do his elbow, then try to get by 81-mph arrows in the vain hope of the velocity, movement, or location coming back.

While the Marlins yanked Ferndandez after 2 2/3 innings, the Red Sox trotted Lackey back out there for another two months or so with the inside of his elbow resembling nothing so much as the mangled inner workings of the Cylon Raider that Starbuck fixed up in that episode of Battlestar Galactica. So the Red Sox traded for Eric Bedard, who was hurt and ineffective. Then they found themselves in the stretch run with only two effective, healthy pitchers: Beckett and Lester. The other three spots in the rotation went to the injured Lackey, the aged Tim Wakefield, and the ineffective Andrew Miller and Kyle Weiland. In 1949, the Red Sox reeled off an 11-game winning streak over the last two weeks of the season by going to a two-man rotation–over the last 20 games of the season, the Red Sox only won two games that where neither Mel Parnell nor Ellis Kinder recorded a win or a save. When Beckett and Lester were unable to duplicate that success, the Red Sox were screwed.

The presence of Kendrick, who almost certainly won’t be able to duplicate his 3.22 ERA of last season, makes such a disaster profoundly unlikely for the Phillies in the coming year. Now, is $3.6 million too much to pay for a pitcher with a career 4.65 xFIP? Probably, but not disastrously so. He’s almost certain to come down from his excellent 2011, unless his BABIP stays at .261. But with the cost of a marginal win hovering somewhere north of $5 million for this season, Kendrick doesn’t have to be particularly good to justify his contract–about 2/3 of a win will do nicely, and even if he comes up a bit short, overspending by $1 million or so on Kendrick isn’t a disaster for a team whose utter contempt for prudent stewardship of its monetary resources is made clear by the contracts extended to Ryan Howard, Raul Ibanez, Brad Lidge, and Jonathan Papelbon, while Adrian Beltre, Cole Hamels, and Ryan Madson merited little more attention than a panhandler at the PATCO stop at 8th and Market.

And there’s the old adage about there being no such thing as a bad one-year contract.

All in all, there’s a lot to like about this deal: short duration, relatively low cost and expectations, and it fills a need. All in all, Kyle Kendrick is like a slightly overpriced spare tire–kind of irritating if you don’t need him, but absolutely essential if you do. If you want to feel good about the Phillies, you can stop reading now.

HOWEVER.

Today, MLB Trade Rumors noted that the price has come down for the top starting pitchers remaining in the free agent market, including Roy Oswalt, who, it is said, would accept a one-year, $8 million contract. Hiroki Kuroda could be had for $10-11 million. I’ve always liked Kuroda, but his age and his price probably eliminate the Phillies from contention. Of course, if the Phillies hadn’t signed Joe Blanton, Jonathan Papelbon, and Kendrick to deals no one was crazy about when they were signed, they’d have room on their payroll for Kuroda, Madson, and probably one other pitcher. But hindsight, as they say, is 20/20.

But let’s compare  how the three have done, in terms of fWAR, since Kuroda joined the National League in 2008.

As you can see, Oswalt and Kuroda, each in a relative down year, were each somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 times more valuable than Kendrick was. Of course, Kuroda threw a little less than twice as many innings than Kendrick, so let’s say that Kuroda was six times more valuable than Kendrick, per inning pitched, and set aside the intrinsic value that innings pitched have. Oswalt threw about 20 percent more innings than Kendrick, so let’s call him ten times more valuable in 2011.

This is what drives me absolutely busalooey about the way the Phillies do business. They tendered Kyle Kendrick for arbitration, knowing that he’d be in for a multi-million-dollar payday, when better options were out there. Kendrick had a good 2011, buoyed by unsustainably low batted ball numbers. For reference, Happ posted a .261 BABIP, a 4.43 xFIP, and a 2.93 ERA in 2009. In 2011, Happ’s BABIP returned to a relatively normal .297, and his xFIP rose slightly, to 4.59, but his ERA was 5.35. Amazing what a little bit of luck can do to you.

But the Phillies, because of ontological blindness, naivete, or sheer force of their intractably reactionary institutional philosophy, have once again spent $3.6 million on a pitcher with a career low 4.04 xFIP, when $8 million would have nabbed them a pitcher with a career high 3.97 xFIP, or $10 million would have landed them a pitcher with a career high 3.89 xFIP. Imagine shopping for beer like this. Signing Kendrick to this contract with Oswalt and Kuroda where they are in the market is like going to Canal’s, passing the 24-pack of Sam Adams for $12, then passing the Great Lakes variety 24-pack for $15, then deciding you’d rather spend six bucks on two pounders of Beast Light. Those are not the actions of an informed shopper. I know this and I just spent 20 minutes on Google and three minutes tooling around in Excel. The Phillies are an organization worth half a billion dollars or more, with hundreds of full-time employees. How can they not be aware of this?

In a vacuum, re-signing Kendrick is a nice, if slightly pricey insurance policy. Given that the Phillies appear willing to sign Cole Hamels to a one-year deal rather than locking him up long-term (what possible purpose this could serve is a mystery to me), keeping Kendrick on at this price is hardly the most actively harmful personnel decision the Phillies have made this week. And I’ll grant you, that by price, age, and role, Oswalt and Kuroda aren’t completely fair comparisons to Kendrick. But the Phillies have so gravely miscalculated the value of starting pitchers this offseason that if NASA were so off-base, they’d have sent Apollo 11 straight into the center of the Earth.

So did the Phillies do well to re-sign Kendrick? It depends on how you look at it.

It’s always been fun to live in this world of fantasy because things always seem to work out in video games, but playing out the thought exercise hasn’t been as fun with the Phillies of late because, well, over the past five seasons they’ve been one of the best teams in baseball. They’ve had the best record in MLB two years running, and they’ve won five division titles on the trot. Only one other team (the Yankees) even has an active streak of three straight playoff appearances. So going in and blowing up a team that’s won 292 games since 2009 seems a little greedy. Y’all know all of this already, but it’s nice to spell it all out like that while we still can.

Nevertheless, like most fans, I’ve lusted for players on other teams as a matter of habit, and to that effect I wrote several hundred words on my irrational but all-consuming man-love for then-Royals pitcher Jeff Francis last winter. This winter, because pro baseball doesn’t start for three months and because, as a Virginia Tech fan by birth and South Carolina fan by education, my college football season ended last night and college basketball ranks somewhere below cricket on my sporting radar, I’m so bored that I’m willing to try the thought experiment out with the Phillies. What follows is a list of players that, if I lived in a fantasy world where I ran the Phillies, I’d try to acquire if they could be had and the price was right, for no reason other than I love them.

Jackie Bradley Jr., OF, Boston Red Sox

I have never wanted a sports transaction as much as I wanted the Phillies to draft Bradley this past year. Let’s put this in perspective. I can tell you where I was, what chair I was sitting in, and which way my phone was oriented, and the person I was composing a tweet to when the Phillies took Larry Greene with the 39th overall pick in June, then watched the Red Sox scoop up Bradley with the next pick. Jackie Bradley was the MVP of the 2010 College World Series, a five-tool outfielder who would (at the time) have fit in between very nicely between Dom Brown and Jonathan Singleton in the Phillies’ outfield around 2013 or so. Bradley was widely regarded as a top-15 pick before a wrist injury cost him most of his junior year, and while he struggled to stay on the field his last year at college, he posted a .368/.473/.587 slash line in 67 games as a sophomore for the  national champions, and as a freshman he put up a .349/.431/.537 in 63 games.

Though he’s only 5-11 and 180 pounds, Bradley makes the most of his physical attributes with a sharp lefty swing, good speed, and outstanding baseball intelligence. This interview with David Laurila of FanGraphs, published in November, made me want to put my head through the wall: a guy with tools and an almost academically thoughtful approach to hitting? Of course the Phillies passed on him.

Bradley is regarded as a good baserunner and a center fielder who not only possesses the speed and arm to make plays, but the ability to read balls off the bat. And, by all accounts, he’s a great guy whose public reputation and Twitter profile persuade me to put him just below Hunter Pence, but in the neighborhood of Cliff Lee on the List of Guys Who Are Easy to Root For.

While Bradley doesn’t really have a single elite tool, and might not have more than doubles power at the major league level, his on-base ability, speed, and personality, combined with my massive Gamecock homerism, makes Bradley the No. 1 trade priority for my hypothetical video game Phillies.

Jaff Decker, OF San Diego Padres

Decker, like Bradley, is a left-handed outfielder born in 1990 who puts up insane on-base numbers (16.5% walk rate in AA last year) and has a little bit of speed. This might not surprise people in Bradley’s case, because he’s built like a basestealer. Decker, however, looks like Vance Worley ate Joe Blanton. Despite this, he’s stolen 40 bases in four minor-league seasons, and while the Padres have seen short, fat guys put up seasons with a .400 OBP and 20 stolen bases before, Decker’s true potential is probably somewhere more in the neighborhood of Nick Swisher than Tony Gwynn. Still, his plate discipline numbers conjure up images of Bobby Abreu and his name conjures up images of a bounty hunter from Star Wars. I want Decker in my hypothetical future outfield as well.

Adrian Beltre, 3B, Texas Rangers

I’ve tried to avoid established major league stars so far, because it doesn’t take a whole lot of creativity to go on the internet and say that if you were running the Phillies in a video game, you’d trade for Clayton Kershaw and Evan Longoria. But Beltre is different, perhaps the only active player whose Hall of Fame case is better than Chase Utley‘s but will wind up, when all is said and done, with fewer advocates for his enshrinement. Beltre, in 2004, posted one of the best seasons ever for a third baseman, then went off to sign a five-year deal with the Mariners, where he was widely regarded as a disappointment. Of course, what mainstream writers chalked up to  some sort of moral failing on Beltre’s part was more likely a product of 1) it being really hard to put up good power numbers as a righty in Safeco, particularly when your team sucks and 2) the understandable dropoff from 2004 to 2005, considering that Beltre’s 2004 was one of the five best seasons ever for a third baseman.

After an outstanding 2010 with Boston and a very good 2011 with Texas, Beltre stands with more career bWAR than two of the nine current Hall of Fame third basemen, and going into his age-33 season, coming off the second-and third-best seasons of his career, Beltre is in a position to make a run at Scott Rolen for the title of best third baseman of this generation. Of course, everyone knows about Beltre’s hitting–he has a reputation as an impatient hitter with power, whose career .329 OBP and nine 20-home run seasons speak to that fact, but Beltre is quietly one of the best defensive third basemen in the game, a notch below Rolen in his prime or Evan Longoria now, but still worth between one and two wins for his glove alone. Not knowing what to expect from Placido Polanco going forward, and with no young third baseman on the horizon, video game me would make a move for Beltre.

Ben Zobrist, UTIL, Tampa Bay Rays

If Beltre is underrated, I’m not sure what to call Zobrist. In 2009, FanGraphs rated Zobrist as the most valuable position player in the Ameircan League, which was probably a fluke of the ratings system. However, he can play almost literally every position on the diamond, hit anywhere in the lineup, and he posted a 131 wRC+ last year. I’d foresee using Zobrist, a switch hitter who, like Shane Victorino, hits lefties better than righties, at first base instead of Ryan Howard against left-handed starting pitchers a couple times a week, then to spell Chase Utley at second once a week to keep his rapidly deteriorating body in better shape, then in left field, third or shortstop as necessary–essentially, exactly the same way Joe Maddon used him in 2009 and 2010, giving him six starts a week at four different defensive positions. Zobrist’s bat and glove are valuable enough on their own, but that value is compounded by the fact that those assets can be used anywhere on the diamond.

Brandon League, RHP, Seattle Mariners

I know, I know, never ever spend money on relief pitchers, and with Papelbon and Tony No-Dad already in the fold, it’s not like the Phillies, or even a hypothetical Phillies team, is in a position where they need to break that rule. However, League has a killer splitter (my favorite pitch in the game) and a blistering fastball, which make him not only a rather effective relief pitcher but an entertaining one as well. Plus he wears glasses and is all tatted up, so imagine a combination of Ryan Madson, Vance Worley, and Dennis Rodman and you’re beginning to get the picture.

I know that none of these trades will happen anytime soon, though every day that passes without Jackie Bradley, Jr. getting traded to the Phillies is a day that makes me want to curl up in bed and weep the embittered tears of a sorority girl who just found out her boyfriend got that fat slut from Chi O pregnant, while drinking wine coolers and watching A Walk to Remember. On her birthday. The night before a final that she (wipes tears from her cheeks) needs to get a good grade on to pass this class or else my parents aren’t going to let me study abroad in Barcelona next year.

But I’ve come to terms with all that.

The point is that if I were dictator of the world, these five guys would be Phillies. Given the weather and lack of otherwise compelling sports to watch and talk about, sometimes it’s healthy to indulge in such fantasies as these. Feel free to leave your additions in the comments.

I have sort of an odd fixation on retired numbers and captaincy designations. For instance, when Chris Pronger got knocked out for the season, my first question was not “How do the Flyers replace him on the ice?” but “Do they assign a temporary captain? And is it Kimmo Timonen or Danny Briere?” It’s a small subset of the uniform obsession weirdness, and, I’ll grant you, not the coolest thing to care about as a sports fan.

There have been two historical questions to consider, at least for me, looking back on the past half-decade of Phillies history. The first, which Bill addressed the other day, is whether Chase Utley makes the Hall of Fame. The second, and now that he’s signed an extension that will most likely keep him in Philadelphia through his age-36 season, is whether the Phillies ought to retire Jimmy Rollins‘ number.

All things considered, the Phillies are rather conservative on retiring numbers. Despite a history that predates, among other things, the American League and the state of Oklahoma, the Phillies have retired five numbers, not counting Jackie Robinson’s No. 42, which, as you know, was taken out of circulation by Major League Baseball in 1997. In addition, they’ve honored Grover Cleveland Alexander and Chuck Klein without retiring a number because Alexander played before uniform numbers and Klein, by my count, wore seven different numbers in his three stints in Philadelphia. Incidentally, three of the numbers Klein wore for the Phillies, No. 1, No. 32, and No. 36, were the first three numbers retired by the franchise, while a fourth, No. 26, is currently in use by someone who may warrant a marker of his own someday.

But while all of that is fascinating, none of it is particularly relevant to my argument: that Jimmy Rollins, assuming his career trajectory remains more or less normal, should have his number retired. I’m a little biased, since I’ve written volumes on my unrequited man-love for the Phillies’ shortstop, but consider the stats as they stand now.

Jimmy Rollins is currently eighth on the Phillies’ career leaderboard since 1901 in bWAR among position players, third in plate appearances, fifth in games played, third in hits, third in runs, second in doubles, second in triples, second in stolen bases, fifth in fielding runs, and thirteenth in home runs (as a Gold Glove-winning shortstop, for what that’s worth). That’s an impressive list, particularly when you consider that the people he’s behind include Mike Schmidt and Richie Ashburn in most cases, and remember that Rollins has somewhere in the neighborhood of four more years of starting and racking up 600 plate appearances per year to add to those totals. We’ll come back to that later.

The counterargument, of course, is that he’s 27th in OPS and 20th in WPA for the team since 1901, and if a franchise is going to retire five numbers in its history, all for Hall-of-Famers, why would you make room for a guy with a .329 career OBP who was never, if we’re totally honest, anything more than the third-best player on his team? After all, he’s almost certainly not going to make the Hall of Fame, which appears to be the standard for the Phillies retiring players’ numbers.

There’s an answer to that question, but not an entirely satisfying one because it’s absolutely emotional and subjective, so if you think this is absolute hogwash I won’t be personally offended. Jimmy Rollins has the extremely rare opportunity to become a civic institution in Philadelphia. Entering a three-year contract with a vesting option for a fourth, that will run from his age-33 to age-36 seasons, Rollins has 7,537 career plate appearances, 2,463 short of 10,000. He needs about 616 plate appearances a year to reach 10,000 plate appearances for his career, and a little over 631 (his plate appearance total in 2011, incidentally) per year to tie Mike Schmidt’s franchise record of 10,062.

That number, 10,000 is not really important in and of itself, but here’s the complete list of major league ballplayers who have compiled 10,000 plate appearances while playing their entire career with one club: Carl Yastrzemski, Cal Ripken, Stan Musial, Craig Biggio, Robin Yount, Brooks Robinson, George Brett, Al Kaline, Mel Ott, Derek Jeter, Ernie Banks, Luke Appling, Charlie Gehringer, Tony Gwynn, Roberto Clemente, Chipper Jones, and Mike Schmidt.

Let’s say Rollins compiles another nine WAR by the end of his contract, on the way to 10,000 or more plate appearances (3 in 2012, 2.5 in 2013, 2 in 2014, and 1.5 in 2015). That puts him at 43.4 bWAR for his career, which would make him one of the worst players ever to compile 10,000 plate appearances for any number of teams (66th out of what would be 73 if, for the sake of argument, no one beats him there). But someone who plays as long for one team as Rollins will have done seems to automatically get key-to-the-city status, even if he’s hardly the player Jones and Jeter are.

The argument with Rollins is, in essence, the exact opposite of the argument for Chase Utley. Utley, at his peak, may have been one of the ten best second basemen to play the game (exploring that statement would require an entire post unto itself, so I’ll have to ask that you take my word for it for now and trust that the Utley post will come soon enough). But he didn’t become a major league regular until he was almost 27, and after only a few years, age and injuries began to slow Utley down to the point where there’s a serious risk of his major Hall of Fame roadblock not being his counting stats as such, but having played 10 full seasons in the majors.

Rollins, however, was a starting shortstop and leadoff hitter at 22 and has been relatively healthy since then, so he’s been able to take 700 or more plate appearances almost every year. So while Utley’s peak may have been almost twice as good as Rollins’, Rollins’ career might wind up being almost twice as long. From a player evaluation standpoint, this puts Utley unquestionably ahead of his double-play partner, but retiring a number isn’t wholly about how good the player was in a vacuum.

Rollins will almost certainly pass Sherry Magee’s modern-era stolen base record next year (apologies to Ed Delahanty and Sliding Billy Hamilton, who played before baseball had entirely evolved into a civilized game). He will almost certainly end this contract as the franchise’s all-time leader in hits, and is on pace to break Delahanty’s club record of 442 career doubles sometime in the next four years, assuming he stays healthy and in the lineup.

So while it might make sense to put the franchise’s career hits leader up on the proverbial outfield wall (or, rather, his uniform number), it’s not just the statistical legacy Rollins leaves behind that warrants special consideration. The Phillies, it seems, have a tradition of honoring historic teams by retiring the number of one or more of its members. When we see Richie Ashburn and Robin Roberts’ numbers, we think of the Whiz Kids. With Carlton and Schmidt, we see the teams of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and especially the 1980 World Series champions and 1983 National League champions. Jim Bunning’s No. 14 brings back memories of the 1964 Phillies, though I’d really rather it didn’t.

So it would make sense that the franchise should memorialize the past decade, the greatest in more than a century of Phillies baseball by wins and playoff success, by retiring at least one number from the era. The current Phillie with the best chance of making the Hall of Fame is almost certainly Roy Halladay (who wasn’t on the Phillies for either of their World Series appearances), then comes a long distance to either Cole Hamels, who probably has to pitch at this level for another eight or nine years to get there, or Chase Utley, whose spectacular peak is undermined by a lack of longevity, and whose generational greatness has, in any case, been largely overlooked by a BBWAA whose understanding of the game and interrogative inclinations have only atrophied since the days of Ring Lardner. Even if Utley’s peak is great enough to warrant his inclusion into Cooperstown (which, given how short it was, is debatable), it’s probable that the people who observe and write about him for a living have been too oblivious to notice. But, again, that’s another post.

Even if Utley or Hamels make the Hall of Fame (which is unlikely), the man who represents the transformation of the franchise is Rollins, in any case. Rollins arrived in 2001, the year the Phillies went from doormat to also-ran, and it was Rollins’ bold proclamation and MVP season in 2007 that heralded the Phillies’ transformation from mid-table pest to five-time defending division champion. It seems counterintuitive to say that Jimmy Rollins, even at his best, was really only the fourth-best player on the team (behind, at different times, Abreu, Rolen, Utley, Thome, Howard, Werth, Hamels, Halladay, Lee, and, sometimes, Ruiz, Victorino, Rowand, and Burrell), and then lift him up as the avatar for the greatest period of success in the history of the franchise. But that’s what he was.

Bill James once wrote of another shortstop, Bert Campaneris, who, like Rollins, was never the best player on the juggernaut Oakland A’s of the early 1970s, but his arrival during the team’s purgatorial stay in Kansas City heralded the great things to come. So, too, with Rollins, whose early arrival and almost tidal consistency would have, if he were a 10 percent better player, catapulted him into the stratosphere of public adoration that Chipper Jones enjoys in Atlanta or Derek Jeter enjoys in New York.

Rollins, like Campaneris, was never the star, but has always been the pathfinder. The Phillies likely don’t win a title without him, and if that’s hard to believe, it’s only because Rollins has manned shortstop so well for so long that it’s hard for Phillies fans to remember what it’s like to have Kevin Stocker or Desi Relaford out there for 162 games a season. Rollins, whose tenure in Philadelphia has seen the Phillies rise from the ashes of the Francona Era like a phoenix, is the Tenzig Norgay to Utley’s Sir Edumund Hillary.

So to distill nearly 1,800 words into a couple sentences, I think the Phillies, who have never retired the number of a non-Hall-of-Famer, should do so for a shortstop with a .329 OBP. In fact, I think it would be strange if they didn’t.