An Open Letter to Ruben Amaro, Jr.

Ruben,

How are you doing? It’s been a tough sev­en months, huh? You prob­a­bly thought that things would be going swim­ming­ly by now, that Roy Hal­la­day and Placido Polan­co would make us for­get Cliff Lee, that our Phillies would be cruis­ing to their fourth straight divi­sion title, did­n’t you?You’ve tak­en plen­ty of heat for trad­ing Cliff Lee, which I hope you real­ize is under­stand­able, but this isn’t about that. This is about admit­ting you’ve made a mis­take. Maybe it’s some­thing pecu­liar to gen­er­al man­agers and Steve Jobs, but it’s okay to admit mis­takes. We’re human. It happens.

Even if we set aside the Cliff Lee trade, you’ve made some pret­ty spec­tac­u­lar blun­ders since we lost the World Series. You signed Juan Cas­tro. You made Joe Blan­ton an unmove­able object, after dis­cov­er­ing how unap­peal­ing he was last win­ter. Now he’s Adam Eaton rein­car­nate. You signed Ryan Howard to a deal that any­one who knows any­thing about base­ball thinks is oner­ous to say the very least. Would Jim Thome have been appeal­ing to any­one had we not been sub­si­diz­ing his contract?

You said you want­ed this team to be com­pet­i­tive for years to come. I’m not so sure you’ve accom­plished that. We’re left with Domon­ic Brown as the last hope for the Phils imme­di­ate future and he’s stuck in Triple A because you don’t have the where­with­al to make room for Ibanez on the bench. Actu­al­ly, Char­lie’s begun pla­toon­ing Raul and Ben Fran­cis­co, but that does­n’t exact­ly warm my heart either.

Let’s not even talk about that sor­ry excuse we polite­ly call the bullpen.

I under­stand it’s been a tough sea­son. The team is snakebit and has­n’t made any excus­es for their per­for­mance. For that the Phillies should be com­mend­ed. The Mets tanked it last sea­son under very sim­i­lar cir­cum­stances. Bra­vo. But where will you take cov­er when Utley’s back, when Hap­p’s end­ed his minor league odyssey? You’ll be where you are right now, on the hot seat, tak­ing flack from a press corps you clear­ly don’t respect.

You could be the George W. Bush of gen­er­al man­agers if you’re not careful.

You want to change per­cep­tion about this team right now? Pro­mote Brown, clock be damned. Unless you want the sta­di­um to look like Nation­als Park in August, it would be a good idea to get that man up to the big leagues. He’s not going to be any more ready than he is right now.

Will it mean a play­off berth? Prob­a­bly not. It’s pret­ty clear from the strug­gles we’re hav­ing that even a team with Cliff Lee would­n’t win. Does that mean we should just throw in the tow­el? No. If we’ve learned any­thing from the past three sea­sons, the NL East can be an unpre­dictable thing. But if we’re being real­is­tic, let’s just get Dom Brown to the big leagues and retool for 2011.