Phillies: Team of Destiny

Sometimes you have to look hard to find something to complain about. Some days it's just too sunny, too breezy, and your favorite team is winning and nothing is wrong. Other times, you're browsing the sports interwebs and someone named Danny Knobler just hits you in the face.

Pat Burrell has been so good that the only question people are asking is whether the Phillies will make the mistake of giving him a new contract.

Last summer, I noticed that the Mariners' stats suggested they were outperforming their skills over a short period of time. Sure enough, my prediction proved accurate: the M's collapsed. In this case, Pat Burrell is outperforming his career numbers by a significant margin. I'm more than willing to put my reputation on the line and suggest that Pat Burrell is due for a slump. Though it's true that players can sometimes exceed their career numbers for a season late in their career (Jorge Posada anyone?), it's an exception that doesn't negate the rule.

Someone remember to look it up at the end of the year and see if Burrell's OPS+ is still at 155.

And in an era where one of the best indicators of success is a healthy pitching staff, the Phillies have used the same 12 pitchers to work every inning this year.

Though I suppose you could attribute it to good managerial managering of the pitching staff, managers don't do that much. I think you could attribute this to good general managering; maybe Pat Gillick is good at signing pitchers that don't get hurt. You could attribute this to the pitchers, for their gritty and tough and workmanlike outlook and working hard at their work so they don't get hurt to miss work.

I think, actually, that you have to attribute this to "luck".

Besides, this is a team that plays hard, all the time.

Oh boy.

"The grittiest team I saw all year," one scout said. "I love the way they play. It's a credit to (manager Charlie Manuel), and also to Pat (Gillick), because he put them together."

Again, the unnamed scouts. I wonder if the grittiness of the team is responsible for Cole Hamels' awesome pitching or for Chase Utley's ability to hit basballs to Saturn. I wonder if the grittiness caused Pat Burrel to learn to hit better than he has in his entire career. I think, on the top of Pat Gillick's list of things to acquire to help the Phillies, GRIT was written in capitals.

Victorino likes the word "gritty,"

Probably because the myth of grittiness is the only reason people like Victorino still have a job.

pointing to a mid-May game against the Braves in which the Phillies trailed 8-0 in the fifth, then came back to put the tying run on base in the ninth.

Wow. They didn't even win! What a bunch of losers. This point is more likely to make me believe that the Phillies aren't World Series material

"We never give up," he said. "It starts with (Manuel)."

Charley Manuel never gives up, probably because his job mostly consists of sitting in the dugout telling grown men to go do what they've been practicing their whole lives.

Ugh. This article sucked.

It's Unexplainable

Really, the obsession that baseball writers have with these two.

I don't love Jayson Stark or anything, but he's usually a pretty reasonable guy. And actually, this article isn't over-the-top; it just repeats pretty much everything said about Rolen and the most bad ass shortstop-turned-German-wrestler around.

The highlights:

DUNEDIN, Fla. -- It's 786 miles (and one trip through the customs line) from Busch Stadium to the Rogers Centre. But Scott Rolen and David Eckstein don't measure that journey on their odometers.

What are they measuring it on? Their rulers? Their yardsticks?

Oh. Yeah. Probably their hearts. There's a lot of miles on old Eckstein's heart, seeing as he's motorvated every team he's ever been on to many wins.

No matter what you've read or heard, they never wanted to leave St. Louis, a place where they won together. A place where they were once showered with sea-of-red adoration together. But stuff happens. And it sure did happen to them.

Stuff does indeed happen, Jayson.

So now here they are, bound for the left side of the infield in a city north of the border. Here they are, about to become the first two infielders to transplant themselves into some other team's infield, within two years of starting at least 80 games for a World Series champion, since Bill White and Dick Groat went from the Cardinals to the Phillies in 1966.

Classic Stark.

Here they are, in their blue jerseys and blue caps -- not even a red sweatsock in sight. And it sure is fascinating that their new employers don't seem the least bit interested in the events that propelled them toward their awkward exits from St. Louis.

Not just a regular sock, ladies and gentlemen, but not even a red SWEAT sock is visible.

"Those two guys exemplify what we want to be," Blue Jays GM J.P. Ricciardi says. "That's why they're better fits for us. They're grinders, and they're dirtbags. Not that the guys we had before weren't. But that might be the one piece we were missing, from the standpoint of getting in there with the Red Sox and Yankees and just grinding it out from a day-to-day standpoint."

In nearly every profession in America, being called a "dirtbag" is a pretty bad thing. Yet, in some strange fashion, Ricciardi seems to be using it as an endearing term. Strange.

Do not fear, AL East fans. The Blue Jays are in the hands of a man who thinks that the difference between his team and the Red Sox/Yankees juggernauts is a lack of grinding it out on a day-to-day standpoint.

"Just the style of these two guys is something we needed," manager John Gibbons says. "It's not like either of them are such great players that everything comes so easy to them; they're cruisers. They both get down and dirty. And teams that win always have their share of those guys. I think we needed more of that."

What? I would think that if they had to work hard at certain things, they would be the opposite of cruisers! I think of "cruisers" as players who are :

1. So good at baseball they seem to cruise their way to ridiculous statistics every year with little effort (see Pujols, Albert and Rodriguez, Alex)
-or-
2. Very average at baseball but have the happy disposition that makes them just cruise through the clubhouse, because nobody is really jealous of their skills and their MVPs. (see Casey, Sean).

OK, maybe these guys are cruiser #2. Also, I like how John Gibbons gives them a nasty backhanded compliment: they're not so good ... they have to work hard!

Once, their old team said the same stuff about these two men. And it was all true. The fit was perfect, for both of them. They played on a 100-win team together in 2005. They played on a team that won the World Series in 2006. Eckstein was a World Series MVP. Rolen ripped off a 10-game postseason hitting streak.

I like how Stark uses these gaudy stats to describe how these two men had such successful careers. I like how they pleasantly obscure the fact that, in the last three seasons, those two gentlemen put together one combined season in which they OPS+'d over the league average.

That's how "stats" are "good". They can make a way for a pretty below average player seem like the best player in baseball.

There's a bunch of other crap about Rolen fighting with LaRussa and Eckstein being small. But that's the worst of it. I hope that my boss never tells me I'm not too good at my job, but he likes how I grind my way through the work day.