The Rotation

by Jim Salisbury

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Introduction

  Meet The Rotation and Its Supporting Cast.

  COLE HAMELS

  ROY HALLADAY

  ROY OSWALT

  CLIFF LEE

  THE FIFTH STARTER

  THE SUPPORTING CAST

  On to the Season.

  SPRING TRAINING

  APRIL

  MAY

  JUNE

  JULY

  AUGUST

  SEPTEMBER

  ONE OF THE BEST

  OCTOBER

  EPILOGUE

  INDEX

  Copyright Page

  To Mom, Dad and Ann, in appreciation of all your love and support.

  —Jim Salisbury

  To my late grandparents: Roy and Josie Vierzba and Art and Wanda Zolecki. My family’s four aces.

  —Todd Zolecki

  FOREWORD

  Three decades had flown by since I’d stood inside the locker room of a professional sports team, waiting for athletes to emerge from mysterious hiding places, and with any luck at all—I thought—three decades more would fly, as well. I’d been liberated from that life by an offer to write for a magazine in 1982, and nothing could possibly un-liberate me . . . until something did.

  The Rotation.

  I watched my hand in surprise—a few weeks after the Phillies’ December 2010 ambush acquisition of Cliff Lee—as it rose to volunteer me to write a series of stories for Sports Illustrated that would chronicle the team’s historical starting pitching staff and their 2011 season. What would it be like, I wondered through that winter, for a team and a city to send four masters to the mound in succession, over and over again, for six—and surely seven—straight months?

  The Four Aces, the Four Horsemen, the Fab Four: Every Philly writer worth his carpal tunnel had a nickname for them. Mine was The Legion of Arms, for it was a rotation that tickled the child inside an aging sports fan, a foursome that conjured memories of comic-book superheroes joining forces to quell their foes. And, yep, it was easy to feel like a 10-year-old on that February day when the Legion sat down shoulder to shoulder for its season-opening press conference.

  But then came the reality of April and May, the hard fact that I’d have to spend long hours standing in a clubhouse, staring at vacant lockers or at players’ backs. Back in my old life: back on a beat.

  It’s the perfect multilayered word, it occurred to me as I tried to hang in there with the two beat men who authored this book—Jim Salisbury of CSNPhilly.com and Todd Zolecki of MLB.com. Beat, as in the daily round that a cop makes, keeping tabs on the locals. Beat, as in the fear of getting beat by the competition that every daily reporter lives in, especially on a media-magnet story like this one. Beat, as in how a man feels trying to put in the ridiculous hours that Jim and Todd invested each day to capture this story and this book. Beat, as in the rhythmic tick of the clock as we waited for the Four Aces to materialize and articulate what it feels like to mingle with co-masters and dominate the best hitters in the world.

  And waited . . . and waited. . . . For the Legion of Arms, just like the superheroes they conjured, were a terse and tight-lipped crew, rationing out a few careful words in their speech bubbles and then hurrying off to ply their craft, to condition their bodies, to recover in their oxygen tent, to ice their arms, to study their foes on video, or to talk hunting and fishing in a back room.

  This was a story, I quickly realized, that a writer would have to work at from the edges, widening his scope to teammates, pitching coaches, opponents, broadcasters, fans. Watching Jim and Todd work it relentlessly day after day for far more days than I—melding into the media pack around a player one moment and then slipping away the next, following their instincts to poke around alone on the margins—left me with a vast respect for what it took to work this beat.

  And in the end, no matter how hard they worked it, they were always at the mercy of it. It could end, as it did, with catastrophic suddenness, leaving their audience frozen and wanting only to push the whole thing away.

  But the secret of the master fan is not unlike that of the master pitcher—the secret that Doc Halladay took seven years to learn: It can’t be only about outcome. It has to be about each moment along the way. “It’s not so much about a distinct finish line,” Doc said one day, when I finally got him to sit down. “I might not always finish everything, but it’s the doing of it that matters. That became how I measured myself. It’s not so much finishing as it is continually beating at it. I had to learn to be in the moment.”

  The moments. The ones that everyone saw and heard, and the ones that only guys like Salisbury and Zolecki saw and heard. The beating at it, every day of the best season in a Phillies fan’s life—up ’til the last day. That’s what this book offers. You weren’t ready for it last November or December, with that last missed note in your ears, but now the thaw’s coming fast, and what a shame to lose the beat of that summer song.

  —Gary Smith, November 2011

  INTRODUCTION

  John Kruk has never been afraid to say what’s on his mind. Plain. Simple. Organic. If the thought is rattling around the Krukker’s brain, it’s going to find its way to his tongue and someone else’s ears. And if it makes you uncomfortable, well, Here’s Johnny.

  “It must be time to talk about my nuts,” Kruk said at the start of a news conference in Clearwater, Florida, in March 1994.

  A gaggle of baseball writers winced empathetically when Kruk, then the Phillies first baseman, spoke those words as he rejoined the team after starting treatment for testicular cancer that month.

  Seventeen years later, in a news conference at Citizens Bank Park, Kruk was once again saying it like it is. Seated at a dais on the day it was announced that he’d been elected as the 2011 inductee to the team’s Wall of Fame, Kruk couldn’t resist giving Phillies President David Montgomery a little poke.

  “If you had given us a hundred and how much million, we could have been a little better,” Kruk said.

  Montgomery smiled sheepishly.

  “Things have changed, John,” he said.

  Have they ever.

  Just ask Scott Rolen. When he played third base for the Phillies from 1996 to 2002, baseball seemed irrelevant in Philadelphia. The team had payrolls that ranked among the lowest in the game, it played in front of an ocean of empty seats at Veterans Stadium, and losing seasons piled up like snowdrifts.

  Now?

  In 2011, the Phillies’ opening-day payroll exceeded $175 million and ranked second only to the payroll of the mighty New York Yankees. They won their fifth straight National League East title, and their streak of sellouts reached 204 regular-season games.

  “It’s a far cry from hot dog wrappers blowing around the turf at the Vet,” Rolen said during a visit to Citizens Bank Park with the Cincinnati Reds in May 2011. “There were 6,000 people in the stands, we were 30 back, and headed toward 90-something losses. That’s not really going on here anymore. It seems to me the whole Phillies baseball culture has changed. The only similarity I see is the cheesesteaks.”

  Terry Francona has seen the change, too. He was just 37 when he was hired to manage the Phillies in 1997. It was his first big-league manager’s job. Francona never kidded himself. He got the job because the Phillies had plummeted to the basement of the National League and getting out of it would be a long, arduous journey, the kind best suited for a young man.

  “In those days, the expectation was if we played well, we’d get to .500,” Francona said. “If they were ready to win, they wouldn’t have hired me. They would have hired [Jim] Leyland or someone like that.”

  Francona was fired after four losing seasons and w
ent on to win the World Series with the Boston Red Sox in 2004 and 2007.

  He returned to Philadelphia with the Red Sox in the summer of 2008, and his daughter Alyssa joined him on the trip. She had attended high school in Bucks County when her father managed the Phillies and Padilla’s Flotilla was as close as anyone could get to a parade in Philadelphia. Walking around Center City on that June day, Alyssa noticed a change. She felt the electricity that can light up a town when its baseball team is good.

  “Dad, it’s really different around here,” Alyssa Francona told her father. “Everyone is wearing red.”

  And it’s not just the fans that are wearing red. Roy Halladay wears red pinstripes now. So does Cliff Lee and Roy Oswalt and, of course, Cole Hamels. Now that, folks, is a starting pitching rotation, the best in baseball, one might say. Whereas Francona once had to send the immortal Calvin Maduro to the minors, and then recall him to be his No. 2 starter—all in the same week in 1997—Charlie Manuel can give the ball to a Cy Young winner, an ERA champ, or a World Series MVP on any given day.

  That’s why, entering the 2011 season, the Phillies were considered World Series favorites, right there with Francona’s Red Sox and the ubiquitous Yankees, baseball’s big boys.

  It might not have worked out that way, with the Phillies and Red Sox playing in the World Series, but it sure was fun to fantasize about as the season approached.

  “They’ve done a terrific job,” Francona said of the Phils in March 2011. “They’re in a different place now. They have the ballpark. They’re a big market. And people are hungry for a good team. Those people deserve a team like that. It’s good for baseball.”

  Francona paused that March day as images of the Phillies’ rotation passed through his mind.

  “I don’t know if I’d want to be in the National League facing those pitchers every day, but they’ve got a good thing going,” he said.

  On August 15, 2011, Jim Thome made big baseball news when he became just the eighth player to hit 600 big-league home runs. He did it while wearing a Minnesota Twins uniform. Surely, there would never be a bad time to give one of baseball’s all-time good guys a tip of the cap for this special accomplishment, but that’s not why we bring up his name here.We mention Thome because one could make a case that baseball began to matter again in Philadelphia in December 2002 when Thome, baseball’s premier free agent that winter, decided to sign with the Phillies, who had smartly targeted him to be the ticket-selling booster shot of excitement the team needed with a new stadium on the way.

  Now, let’s not kid anyone here. There wasn’t a lot of play on Thome that winter. Most of the big-market teams were set at first base, and the Cleveland Indians, the team for which he had played a decade and bashed 334 home runs, were looking to go young and cheap, and that was reflected in an offer that didn’t come close to the $85 million that the Phillies ultimately gave Thome. In a lot of ways, the Phillies were the only open chair—or certainly the most richly appointed—when the music stopped that winter. But what did it matter? A premium talent chose Philadelphia and that meant something, especially after stars like Rolen and Curt Schilling had run from the place and a kid named J. D. Drew refused to come.

  Jim Thome helped make Philadelphia a baseball destination long before Roy Halladay, Cliff Lee, and Roy Oswalt carved that label in stone. Thome created a buzz, an electricity, a credibility, a feeling that baseball was on its way to mattering again in Philadelphia, just as it did in the late 1970s and early 1980s and again, for one enchanting season, in 1993.

  Thome’s impact was brief. After just three seasons, he was traded to clear the way for young slugger Ryan Howard, one of the most exciting players in franchise history. Howard solidified himself as part of a core of players that included shortstop Jimmy Rollins and second baseman Chase Utley. That group of young, homegrown players began to gel as the Phillies opened the doors to Citizens Bank Park, which, in time, became the place to be for Philadelphia sports fans and an economic boon to the franchise. General Manager Ed Wade, who’d helped build the team’s talent core, was let go after the 2005 season and veteran executive Pat Gillick, a two-time World Series-winning GM in Toronto, was brought in to push the team over the goal line.

  Baseball finally blossomed once again in Philadelphia in 2007. Rollins ignited the buzz before the season when he proclaimed the Phillies as the team to beat in the NL East. Rollins’ confidence was admirable, but in many ways his prediction was audacious, even foolhardy. This team hadn’t been to the postseason in 14 years. Fourteen. What balls this kid had!

  Indeed. What balls Jimmy Rollins had. And what a ball he had winning the NL MVP Award as the Phils won the division title on the final day of the season. A year later, with some valuable postseason experience in their satchels, the Phillies finally got over the goal line. Led by 24-year-old left-hander Cole Hamels and perfect closer Brad Lidge, they blazed through the postseason, won the World Series for just the second time in the franchise’s 126-year history, and rode down Broad Street to the delirium of two million people, some of whom wore red shirts emblazoned with a word that said it all: Phinally. Finally, after 25 years of 0-fers, Philadelphia had a pro sports champion. The once irrelevant Phillies owned the town, and Manager Charlie Manuel, an unpopular hire who’d been kicked around like an old football since arriving in 2005, was suddenly royalty.

  On one of the parade floats that day rode a kid from Northeast Philadelphia, Rhawnhurst to be exact. Ruben Amaro Jr., then 43, was the team’s assistant general manager and apprentice to Gillick. In just a few days, Gillick’s contract would run out. His dual mission—to show an organization how to cover the final miles to a championship and groom Amaro for the GM job—was complete. Now it was Amaro’s turn to run the team’s baseball operations. In a sense, he had been born for the job. His father, Ruben Sr., had been an infielder for the club in the 1960s. As a youngster, Ruben Jr. had been a batboy for the club and he played for the team in the 1990s.

  When Ed Wade took over as GM late in 1997, he was handed the keys to a Yugo with an AM radio and windup windows.

  Ruben Amaro Jr. was handed the keys to a loaded Mercedes. And he had just enough confidence—arrogance might be a better word—to sit tall behind the wheel and blast the stereo as he maneuvered the team through its best run in franchise history.

  Amaro’s playing career brings to mind that great old Jim Palmer quote. When speaking about his former Baltimore Orioles manager, Earl Weaver, Palmer said, “All Earl knows about big-league pitching is that he couldn’t hit it.” Palmer was wrong in some ways. Weaver actually knew plenty about pitching. He knew it was king in baseball. “The only thing that matters is what happens on that little hump in the middle of the field,” Weaver once said. Amaro, a lifetime .235 hitter in 435 big-league games, knew the importance of pitching long before he started working for Gillick, but his commitment to it was made even stronger during his time under Gillick, a pitching-first guy. Not long after becoming GM, Amaro said, “Pitching rules the day.” It became one of his favorite aphorisms. He didn’t just say it. He lived it. He had an obsession with pitching, an obsession that led to The Rotation.

  Trying to parlay Philadelphia’s newfound status as a destination city for ballplayers—it’s amazing how far the shine of one of those World Series rings can radiate—Amaro spent part of his first season as GM trying to make a trade for the best pitcher in baseball, Roy Halladay, the 2003 American League Cy Young Award winner. When that deal fell through, he landed Cliff Lee, the 2008 AL Cy Young winner.

  Lee helped take the Phillies back to the World Series in 2009 and helped increase Philadelphia’s luster as a destination city for top talent. Within the next nine months, Halladay and Roy Oswalt both waived no-trade clauses to come to the Phils. Philadelphia used to regularly appear on players’ no-trade clauses. Now, to hell with those private jets, they’d hitchhike to town to be fitted for red pinstripes.

  Of course, the lure all started with the winning.

  Things
have changed, John.

  “I remember when I first came up,” said Rollins, who debuted in 2000, when the team was still in Veterans Stadium and finished tied with the Chicago Cubs for the worst record in the game. “We’d have a meeting the first day of spring training and the GM would say our goal was to win the World Series. We’d kind of look around and think, ‘Yeah, right.’ But now we have that meeting and we all believe it.”

  To fully grasp what great baseball times these are in Philadelphia, you have to go back to a darker day when the Phils played in front of thousands of empty seats at the Vet.

  During spring training in 1997, Curt Schilling practically pleaded for a contract extension. Three months later, before the deal even officially kicked in, he was raising his hand, offering to waive his no-trade clause. The Phillies went 4-22 in June of that year. During a three-game series at Camden Yards in that ugly season, President Bill Clinton came out to a game. Security rules dictated that all players be in uniform when Clinton came through the clubhouse for a pregame visit. Before Clinton arrived, a security force swept through the clubhouse. The room was packed as Clinton made the rounds.

  The scene provided a perfect opportunity for the sharp-tongued Schilling.

  “You’ll have to excuse me if I seem a little nervous, Mr. President,” Schilling said as he reached through a crowd to shake Clinton’s hand. “I’m not used to being in my uniform in front of this many people.”

  There was no greater critic of the Phillies in the late 1990s than Schilling. Though he could often be self-serving, he pitched his ass off and there was never a doubt that he wanted to play for a winner. He’d often spoken of how great Philadelphia was in 1993 when he pitched for the surprise NL champions, but by 1996 those days were long gone, and by 2000, when Schilling finally forced a trade to Arizona . . . well, as he said a few years later, “We had fourteen big-league players on those teams.”