Amaro_finger

Ruben Amaro greeted everyone’s work week this morning with comments that fans don’t “understand the game” and “they bitch and complain.” He then walked back those statements, saying he didn’t mean all the fans. Just the ones who complain. You know, all the fans. Unsurprisingly, most people didn’t like that.

Some local TAKES:

Ruben Amaro has “failed to remember that he’s not in a position to bitch about fans who bitch about his baseball team,” Mike Sielski wrote. “Deep down, maybe Amaro believes that he’s entitled to more latitude than he’s gotten from the Phillies’ fan base … and he’d be right if the Phillies’ subsequent collapse weren’t so predictable and preventable, if he and the team’s ownership group and decision-makers hadn’t held on too tightly to that brief period of greatness, if the Phillies hadn’t wasted the 2013 and 2014 seasons in a laughable attempt to reload instead of beginning their rebuilding then.”

Matt Mullin at the PhillyVoice called Amaro “the smartest man in baseball according to general manager Ruben Amaro, Jr.,” which hits at the core of many of the Phillies’ problems. Ruben doesn’t believe in analytics. Ruben doesn’t think the fans “get” his plan. Ruben has, in the past, said he doesn’t believe in plans. Because in Ruben’s eyes, he only has to do what Ruben wants to do. Ruben was handed a fully functioning World Series champion and has let the wheels fall off slowly, sadly, and above all else, predictably. He’s overpaid aging stars, failed to turn quasi-talented prospects into talented players, and refused to ship away talented players to acquire prospects. Yet, we don’t know the game. Ruben is the smart one.

And this plan? “There very well might be a plan,” Matt Lombardo said. “However, firing proverbial shots at a fanbase of an organization that hasn’t made the postseason since 2011 and has lost 89 games in consecutive seasons, isn’t the wisest decision. Especially, for a general manager that many of those fans wish were already on the hotseat.”

Hardball Talk’s Craig Calcaterra – a notorious troll of all things Philly – thinks Ruben might actually be right, but he’s “done nothing in the past several years which entitles him to offer these kinds of truths in as undiplomatic and as snotty a fashion as he does here.”

Ruben will be on the radio soon to once again talk about these comments, and he’ll likely dig himself even deeper into the hole he’s already dug. We’ll have those comments when he makes them.