Phillies

Ruben Amaro Went on the WIP Morning Show Today to Remind Us How Clueless He Is

By Kyle Scott

Published: Nov 22nd, 2013 · 2:43 PM EST

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Ruben Amaro called in to the WIP Morning Show today to try and explain why he refuses to do things that will make the Phillies better. He did a great job of it.

Some of these quotes are from CBS Philly:

“I don’t care how young they are. You can have the youngest guys on the planet, but if they don’t win baseball games, what good does that do you? My whole job is to try to win baseball games. Our fans want us to win.”

“We have some young players on our roster. A guy like Brownie [Dom Brown], and a guy like [Ben] Revere, and we’ll have probably [Cody] Asche or Maikel Franco at third base,” Amaro said during a surprise call to Angelo Cataldi and the 94WIP Morning Show on Friday. “They are some young players, but we can’t have a stockpile young players and expect our team, the way it’s set up, to win baseball games on a consistent basis. That’s my job, to put a team on the field that is going to win baseball games.”

Getting younger for the sake of getting younger isn’t what the Phillies need, Rubert. They need to get younger because virtually every player in their aging core is an injury risk, and signing 36- and 35-year-olds as the first two moves of the offseason does nothing to lessen that risk. I don’t think anyone is implying that the Phillies need to totally blow it up. They have too much money and there’s too much parity in baseball for that to be the case. Look no further than the Red Sox, who turned it around in one winter. But you need to have the right guys to do that. There needs to be a plan. Amaro doesn’t act like he has a plan. He just grabs the best short-term name based on archaic metrics (speaking not just about Byrd and Ruiz) and crosses his fingers. He’s putting together a bunch of questionable pieces instead of building towards a whole. It’s like a kid going into a Toys”R”Us and grabbing handfuls of Legos, K’Nex, Play-Doh and a 36-year-old beefed up PED user. Some those things may be useful, and some may smell good, but they’re not going to fit together real well. What’s worse, is that they were all returns or defective items. Rube bought the fucking Lego Star Wars Red Five X-wing Star Fighter, but its Hyperdrive is broken and R2-C2 is a shell of its former self. At this point, the Phillies are chasing their tail and trying to plug holes that are popping up more quickly than they can be plugged (!!!). You’re sinking, Rube! It’s a losing battle. There needs to be a paradigm shift. They keep trying the same things which, obviously, aren’t working. Haven’t we heard this quote before?

“We need Ryan Howard to produce for us and if he produces for us we will have success. He is a very key element to our club,” Amaro said. “My mind is open on everything and so I can’t close myself off or allow our organization to close ourselves off from different ways in trying to improve our club. I believe that Ryan Howard still has a lot left. We’ll find out, because he is going to be playing for us. We didn’t even think about moving him now, probably at the lowest point of his value. Ryan Howard needs to play for the Philadelphia Phillies and do well so that we can have success, and if he doesn’t then it’s going to be difficult for us to have success.”

Amaro said that today. But he could’ve said that in 2011 or 2012 and you wouldn’t have known the difference.

Audio here.