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Goodbye, my pretty steed.

Ruben Amaro, speaking to reporters today, said that he’s “not terrible optimistic” that Cliff Lee can avoid surgery on his sore old man’s elbow which would require him to be out 6-8 months and, according to Lee, potentially end his career. Lee has a tear in his flexor tendon and will try to throw through it. The surgery would not be Tommy John.

Now seems like a good time to reprise Buster Olney’s thoughts on the Phillies’ mishandling of Lee:

The Phillies have repeatedly missed windows to make deals or better position themselves in recent years. When they traded for Roy Halladay and almost simultaneously swapped Cliff Lee to Seattle, some other teams wondered why they hadn’t been given a chance to make offers for Lee. When Lee was claimed on waivers by the Dodgers in the summer of 2012, the Phillies never engaged L.A. about what might be possible, and a few weeks later, the Dodgers concluded the massive trade with the Red Sox that allowed Boston to dump the contracts of Carl Crawford and Josh Beckett, attaching them to Adrian Gonzalez. Now Lee is coming back from surgery and is essentially untradable until he can demonstrate he is healthy, at age 36, after being shut down for elbow trouble last summer.

Well played, Phillies. Well played.