Rich Hofmann: Dealing with injuries, Phillies GM Amaro must make right moves

THE LAST TIME this happened, second baseman Chase Utley got hit by a pitch thrown by Washington's John Lannan and broke his right hand. It was July 26, 2007, a day game. The Phillies were three games over .500, in third place in the National League East, five games behind the New York Mets - and now a guy having an MVP-caliber season was out.

After seeing the news on television, White Sox general manager Kenny Williams called Pat Gillick, his Phillies counterpart. Some people thought it was because Williams felt lousy for sticking the Phillies with Freddy Garcia, but that motivation was denied all around. Instead, it was said that Williams had a team going nowhere and a salary he was willing to move. The next day, Tadahito Iguchi belonged to the Phillies.

Three days later, in need of pitching at the deadline, Gillick traded for Kyle Lohse. The reaction was reasonably underwhelming among the paying customers. It was only 3 years ago but it was another lifetime for the franchise, the tail end of a 13-year postseason drought that nobody knew was about to end - and that would not have ended had not the Mets gagged on a piece of meat that they still have not successfully digested.

Iguchi? Lohse?

Iguchi hit .304. Lohse went 3-0 with five quality starts out of 11. The Phillies don't win the division that year without them. They were the little moves that defined Gillick's work that season, a year of patching and filling and fulfillment in the end.

With that, all eyes now turn to Ruben Amaro Jr.

Utley went on the disabled list yesterday with a sprained thumb that might or might not be a Really Big Deal; second opinion pending. (And, just guessing here, but people don't tend to run home to Philadelphia for a second opinion when the initial diagnosis is a super-optimistic two thumbs up, you should excuse the expression.)

Third baseman Placido Polanco also went on the disabled list yesterday with an elbow problem that has been nagging for weeks. He's getting another opinion, too. Seven players are on the DL all together, including a third regular starter, catcher Carlos Ruiz.

With that, Amaro now has some decisions to make. If the second opinion on Utley is bad, the general manager is almost certainly going to have to make a move - and the same with Polanco. In 2007, Utley missed a month and a day but Gillick was not willing to make do even for that long - and that was with a much better bench than the Phillies have this season.

Quick OPS comparison time.

In 2007, the top bench guys went like this: Jayson Werth .863, Greg Dobbs .780, Rod Barajas .745, Chris Coste .730, Michael Bourn .727, Abraham Nunez .600.

In 2010, it goes like this: Ross Gload .689, Brian Schneider .639, Ben Francisco .637, Wilson Valdez .624, Juan Castro .492, Dobbs .465.

In other words, there is no comparison. The idea of going even 2 weeks with Dobbs hitting the way he's hitting now seems really unlikely. Even if you can convince yourself that Valdez can build on what he's done already - including a three-run homer last night against Cincinnati - it is harder and harder to convince yourself if Utley is going to be out for 6 weeks, or 8 weeks, or more.

So they wait on the doctors. If the news is bad, the decisions are easier. But here's the thing: Even if you get good news on both Utley and Polanco, don't you either have to see significant improvement over the next couple of weeks or have to do something about the bench before the trade deadline?

These are the days and the decisions when a major league general manager earns his money - not on the days when ownership reaches into the safe and stacks up the neat bundles of cash so that he can push it across his desk to Roy Halladay or Ryan Howard or whomever; not on the days when the biggest chess pieces are maneuvered around the board and into position.

No, these days: When Ruben Amaro Jr. has to figure out a way for the Phillies to survive what is looking more and more like a patching and filling kind of summer.

Send e-mail to hofmanr@phillynews.com,

or read his blog, The Idle Rich, at

http://go.philly.com/theidlerich.

For recent columns go to http://go.philly.com/hofmann.