These Phillies not worth watching

THE GOOD NEWS is that the weather is expected to be 20 degrees warmer than the seasonal average this week, so there are plenty of things to do besides watch Phillies baseball. Take a walk, ride a bike, attempt to lasso an asteroid - anything would make more sense than sitting through another game like the one that unfolded at Citizens Bank Park on Monday night. Forget about the 2-5 record. Plenty of teams have overcome worse starts to make the playoffs. The Phillies themselves did so in 2007, losing six of their first seven games in a season that saw them finish first in the National League East. This is about the product that is being passed off as a baseball team every night.

The Phillies have played 63 innings this season and they have entered exactly 16 of them with a lead. None of those innings occurred on Monday night, when the Mets started their series against them the same way the Royals and Braves did: by outhitting them and by outpitching them, a combination that is tough to overcome in the game of baseball. The result was a 7-2 loss that felt much uglier than the final score and much longer than the official 2:55 time of play.

"It seems like every night I look up and it's Durbs and Valdes and Horst," manager Charlie Manuel said.

He can only imagine what it seems like to everybody else. Against the Mets, Chad Durbin, Raul Valdes and Jeremy Horst finally made it through an outing without being charged with any runs, an objective that had often eluded them in the first 9 1/3 innings that they had worked on the season, when they combined to allow 13 earned runs. But Durbin did allow both of the runners he had inherited to score - he has allowed all seven to score on the season - to turn a 5-2 deficit into a 7-2 deficit. On that front, the Phillies are at a point at which they might as well start cycling in some relievers from Triple A until they find one who can throw strikes consistently. Valdes has options remaining and has thrown 107 pitches over the last 6 days. Whether it is Mike Stutes or Justin De Fratus or Jake Diekman or Cesar Jimenez, the Phillies are getting close to a juncture at which change, even if for change's sake, might not be the worst idea in the world.

The change almost surely will not come in the rotation, where Roy Halladay continued his frustrating search for himself, allowing seven runs in four innings before getting the hook with two on and nobody out in the fifth. There are no experienced options at Triple A Lehigh Valley, but it wouldn't matter if there were: The Phillies' success is contingent on Halladay working through his command problems and establishing himself as a viable No. 3 starter. Anything else is just rearranging the deck chairs.

The Phillies must also operate on faith alone when it comes to their lineup, which was no match for young Mets righthander Matt Harvey's mid-to-high-90s fastball. They managed four hits, one of them for extra bases, and struck out 10 times in 30 at-bats. The biggest piece, naturally, is Ryan Howard, who went 0-for-3 with two strikeouts and a sacrifice fly and is now 4-for-27 with 10 strikeouts and no extra-base hits. But they also need more out of the man who prompted them to trade away a piece of their starting rotation: Ben Revere went 0-for-3 with a walk and has now reached base in only nine of his 31 plate appearances. Carlos Ruiz will be back in 3 weeks, and Delmon Young might be back sooner. Otherwise, what you see is what you will get.

The Phillies say that it is early, that Howard's slump is just the way baseball works, and that Halladay's stuff looks better, and that the front of the bullpen is filled with slow starters. And, really, they do not have a choice but to believe that all of that is true. But if the Phillies really are a good baseball team, they have not yet come close to showing it.

"It's early, but I'm concerned about our pitching," Manuel said. "I still think we are going to score some runs. The guy tonight threw a good game. Their guy, he's a top-of-the-rotation guy. He threw a heck of a game. But at the same time, we're going to score some runs . . . Right now, we've got to work through the problem we have with our pitching, and things will work for us."

Until then, you might want to find something else to watch.

Blog: philly.com/HighCheese