Ruben Amaro is way off base

WHILE IT may be a tad presumptuous to attempt to speak for an entire fan base, I should note that, over the past six months or so, my job has evolved from a pure writing role to include some light interpersonal therapy work with Phillies fans. They recognize me from the five years I spent as the Daily News' traveling beat writer.

Sure, it can get awkward when somebody approaches and starts ranting about some guy named Ruben when I am hanging out with a friend or acquaintance who is unfamiliar with the strength of the emotional ties that bind this city to its sports teams (FRIEND: Ex-boyfriend? ME: General manager). But they say that talking is helpful in times like these, and so I let people do it. Besides, who am I kidding? I don't have many friends.

I mention all of this because I feel it provides me with a unique window into the tortured souls of Phillies fans, to the point that I feel comfortable making generalizations about their condition. And Tuesday's declaration by the aforementioned Ruben that Chase Utley is no longer the team's everyday second baseman offered an excellent learning moment for a front office that at times seems confused by the suggestion that it deserves a terminal level of blame for the crime against sport that its baseball team commits each night.

On several occasions, a member of that front office has reminded fans and media that it is the same front office that won five straight division titles, and, besides, you can't expect a team to be better than a five-alarm Dumpster fire every year, can you?

No doubt, there is something to be said for that rationale. It might be the word "bullbleep" disguised by a cough, but that's still something, and even the most disaffected of fans must admit that the troika of Ruben Amaro Jr., David Montgomery and Pat Gillick was in office for the greatest run of success in franchise history. Correlation, causation, whatever - they were there.

Yet that understanding dies a violent death the moment the front office gives a light rap on the door frame, invites itself to sit on the bed and starts to deliver a monologue about how nothing lasts forever and everything has a shelf life and sometimes we have to say goodbye to the things we love today so that we can have things that we love tomorrow. No amount of soothing end-of-episode music will make it easy for a fan base to nod in acquiescence as the man in charge of one of the worst rosters of all time tells them he doesn't consider the most popular player in franchise history to be the club's everyday second baseman anymore.

The fan base hears that and it says, "Yo, Ruben, who says Utley considers you the everyday general manager?" If that sounds harsh, then there is a hell of a double standard for management and labor, and that's what defies this fan base's comprehension. The Phillies just jettisoned Kevin Correia and Sean O'Sullivan, because this is a results-based business, and their results were poor. But the result of the jettisoning was that the Phillies were forced to promote a pitcher with an 8-something ERA, because they do not have pitchers of any other kind. By most measures, that qualifies as a poor result. Yet according to the front office's logic, the result's poorness is an innate characteristic, born of some mystical deterministic force against which all of us are powerless, because its poorness could not have been a result of a front office that failed at its job. After all, this front office won five division titles, and, as Gillick recently said, they didn't get dumb overnight.

And then people with rational minds start to talk to themselves and smoke starts coming out of their ears and they double and triple check the historical record and, well, yes, see, here it is, just as I thought, Chase Utley also won five division titles, and so did Ryan Howard, and so did Charlie Manuel. And Milt Thompson was the hitting coach for some of the best offenses this city has ever seen, and Brad Lidge pitched a perfect season and Roy Halladay pitched a perfect game. And do we really have to keep going, or is it pretty clear why people have a hard time accepting the notion that the only folks who do not deserve a terminal amount of blame for the Quad-A slop they watch each night are the folks at the top of the chain of command?

Blog: ph.ly/HighCheese