With Utley out indefinitely, Phillies ponder options

CLEARWATER, Fla. - Jimmy Rollins slouched in the corner of an empty Phillies clubhouse after the 25th straight day of work under the Florida sun. This is helplessness, and Rollins officially reached it Monday, when he stepped onto Bright House Field with an infield rife with unfamiliarity.

This is nothing new in spring training. But on this day it came with the realization that unfamiliarity could last deep into the regular season. So Rollins took a good look around.

"This is what I have to get used to," he said.

The players and coaches did that in the dugout, while the executives plotted possible solutions from behind home plate, and distraught fans watched on TV in Philadelphia. Life without Ryan Howard? That was difficult, but maybe manageable. But the Phillies without their two pillars, Ryan Howard and Chase Utley: Is this real?

There was Ruben Amaro Jr., relaying the news of Utley's visit to a specialist for another opinion on his chronically injured knees, and unable to speak definitively about the second baseman's future.

"I worry about Chase because it's a chronic knee problem," Amaro said. "About his career? I don't know."

For now, Utley cannot play baseball. His knees are not healthy enough to take the field. He has yet to hit anything but a batting practice fastball this spring. He doesn't take ground balls.

Utley will almost certainly join Howard and begin the season on the disabled list, which means the right side of the infield - $155 million of guaranteed salary - will be missing.

Freddy Galvis, the 22-year-old who learned how to play baseball on the streets of Venezuela without a glove and with rocks for bases, was effectively anointed by Amaro as Utley's replacement. Until two weeks ago, Galvis was a shortstop.

"It's a dream," Galvis said.

What significance this day ultimately has in the narrative of a franchise's great run will require time. The gravity of the situation was not lost on Rollins, the city's longest-tenured athlete.

"Well, we've lost a lot," Rollins said. "That's the truth. But we've got to keep going forward."

Amaro revealed both knees are bothering Utley, 33, and that the second baseman recently told him his left knee hurts more than the right. The Phillies had hoped a different conditioning and stretching regimen would allow Utley to manage the pain of decreased cartilage in both knees, which caused him to miss the first 46 games of 2011. When he arrived at camp this spring, he found the stress of doing infield work to be too great.

"The guy's got bad knees," Amaro said. "We know it. That's a fact. We're just trying to limit, and make sure he's ready to go and feeling comfortable for the bulk of the season."

Amaro would not provide details of the specialist whose opinion Utley will seek. The GM said Utley is not leaving the country, the specialist is different from the one he consulted last spring, and a member of the team's athletic training staff did not accompany Utley.

Amaro said there will be no surgical procedures performed by the specialist and there have been no discussions about pursuing a possible surgery.

Utley is scheduled to return to camp Thursday. He is signed through 2013 and will earn $15 million in each of the next two seasons.

The Phillies released a 96-word statement Monday morning categorizing Utley's rehab process as coming "to a bit of a plateau." On Saturday, Utley broke his monthlong silence with reporters and said his goal remained to play April 5 in Pittsburgh - opening day. He then was asked whether everything had gone according to his original spring-training plan.

After a long pause, Utley said: "I don't know. That's a good question. There have been some ups and downs. There are parts that are really positive."

Asked Saturday whether he felt better or worse than he did at the beginning of camp, Utley simply answered, "Today, I felt pretty good."

"I don't know if anything changed," Amaro said, "but he just didn't really progress the way we'd like for him to progress. When he first came into spring, he was feeling really good. He started taking ground balls. Our plan, as we had talked about, was to not have him play for a while because we wanted to make sure we put him in a position to not start pounding on his knees in the early part of spring, just to hold him off.

"But kind of when it was time to start getting him on the field, he wasn't really feeling well enough to do that. So he's not."

Can Utley ever be the player he once was without the ability to drive the ball?

"I couldn't even really speculate," Amaro said.

"I think he can," Charlie Manuel said. "He's not that old yet."

Amaro said he will not seek an upgrade outside the organization. At first, he termed Galvis as "one of the candidates" to replace Utley. Later, when pressed, Amaro said, "We have a guy in-house."

"Has Galvis done anything to not warrant playing?" Amaro said. "He's been our best player this spring."

Galvis is hitting .282 (11 for 39) with four extra-base hits in Grapefruit League play. His defense has never been questioned, but he's had just 121 at-bats above double-A, and his ability to hit major-league pitching is a great unknown.

Even if Galvis is at his best, the production Utley and Howard provided will be almost impossible for the Phillies current infield to replicate.

"We're going to have to catch the ball and pitch it like we did last year," Amaro said.

Later, in the clubhouse, Rollins pondered the new reality. He's seen this before.

"It's going to be different," Rollins said. "We didn't have a great team in '07 and we didn't have a great team in '08 but we found ways to win. We're kind of back there."

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ON A1: Utley's future uncertain. Amaro: "The guy's got bad knees."

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