The Rotation (20 page)

Now, in Clearwater weeks later for the first day of pitchers and catchers, Lidge was still thinking big.

“When you have four guys like we have, your mind automatically thinks World Series,” he said. “Cliff coming here changes the dynamic. Everybody realizes we are the team to beat. To a man, every one of us feels we need to win the World Series.”

Yes, that was the feeling in the clubhouse on the first day of pitchers and catchers. Lidge was one of the few willing to forcefully articulate it. Others in the room, though confident, practiced the time-honored baseball tradition of circumspection.

“We have to curb our excitement a little bit, too,” Dubee said. “We still have to play baseball. I mean, we're absolutely thrilled with our starting rotation. I don't think anyone who has ever seen baseball would downplay that. But the fact of the matter is we have to play 162 games and play up to our potential.”

Even Lidge acknowledged that. Another parade around Halloween was
the goal. But this was Valentine's Day.

“It's a long way away,” he said, “and we have to perform to our capability.”

Just after 10 A.M., Phillies pitchers and catchers exited the back door at Bright House Field and headed for the dew-covered fields of Carpenter Complex. Club officials dabbed their noses with sun block and descended from their third-floor offices to see the army of arms that they had constructed to be the foundation of the team. Club President David Montgomery, who'd presided over the team's methodical rise from the NL basement to the top of the baseball world, resembled a proud father as he greeted team personnel. General Manager Ruben Amaro Jr. patted Manager Charlie Manuel on the back as the first workout of the new season began. Cameras caught all the flavor—the fresh red uniforms, the green grass, the swaying palms, and most of all, the excitement and optimism—and sent the baseball postcard back to chilly Philly.

Early in camp, pitchers take the field and immediately go through stretching and throwing drills before scattering to different practice stations. Veteran reliever J. C. Romero was jogging between fields when he spotted a man who just a few weeks earlier had become a painful reminder that baseball is fun and games, and no matter how shiny the ERAs and championship trophies are, there's still a real world out there and sometimes it's unbearably cruel.

“Mr. Green,” Romero said quietly. “I am so sorry.”

Dallas Green, still as hulking at 76 as he was the day he hoisted the World Series trophy in 1980, patted Romero gently on the shoulder. Dark sunglasses hid Green's pain. A month earlier, his granddaughter, nine-year-old Christina—the daughter of Green's son, John, and his wife, Roxanna—was killed by a madman's bullet during an attack on Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords at a grocery store in Tucson. Devastated over the loss of his granddaughter and heartbroken for his son and daughter-in-law, Green was back in Clearwater for his 55
^th
year in baseball and 38
^th
as a Phillie. “Baseball helps me,” an emotional Green said a few days later. “You sink yourself into your work and you don't see a little girl with a hole in her chest as much.”

Seeing Green for the first time since the tragedy was heart-wrenching for many of the people—cold, heartless baseball writers included—who had
grown close to him in his years as a pitcher, manager, and adviser with the club. With one small gesture in the middle of the most anticipated workout in Phillies history, J. C. Romero spoke for a lot of people.

For Roy Halladay, there was no easing into the first workout of spring. The guy is an animal when it comes to conditioning his body and preparing it to throw 250 innings. The first workout of spring is as important to him as a postseason start. While his teammates had begun to trickle into the clubhouse in the days before the first workout, Halladay's locker had been occupied since December. The pitcher lives in nearby Odessa and works out religiously at the Phillies spring facility, starting in December. He arrives at the ballpark around 5 A.M. when no one is around and not even the crickets can distract him from that day's plan. By the time Halladay takes the field, he's already pushed his body in the weight room and on the stationary bike, but you'd never know it by the way he goes through his first official team workout. Three and a half months after winning his second Cy Young Award, he is the picture of intensity as he leads the way through every drill, executing them perfectly, giving even the most mundane exercise his full attention as a crowd of fans gather five deep around the chain-link fences.

“They're parking them across the street,” a longtime security guard said. “I've never seen that for the first workout.”

Even the players turned into fans during the first workout.

“I was stretching between Roy Oswalt and Cliff Lee,” said Michael Schwimer, a reliever in his first big-league camp. “I'm not going to lie. I was like, ‘Where's the camera?' I was trying to hide the fan in me as much as possible.”

Mike Stutes, another first-timer in camp, was also caught up in the excitement of working aside the game's most decorated starting staff. He found himself mesmerized by how hard the starters worked away from the pitcher's mound.

“Even on days when they're tired, when they've thrown fifty pitches and run, they still do all their work and they work harder than anyone,” he said. “Halladay is a machine. I watch him all the time. It's impressive. He's always in a rush going somewhere for his next drill or workout. I just try to stay out of his way.”

Disrupting Halladay's workday can be like thrusting a butter knife into an electrical socket.

If you have ever wondered why spring training lasts six weeks, look no further than the pitching staff. Hitters can hone their swings in less than a month, but pitchers need those six weeks to build the arm strength and endurance that will carry them through a six-month season. And for The Rotation, six months was a minimal expectation. Anything less than a seven-month season, with a trip deep into October culminating with confetti flying in Citizens Bank Park, would be a huge disappointment.

“We all feel like we're on the same page,” Halladay said in spring training, two months before his 34
^th
birthday. “We all feel like we're at the similar points in our careers. Cole probably has a lot longer left than the rest of us, but we all feel like we've accomplished personal things, we've set ourselves up, and now it's the ultimate goal—trying to win. The reason I'm playing now is to try to win and win a championship as a team. That's the driving factor for all of us.”

Lee confirmed as much, saying he chose the Phillies because he believed they gave him the best chance to win a World Series, a better chance than he'd get with the Yankees, he said, who were getting old.

After a morning of conditioning, throwing and fielding drills on the first day of pitchers and catchers, it was time to start building arm strength at 60 feet, six inches—the distance from the rubber to home plate. Pitchers were split into two groups that would throw every other day in the bullpen or in batting practice until exhibition games began. On Day 1, Halladay and Cole Hamels took the mound, each throwing for about eight minutes. Hamels had finished the 2010 season on a roll and was a big reason the team had won its fourth-straight NL East title. In 15 starts after the All-Star break, he had a 2.23 ERA, the fifth best in the majors over that span, and 104 strikeouts, the second-most in baseball in that time. Twenty-seven years old, he arrived in camp serious and confident, and it showed in his first bullpen session.

“Cole could pitch in a game today,” Dubee marveled.

In national media circles, Hamels quickly became the hot pick to win the Cy Young. Reporters love to make predictions in February, even if they are meaningless by Memorial Day, never mind by October. On a staff that included Cy Young winners and ERA champs, Hamels would be allowed to blend in and perform in the less-pressurized No. 4 spot in the rotation. Many thought he couldn't help but shine in the role.

But while Hamels was a fashionable preseason pick for Cy Young, he was only part of the reason that Clearwater had become the No. 1 destination for America's baseball media in the spring of 2010. Albert Pujols' contract drama across the state in Jupiter was a hot story for a day or two, but it didn't have the lasting draw of The Rotation and all its promise. Lee's signing had taken a golden rotation and turned it platinum. On paper, this was one of the greatest starting staffs ever. In the history-obsessed world of baseball, and among the people who cover the sport, that's a big story. Everyone wanted a piece of it and that had kept Greg Casterioto awake at night ever since Lee came on board in December.

As director of baseball communications for the Phillies, Casterioto fields all media requests, and once the winter holidays cleared and spring training came into focus, he was deluged. Casterioto, Bonnie Clark, Kevin Gregg, John Brazer, and Scott Palmer—all members of the team's public and media relations staff—tried to come up with a plan to satisfy the media's demand for access to The Rotation without cutting into the pitchers' preparation for what mattered most—the season. The Phillies PR staff couldn't have individual reporters from around the land parachuting into camp seeking a few minutes with each pitcher on a daily basis. That's a lot of potential butter knives around Halladay's locker.

Phillies officials came up with a plan. They would hold a news conference and make the Big Four starting pitchers available after the first workout of the spring. It would last no more than an hour and the pitchers would be free from questions about their potential place in history for the rest of the spring. The news conference would be transcribed and any reporter who wandered in on March 10 would have access to pages worth of quotes. It would be televised live on MLB Network and on Comcast SportsNet Philadelphia. The pitchers would be required to appear wearing their red Phillies tops—a branding opportunity for a ball club that needs to sell a lot of jerseys to support a $175-million payroll.

The player-media liaison in Casterioto thought a group news conference would work. The fan inside him liked it, too. Halladay, Lee, Oswalt, and Hamels all sitting together with bright eyes and big dreams. Wouldn't it have been cool if the Orioles had done something like that in 1971?

The idea was the easy part. Selling it to the pitchers, particularly the introverted, routine-obsessed Halladay, would be a different story. The job began and ended with Casterioto's ability to convince the ace of aces to carve out an hour at the end of a workday that had begun at 5 A.M. to do something
he wasn't particularly fond of.

“Sure, I'll do it,” Halladay told Casterioto over the telephone one January day.

Inside, Casterioto was elated to hear Halladay's response.

“As long as Joe is there, too,” Halladay said.

The numbers on the back of bubblegum cards made it easy to overlook Blanton, and fans, media, and even people who worked for the team were guilty of it. On a staff of stars, Blanton was Average Joe. He had never made an All-Star team. He'd helped the Phillies win the World Series in 2008, but that didn't stop the team from attempting to trade him in the weeks that followed Lee's signing. The Phillies found no takers for Blanton and the $17 million that remained on his contract, and as spring training 2011 approached, he lined up to be the club's fifth starter. Less than a year earlier, Halladay had purchased 65 Baume & Mercier wristwatches—listed at nearly $4,000 a piece—for teammates and club personnel as a gesture of thanks after his perfect game against Florida. “We did it together,” the inscription said. Halladay had defined himself as a team player, and in his mind Blanton was as big a part of The Rotation—the team within the team—as anybody. He had to be at that news conference.