Phinally Philly

For the second consecutive season, the biggest news in Spring Training will come down to who the 5th spot in the rotation will belong to when the Phillies head north.

Last season, the race was between Kyle Kendrick, J.A. Happ,  and Chan Ho Park. With Chopper moving on to the Yankees and Happ solidifying his spot in the middle of the rotation, there was bound to be a new competition for the last spot in the rotation.

The race is primarily between Kendrick and Jamie Moyer, with a few other long shots in case neither of those two perform.

Kendrick made his spring debut against the Yankees yesterday, following in the footsteps of his new role model, Roy Halladay. Kendrick has been working out with Roy and has even started to sport the same facial hair style. If he pitches like Halladay, the Phillies will be in good shape. In his two innings of work, Kendrick gave up one hit to go along with one strikeout. Not a bad debut.

Jamie Moyer made his spring training debut this morning in a B game, going three innings. He gave up three singles, no runs or walks and three strikeouts. He threw 31 pitches and got 23 of them over for strikes. An impressive start for the old goat.  I’m actually surprised to see Moyer throwing off of a mound at all this early in camp. After his offseason surgeries, I thought he wouldn’t be ready until closer to the season opener. At this stage in his career, Moyer knows what he needs to do in order to be prepared for the season, so he should be alright. Granted, he knows this is a competition and will do everything he can to show he can still ptich.

Obviously, the Phillies want the Kendrick of a few years ago when he came up from Reading and won 10 games his first year and 11 the next. After losing out last year and starting out in Lehigh Valley, Kendrick came back late in the season and won a few games for the Phils down the stretch. If he can develop his other pitches, he’ll be a sold pitcher for the big club.

Moyer had an up and down season last year. While still winning 12 games, he was bumped out of the rotation to make room for Pedro Martinez and sent to the bullpen. Jamie pitched extremely well out of the bullpen and made a few spot starts until getting injured late in the season. After a few complications from surgery, Moyer seems to be back on track to be ready for Opening Day in a month.

It’s hard to tell what the Phillies would prefer out of this race. While they have a lot of money committed to Moyer, the team has been known to eat money when it comes to under performing players.  (Adam Eaton, anyone?) Plus, the Phillies want to see if Kendrick can come back to the major leagues and pitch at a high level. If he can, he’ll be a valuable part of the rotation for the next few years.

At the end of spring training, if Moyer and Kendrick have pitched pretty similar, I see the 5th spot going to Moyer. Keep Kendrick around in the ‘pen for long relief and spot starts. His confidence would get shattered beyond repair if he has to start in Lehigh again. Keep him around with the big club in case Moyer falters.  Jamie probably knows that this should be his final season, so he’ll be going all out to make it successful.

By the end of the season, I think Moyer will have made more starts than Kendrick, but it will be close.

While the Phillies first exhibition game was a 13-6 win over the Florida State Seminoles yesterday,  the Phillies start playing the big boys today.

In the Grapefruit League opener, the Phillies play the New York Yankees at Bright House Networks Field at 1:05 P.M. Now, besides being the spring training opener, the game will also serve as Roy Halladay’s Phillies’ debut. An entire city of baseball fans has been waiting for this day all winter. To finally see Doc in red pinstripes will exciting.

This game will be a World Series rematch for about an inning, maybe 2. After the first couple of innings, the fringe players and spring training invitees will begin to filter in. The regulars may play a little longer as this is against the Yankees, but most of them will be out of the game by the 3rd inning most likely. Hell, as all of the beat writers just Twittered, even the starting lineup will be watered down:

SS Rollins, 3B Polanco, CF Francisco, RF Werth, LF Mayberry, 1B Ransom, 2B Castro, DH Bocock, C Ruiz with Halladay pitching.

Interesting to see Cody Ransom playing for the Phils against the Yanks after opening last season as NY’s Opening Day 3rd baseman when Alex Rodriguez was injured.

Even thought this may be the first game, it will hopefully be the beginning of a long journey that will end in late October for this team.

It’s been a long 4 months, but Phillies baseball is finally back.

It’s easy to go and blame contract clauses and shortage of usable assets for the Flyers’ lack of movement on trade deadline day. While everyone wanted a shiny new toy to throw into the locker room, no team really got anything special in one of the slowest Trade Deadline Holidays in recent memory.

Not much happened among the competitors today and yesterday other than Pittsburgh getting a serviceable winger and Washington getting a decent defenseman for some minor assets.

The biggest change in the Eastern Conference is likely the Devils getting Kovalchuk, which happened even before the Olympics. We all know how the Flyers handled that situation.

It takes a special kind of person to see that changes need to be made to a roster to have the best shot at winning in the postseason, but sometimes it takes a calmer hand to realize that giving up too much may not be in the best interest of the team. It takes a real man to claim he’s willing to stand pat.

Holmgren stood pat, and all we can do now is wait for the rest of the season to play out.

After a dominating third period against the Tampa Bay Lightning last night, you kind of had the feeling that there wasn’t much that needed to be changed on this team.

Obviously with Emery done for the season, you would like a starting goalie with a little more pedigree, but last night was Leighton’s fifth straight game giving up only two goals. The defense seems comfortable with him. He isn’t great, he has some flaws, and he certainly has the ability to make quite a few people nervous, but it is what it is. I’m not saying you should feel completely comfortable with Leighton, but our offense and defense are world class.

I’m not saying that we’re the favorites, but really, those teams that you may think have the best shot at the Cup have their own problems to deal with as well.

You want to know what Laviolette’s system and a world class team has turned Leighton into? Here you go:

Goals Against Average

• Tuukka Rask (BOS) – 2.15 GAA
• Ryan Miller (BUF) – 2.16 GAA
• Mike Leighton (PHI) – 2.18 GAA / Miikka Kiprusoff (CGY) – 2.18 GAA
• Antti Niemi (CHI) – 2.26 GAA
• Jimmy Howard (DET) – 2.28 GAA

Save Percentage

• Thomas Vokoun (FLA) – 0.931 SV%
• Mike Leighton (PHI) – 0.930 SV% / Ryan Miller (BUF) – 0.930 SV%
• Jimmy Howard (DET) – 0.927 SV% / Evgeny Nabokov (SJS) – 0.927 SV%
• Tuukka Rask (BOS) – 0.926 SV%
• Miikka Kiprusoff (CGY) – 0.925 SV%

Leighton has 13-3-1 record in 19 games played and is not only tied for second with Ryan “USA’s Hero” Miller in save percentage at 0.930 but is also tied for third in GAA at 2.18. In 77 games played over his career before his return to Philadelphia this season, Leighton has 18 total wins with a 3.63 GAA and a 0.878 SV%.

I’d say that Laviolette’s system and our elite team is a major part of that, and though I’m not completely confident in Leighton, there is a lot to work with when your team can turn a guy like him to a legitimate goaltender.

You also have to look at what other teams wanted in return for a goalie. Montreal asked for Carter for Jaroslav Halak. It’s also likely they asked for one of Giroux or vanRiemsdyk for Carey Price. For Thomas Vokoun, Florida wanted Carter as well.

That wasn’t about to happen.

Our deadline moves were simple. Ryan Parent is now healthy and will help out a lot. Lukas Krajicek was claimed off waivers to add even more depth. Because of that, our defense is arguably the best in the entire NHL. We did all of this without sacrificing any forward strength. Hell, we even gained a former Calder Trophy favorite for rookie of the year from Detroit for almost nothing in Ville Leino. If one of our forwards goes out, we have a competent replacement waiting in the wings.

In the end, the hiring of Peter Laviolette may be the best trade deadline move we could have done.

We also signed a couple of prospects to add to our pool of forwards. I will update them later tonight.

For now, the Flyers look to play the Florida Panthers tonight at 7:30.

Here I am on a Tuesday morning working on an top prospect article for the Flyers’ top 20 prospects with Mike & Mike in the Morning playing on the TV in the background. For those who have never heard of the show, it’s normally some of the best programming ESPN has to offer even though quality ESPN programming has become hard to find in recent years.

Well, this morning there was a big deal about the NHL. I was in shock. ESPN should not be talking about hockey. That’s not something it never does outside of when a three second clip of some incredible, miraculous goal gets beat out in the top 10 on Sports Center by a couple of mediocre dunks that any NBA player can make in any game.

The talk this morning was about how the NHL is going to capitalize off the incredible atmosphere that the Gold Medal Game against Canada created.

Even though Team USA lost, it was the most watched hockey game in the United States since 1980. It pulled in more viewers than any NBA Finals game since 1998, more viewers than any MLB World Series game since 2004, and every NCAA Final Four Basketball game since 1998. Not including NFL related football, it was the 2nd most watched single sports event this year falling just shy of the BCS National Championship game.

That’s just in the United States.

As far as Canada is concerned…well last Sunday was arguably their most important game in Canadian sports’ history. To say the majority of the country tuned in would be a gross understatement.

Everyone in the world watched last Sunday’s gold medal game, and even though the United States lost, nothing can be taken away from that one incredible game.

So where does the NHL go from there? How does it become more popular from one incredible event?

ESPN wants them to take out the fighting because it’s so much more destructive and violent than any other television program kids will see. Fighting cheapens the game of hockey, but if there is a fight in the stands at an NBA game or a massive player brawl on the field at Miami University, ESPN won’t fail to show non-stop live coverage until everyone has had their say.

Fighting is not the reason nobody watches hockey, and in fact, to say nobody watches hockey is a bit of a severe misinterpretation of reality. Hockey is a culture that you either get or you don’t. There are no tweeners. There are no casual viewers. You either watch your local team or you tune in if something important happens. People won’t just pick up hockey a random hockey game to watch a superstar play like some might pick a football game out of their weekend selection.

Mike and Mike feel that is what needs to change. They feel the NHL needs faces; it needs names. Give me a name, and I’ll draw you a picture with words, you self-proclaimed journalists.

They talk about how there are no “story lines,” but who is at fault there? Story lines are written by the players, but they’re told by story tellers. The journalists are the ones that convey the story. There’s far too little actual journalism at ESPN and far too much sensationalism. Hockey gets lost in the fold.

If you really want to believe that hockey isn’t on ESPN because it’s not marketable, you really need to re-assess reality. ESPN has created Danica Patrick and midnight poker tournaments. What makes hockey so inferior to the garbage ESPN wastes it’s coverage on?

This is Trade Deadline week. It is practically a hockey holiday. Mike and Mike failed to mention that too.

Mike and Mike want to blame hockey for not marketing American stars like the Cherry Hilly native Bobby Ryan, or Zach Parise playing just north in New Jersey, or even the best goalie in the NHL, Ryan Miller. Unfortunately, what they don’t seem to realize is that these players exist just as much as the Brett Favres, the Kobe Bryants, and the Derek Jeters. Hockey players do exist. The stories are waiting to be told, so tell them. Don’t sit idly by making up excuses to look like you have some insight about what is wrong with the hockey world.

There is nothing wrong with hockey that can be fixed by people who know nothing about it. Mike and Mike couldn’t name you half of Team USA, but they know they exist. Find out who they are. If you really care enough to make it a point of emphasis on your show, then do something about it instead of playing the role of the Californian trying to tell the Philadelphian how to cook his cheesesteak.

I hope I do enough. I love sports. I love hockey. The gold medal game, despite the loss, was something spectacular. For Canada, the winners, it was one of those moments you will be able to tell your kid exactly where you were when it happened.

Don’t make excuses for hockey. We’ve proven we can survive without ESPN. It would be nice, however, if there was anything real about the way you talk about hockey. Mike and Mike, you are not journalists, you are not storytellers.

Any publicity is good publicity? I hope that’s true. I truly hope, for the future of hockey, that all the leaps and bounds USA Hockey has gone through as an organization over the past decade, to create a team worthy of skating on the same ice as the Canadians, have not gone to waste for your grand sense of self-righteousness. I hope kids everywhere begin to pick up their hockey sticks from Houston, TX to Duluth, MN and from Los Angeles, CA to Cherry Hill, NJ. I hope they do it just to spite you.

Lost in all of this was Team USA, which is slowly becoming one of the biggest hockey countries in the world. That’s right. USA Hockey has a group of young talent unlike anything it has ever had before. We will have our say. USA Hockey will not be denied whether ESPN will acknowledge its existence or not.

I wanted to beat the Canadians this time just like every other American on the planet, but they worship hockey. They celebrate hockey. As a country, we can never do that if people like you undermine sport; not just hockey, all sport.

Listen to the sounds of Vancouver, of a nation, as they celebrated, and tell me how different it was from New Orleans or even all of America in 1980. Tell me the difference. Tell me a story.

(Sound bite @1:15)

After all, in the end sports is just a story.

In case you missed it last year…Eagles Offseason Bingo is back with a new and improved version for 2010!