It’s been over six weeks since the Roy Halladay/Cliff Lee trade(s) in which the Phillies swapped one Cy Young winner for prospects and different prospects for another Cy Young winner.

While the buzz at the time centered around Halladay, an adding a proven ace (and signing him to a contract extension), recently, the Phillies have taken some heat for making the Cliff Lee portion of the deal.

Ruben Amaro, at the Philadelphia Sports Writers Association banquet on Monday walked up to the podium and said, “First, the Cliff Lee trade was all Charlie [Manuel], who was sitting next to him. Obviously he was kidding, but it was mildly surprising that he even needed to make the joke, considering the elation of December.

Amaro fielded some questions on the trade the other day.

“We cannot be the New York Yankees,” Amaro said. “We have to have people that we can bring to the big leagues from our system. The guys who are our core players are guys from our system.”

This is a key point, and he followed up with:

“It’s going to be difficult to look fans in the face and say two years from now, ‘You know, why we don’t have any players to supplant some of the guys we have now is because I went for it with Cliff Lee and now we have no players to fall back on,’ ” Amaro said. “That’s not the goal.”

The other concern was payroll. Remember, they are intent on $140 million (like it or not), and according to this post from David Murphy, they’re at $137 million right now (and over $130 million for 15 guys next year). Lee is another $9 million this year, say $17 if they brought him back long-term (obviously the prospects they get back are in the minors and do not factor here).

So going back, had the Phillies just made the Halladay portion of the deal (Michael Taylor, Travis d’Arnaud, Kyle Drabek):

• Lee stays and you have the best rotation in the league (Halladay, Lee, Hamels, Happ, Blanton)
• Payroll is give or take $145-146 million (too high)
• Farm system is gutted (by various accounts the players they got back from Seattle fit into their top 10-12, Phillipe Aumont was in MLB.com’s top 50).

Essentially, two negatives and a positive (simplified).

The key, of course, is the guys they got back. Steve Noworyta told us they wanted to draft Gilles a few years ago, but Seattle got him. Geoff Baker of the Seattle Times had good things to say about the three Seattle prospects too.

To us, it boils down to three things:

1. The guys they brought back are all going to Double-A or Triple-A this year. They are not far from the big leagues (just as Taylor and Drabek would have been close had they stayed in the system). There is a big difference between getting guys who are years away and guys who are injuries away.
2. Until they actually go over the $140 million mark, there is no reason to doubt their self-imposed limit.
3. Halladay locked up for four years is more valuable than having Lee in the fold for possibly one year (plus Jimmy Rollins and Chase Utley are due long-term contracts pretty soon). There is a cost for upgrading (and that cost to the Phillies was the difference between the three Seattle prospects and d’Arnaud, Drabek, and Taylor).

They did fine.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at 8:42 am and is filed under Around the Farm, Past BlueClaws, Phillies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.