Intervention?
What a difference a week makes. When the Phils took two of three from Atlanta in Philly last weekend, taking two taut one-run victories, and then beat the Mets last Monday to go above .500 at 7-6, it looked like their pitching might be for real and there was ample confidence that the bats would pick up. I felt pretty good that the team was winning close ones, even though they seemed to be losing blowouts.

Since then, they've stopped winning close ones, or any other kind. Tuesday, the Mets drubbed Vicente Padilla, 16-4; the next day, Colorado won its first game on the road all season by a 7-4 score. Jon Lieber stopped the bleeding Thursday afternoon to get the team back to .500 with his fourth win in four starts, but this weekend in Atlanta has been lost in every sense of the word. Brett Myers came back to earth in a 6-2 loss Friday night; Randy Wolf got crushed 11-1 yesterday; and as I write this the Phils are being shut out this afternoon by underwhelming (and wild) Braves starter John Thomson. Padilla walked the ballpark and gave up a bunch of two-out, run-scoring hits in three terrible innings. At last count they've been outscored 20-3 for the weekend.

I don't want to over-react, but right now this looks like a lousy team: they swing at an ungodly number of bad pitches, the starters, aside from Lieber and maybe Myers, are all pitching down to the level their doubters expected; the bullpen is a disaster; they're old, slow, and not hitting the home runs they need to win games the way the offense was constructed. They're expensive--in the top fifth of all baseball, in terms of salary--and will become more so as Jim Thome, Pat Burrell and Bobby Abreu move deeper into their 30s. And they've got a GM who likely will never work in baseball again after he finally gets his well-deserved dismissal.

Add in a mostly barren farm system and the good prospects of their competitors--the Mets are about to launch their own cable network, the Marlins and Nationals have new stadiums to look forward to, and the Braves are loaded through their own minor league chain--and this aging, expensive team looks poised for absolute disaster over the next three to five seasons. The city of Philadelphia hates this team; in the second season of the expensive new stadium, attendance is already down by almost 50 percent, and they're booed mercilessly game in and game out. The inept GM is arrogant, confrontational and reflexively dismissive of criticism; the out-of-touch ownership group, having gotten their publicly subsidized stadium, seems totally indifferent to the performance of the team on the field.

It's hard to see how things will get better. One idea that I see taking hold is a high-volume fan protest, pledging to stay away from the ballpark until the GM is gone and the doofus ownership group sells the club. It's not like they'll likely be missing much over the next few years.