The best reason to be optimistic about the Phillies is the two things wrong with them according to the moan-and-groan crowd: 1. "lineup protection" and 2. setup relief.
If that's the best they can come up with ... .
Let's take these one at a time.
1. Lineup protection means Pat Burrell, the overpaid, arrogantly indifferent ne'er-do-well who will ruin wonder boy Ryan Howard's career by hitting behind him in the batting order.
Supposedly.
This isn't entirely baloney. It's about 85 percent baloney and other meat byproducts.
Burrell is a mess in a lot of ways. But with him hitting behind Howard last year, the Phillies had the best offense in the National League and Howard won the MVP.
How much of a drain could Burrell have been?
It is true that for a stretch from mid-August through early September, Howard was about as hot as it's possible to be. Then he cooled off, at a critical time, at least in part because of the way he was pitched to.
How much of that was Burrell's fault?
In a doubleheader Sept. 3, Howard went 6-for-8 with three home runs. He homered Sept. 4, Sept. 7 and twice on Sept. 8.
At that point he had homered 12 times in 16 games.
On Sept. 9, with Burrell not hitting behind him, Howard was walked four times. That was the watershed. In the season's remaining 20 games, Howard had only two home runs and 11 RBIs.
In those 20 games Burrell batted behind Howard exactly four times. Even that's not quite how you remember it, is it?
In those four games Howard was intentionally walked once, Sept. 29 at Florida, the third-to-last day of the season, with a wild-card berth still on the line.
And Burrell followed with a three-run homer, on a day when he went 3-for-4 with two homers, two walks and four RBIs.
Burrell infamously hit .222 in 153 at-bats with runners in scoring position last year.
But the year before he hit .313 with RISP. And even .222 is just three or four singles away from Burrell's overall career BA, .258. To conclude from that that Burrell is a chronic choker when it counts is ridiculous.
Obviously, you don't want to see Howard walked every time he comes up in a key situation with man on and first base open. What's unclear is what can be done about that.
Of Howard's 36 intentional walks last year, 34 came from right-handed pitchers. But if you put a left-handed hitter behind Howard, teams will of course put a lefty reliever on the mound in key spots to face Howard and the next guy.
Burrell hits left-handers better than Howard does. Look it up.
One solution could be to pinch hit reserve outfielder Michael Bourn for Burrell in key spots. Bourn hits left-handed, for a decent average, and doesn't strike out much. He is also a legit center fielder defensively, meaning if he replaces Burrell in left you'd have fabulous late-inning outfield defense.
Finally, intentional and semi-intentional walks have more value than people think. Barry Bonds has been the best offensive player in the game in years when he had less hitting behind him than Pat Burrell, and was pitched to more carefully than any hitter in history.
2. On Comcast SportsNet's "Daily News Live" a couple weeks ago, John Marzano was live from spring training explaining how the Phils were going to run away with the NL East when one of the panelists said, "OK, great Johnny Marz, but who's going to pitch the seventh inning? Who's going to pitch the eighth inning?"
Before we answer that question, let's consider these: Who's going to pitch the seventh and eighth for the Yankees? Who's going to do it for the Red Sox?
Let's see, there's ... Scott Proctor, who led the majors in relief innings last year and ended it with his arm about to fall off. And Mike Timlin, age 41, who had a shoulder strain in May last year and a 5.64 ERA thereafter. And was rewarded with a $3 million contract.
And Craig Hansen, Joel Pineiro, Kyle Farnsworth, Manny Delcarmen ... .
These are the Yankees and Red Sox we're talking about. You know, the teams "in a league by themselves," for whom "money is no object."
When you're talking about who's going to get you from the starter to the closer every night, you're talking about, at best, your seventh-through-10th-best pitchers.
In the 120-plus-year history of major- league baseball, you can probably count on the fingers of one hand the teams who've had 10 championship-caliber pitchers. Practically speaking, it doesn't exist and almost can't.
If Johnny Marz had answered the panelist's question, "Geoff Geary and Ryan Madson," there would have been chuckles back at the studio, of course.
But Geary had a 2.96 ERA last year, a 3-to-1 strikeout/walk ratio and, in 91 innings, allowed exactly six home runs.
Madson has thrown about 300 career innings, more than 200 of them as a reliever. He's had about a half-dozen disastrous career starts that have nuked his overall career stats.
But as a reliever — and that's clearly what he's going to be from here on — his ERA is 3.30. And, again, that's in more than 200 innings.
If the Phillies get that from Geary and Madson (And who knows if they will? Pitching is the least reliable basic element in sports.), who's got two guys better than that in the bottom half of their pitching staff?
It's not that setup relief can't lose games for you, it's that setup relief will lose games for everybody; the media/talk-show angst about it is just the traditional Philly myopia.
No one has a reliably great pitcher in a setup role.
(Yeah, I know: Mariano Rivera pre-1997. That's one. For the first two years of his career. As soon as the Yanks figured out what they had there, he wasn't a setup man anymore.)
To put in more precisely, there are very few reliably great pitchers, and the teams that have them aren't wasting them in setup relief.
It could kill the Phillies (or Yankees, or Red Sox) but it probably won't, and there's no way to ensure it won't.
So there's no sense worrying about it.
Mike Gross is a Sunday News sports writer. E-mail him at mgross@lnpnews.com .
