Phils do nothing

The title of this post sums up the season so far. The trade deadline came and went and Ed Wade was unwilling to pull the trigger for a starting pitcher. The good news is they didn't do anything stupid like trading Billy Wagner. Not that he gets allot of work. I think he has closed only 4 games in the last 2 weeks.

Rich Hofmann in the Daily News sums it up best:

There is nothing that Ed Wade could have done before the expiration of yesterday's trade deadline that would have been applauded back home. Such are the current realities. Of all his available options, though, Wade has chosen the gutsiest for him personally. For now, he has chosen to do nothing.

They wanted a starter, and Wade acknowledged as much. Part of the problem is figuring out whom the new guy might replace, because most of the current starters have taken turns going through horrendous stretches - Cory Lidle in his last four starts, Vicente Padilla before that, and on and on. That leaves the tricky question of whether you would remove Robinson Tejeda and his 2.95 ERA from the rotation, just because he is inexperienced, and replace him with somebody else's problem - a middling veteran having a middling season. Because that was the marketplace. Do you really want to add a so-so starter, and how much are you willing to subtract from your bullpen to get him?

Of course they can still make a trade like the one for Corey Lidle last year. Very few teams block a waiver trade. The only teams that do it regularly are the Yankees and the Red sox. But that is just another part of their never ending war.