Media Ready to Call Pence-Joseph Trade a Net Gain

Today, checking the headlines on most Philadelphia-area media outlets, you can learn a few things quickly.

• The Phillies avoided arbitration with Antonio Bastardo.
• Chip Kelly has been elected of a city he will now call “Chip-chip-chipadelphia,” and after re-checking his contract, Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie sheepishly admitted in a press conference that “Yes, he can do that.  Sorry.”
• Hunter Pence ?  Yeah you’ve been officially replaced.

Ed Szczepanski-USA TODAY Sports

You might be thinking, “How does one go about replacing a deer someone has put a baseball uniform on has a joke?”  And the answer is that without a technical late night zoo-raid, there’s very little we could have done.

The next question you might have is, “Wait, why would we want to replace that?  That sounds detrimental to the team, if anything.”

And fortunately, the Phillies did not replace Hunter Pence with another Hunter Pence.  They replaced him with catching prospect Tommy Joseph, who, with his career OPS of .735, is clearly the number three prospect in all of the Phillies farm system.

The Giants will be paying Pence $13.8 million, because they conduct their arbitration negotiations in an opium den.  Pence did very little in the playoffs for the Giants except yell at them, passionately.  It seems “passionate yelling” was too much to ask of Pence while he was with a struggling 2012 Phillies team, but hey, I guess Gregor Blanco just brings that out in people.

The Phillies are apparently now in the business of not paying people ludicrous amounts of money, starting today, and with Joseph doing what he does–a .256 batting average–the team is clearly the winners in the deal that was an attempt to gut the roster and bail on a horrible season.

There’s a pretty good chance that Tommy Joseph, with his high ceiling and his being a catcher, will wind up having a more effective Phillies career than a single year of Hunter Pence that cost us a van full of our better prospects.  Today, a chilled mid-January Sunday on which there is very little Phillies news, appears to be that day.