Phillies Foul Balls

The Phils made most of their needed roster moves today and there weren’t too many surprises in there. The only one that I wasn’t expecting was cutting Amaury Telemaco. It looks like Telemaco was in competition for Pedro Liriano for the long man spot instead of being in competition with Terry Adams for one of the short men roles. Given that, I can’t really argue too much with choosing Liriano. However I’m not entirely sure that giving Adams the free pass like that was the best decision. He has not been particularly effective over the past couple of years, so this could come back to haunt them.

The news reports are saying that there are 26 players left in camp, but the roster on the Phils website still has 27 names. I think the extra player is Franklin Perez. Given how bad the Phillies are about announcing transactions it wouldn’t surprise me if the Phils sent him down at some point and just didn’t announce it publicly.

As for the last cut, the analysis on the website seems to indicate that Jose Offerman is still around primarily as insurance in case Marlon Byrd or Kenny Lofton is unable to go and has to go on the DL. That makes sense and is probably what will happen, but it’s not the approach I would take. I would prefer to see the Phils cut Tomas Perez who is the very definition of a replacement level player, but apparently he’s threated the front office with enough shaving cream pies that they’re keeping him around.

Getting close to opening day. I’ll put up some predictions for the season over the weekend.