Cliff Lee to make his first start tonight

Well Cliff Lee will make his season first apperance against the Giants tonight!  I know I will be watching for sure and hopefully you all will be too.  Heres to wishing the kid luck and hopefully he will do well and we can chalk up a victory for him!

Heres a nice little article I found about Cliff from philly.com

Well, he’s here now. He dressed up in his Phillies uniform for the first time. He met his new teammates. He slipped comfortably into discussing them with an easy familiarity. “With a team like we’ve got . . .

On Wednesday, while the final details of the big trade that sent Cliff Lee from the Indians to the Phillies were being ironed out, he was the biggest story in baseball.

Yesterday, he was already starting to blend in.

Tonight, he will make his first start for the Phillies. And then it will be possible to start answering overarching question of what it all means.

Here’s a guess, though. With advance apologies to Jimmy Rollins for the plagiarism, it makes the Phillies the team to beat in the National League.

And it gives them a fighting chance to repeat as world champions, a chance that seemed to be pretty much of a longshot at the beginning of the week.

The Phillies, in recent years, have operated by the guiding principle that making it to the playoffs is the most important thing because strange and bizarre things can occur once you get there. And now they have a World Series trophy that says they’re right.

Here’s the thing. The more good players you have, the better the odds that the quirky bounce will bounce in your favor, that the breaks will break your way.

That Cliff Lee was at AT & T Park last night wearing the Phillies’ road grays is an eloquent, if silent, statement that the Phillies have adjusted their operating manifesto.

It is also an unspoken acknowledgement that Cole Hamels, while somewhat improved in recent starts, is not the pitcher he was last year. At least, not at this point. That they miss No. 2 starter Brett Myers, now rehabbing in Florida to possibly come back as a reliever following hip surgery. That Jamie Moyer’s 10 wins have more to do with great run support than the surgical precision of his pitches.

Without Lee, they were likely to have made it to the first round of the playoffs. After that, who knows?

With Lee, you’ve got to like their chances against any team they might match up with in the Division Series or the NLCS.

The Dodgers have the best record in the league and they fortified their bullpen by getting George Sherrill from the Orioles yesterday. But a Hamels-Lee-Joe Blanton combo can hold its own against Clayton Kershaw, Chad Billingsley and Randy Wolf.

The Cardinals and Cubs certainly have the ability to give any team trouble in a short series. Not that regular-season results necessarily carry over to October, but even without Lee the Phillies have handled both teams.

If the Braves win the wild card, their rotation would scare anybody. And they could get Tim Hudson back within the next month. Still, you have to wonder. Which is the real Atlanta offense, the one that has been rolling up big numbers in July or the lineup that couldn’t buy a run the first 3 months of the season?

The Phillies have added Cliff Lee, who only won the American League Cy Young Award last year. And they have Pedro Martinez set to make his second tune-up start tonight, this one at Triple A Lehigh Valley.

Which would be nice under any circumstances. But that’s a cavalry that’s riding to the rescue of a rotation that not only isn’t under attack, but for the last couple of months has figuratively been playing badminton and dining out of picnic baskets instead.

On paper, at least, the Phillies appear so awash in starting pitching that some people are going to have to take one for the team.

The first move, on the surface at least, appears pretty obvious. Rodrigo Lopez started last night. That’s likely to be his last big-league start for a while, with Lee taking his place. That might not seem fair since Lopez was 3-0, 3.09 going into the game. But that’s just the way it is. Lopez could go to the bullpen, which has been depleted by injuries to Chad Durbin, J.C. Romero and Clay Condrey. Or, since he has an option left, he could be sent to Lehigh Valley.

What happens when Martinez is ready presents a more knotty problem. “For [Pedro] to come to the big leagues, he has to be an effective pitcher,” general manager Ruben Amaro Jr. warned. Then he quickly added: “And we fully expect that. So far, everything is going in the right direction.”

What happens then? Things can change – “These things have a way of taking care of themselves,” veteran baseball people say with a knowing smile – but right now it doesn’t look like Hamels, Lee, Blanton or Moyer are going anywhere. Which leaves lefthander J.A. Happ possibly looking at going to the bullpen, especially if the lefty reliever Romero isn’t ready to come off the disabled list by then. And just when Happ was starting to be mentioned in the NL Rookie of the Year conversation, too.

If the Phillies have a concern right now, it’s the bullpen. But some reinforcements are rehabbing and some could come from the current rotation. And while closer Brad Lidge remains a question mark, Myers or even Martinez might be a viable alternative if the need arises.

Anything can happened in October, but by getting Lee the Phillies put themselves in the best position they could to make a run. To become, you could even say, the team to beat in the National League once the playoffs start.