Sam Donnellon: No panic yet from Phillies, but should there be?

LAST NIGHT, on "Daily News Live," on Comcast SportsNet, Phillies general manager Ruben Amaro Jr. twice mentioned a lack of "urgency" in the DNA of this year's club, saying the healthy regulars who still inhabit the first five spots of the team's lineup need to find some, and fast.

Manager Charlie Manuel framed it differently. You hope, he said, that the players you plug in would play so well that the regulars would feel challenged and respond accordingly.

But the message from on high, forged by a day's worth of closed-door meetings, was clear. And seemingly in contrast to the one conveyed by Ryan Howard in Pittsburgh over the weekend, after the Phillies scored 12 runs against the Pirates, or the one expressed by Shane Victorino after last night's 7-5 loss to the first-place Braves pushed the Phillies six games out.

"One thing about this team," Howard had said over the weekend, "is we don't panic."

"There's nothing good about being urgent," said Victorino, whose seventh-inning home run temporarily quelled the populace's unrest over his production this season. "In the game of baseball, you use the word 'urgency,' it means there's nothing good that's coming out of it.

"When you panic, you're adding pressure to yourself."

So what is panic and what is urgency? And is there a difference? When Howard says, as he did after they gave Roy Halladay one run to work with in a loss to the Twins two Sundays ago, that "I don't think this stretch is going to last the entire second half. We're going to get hot and then all this will be pretty much forgotten" - is that a lack of urgency or a sound approach? Is that swagger or foolhardiness?

"It's June," Howard said that day. "Nobody remembers what your record was in June. Everybody remembers where you are at the end of September."

Two nights ago, Howard found himself on third base with no one out in the seventh inning of a tie game. Jayson Werth struck out without taking one swing.

Last night, after Jimmy Rollins led off the Phillies' first with the first of two doubles, Victorino bunted the ball back to the mound, as Rollins stood frozen in disbelief.

As did most of the 44,282 on hand.

There's a sense of urgency there, for sure, especially when game-time temperature is 96 degrees. They boo, they groan, they panic with each failed attempt to score a man from third base with fewer than two outs.