Pitching a good indication of how far Phillies have come

CLEARWATER, Fla. - These days, the Phillies are considered one of the elite teams in baseball. It wasn't that long ago that they were called a lot of things that couldn't be said out loud in polite society.

Even relatively rapid change is difficult to grasp when observed closely. Look in the mirror and the face staring back at you seems exactly the same as the day before. Look at a 10-year-old photograph and the difference can be startling.

In that sense, yesterday's orchestrated lollapalooza in which all five starting pitchers – Roy Halladay, Cliff Lee, Roy Oswalt, Cole Hamels, Joe Blanton – were made available as a group for more than a dozen television cameras, newspapers from as far away as Seattle, all the big online sports websites, Sports Illustrated, radio talkers and a partridge in a pear tree was useful in measuring just how far this organization really has come.

Not only because Lee said more than once that he decided to return to the Phillies as a free agent because he thought he had a better chance to win the World Series here than he would have had with the lordly New York Yankees, either.

The last time the Phillies held a major spring-training news conference involving a starting pitcher was in 1997, and the circumstances couldn't have been more opposite.

Yesterday's celebration was only slightly less meticulously planned than a military operation and was held in a clean, spacious, air-conditioned room at Bright House Field.

Fourteen years ago the venue was a small, musty room at charming but outdated Jack Russell Stadium and the mood was bleak. While the bus that would take the team to a game in Sarasota that night idled in the parking lot, the Phillies hastily called reporters together and announced that they had broken off contract negotiations with ace righthander Curt Schilling, who could become a free agent at the end of the season.

Money wasn't even the issue. Team officials conceded that the asking price was in line with what top pitchers made then. But Schilling had had shoulder surgery and the team was reluctant to take the risk that a 3-year offer would entail.