Dave Hollins

One of the curious things about the Phillies' 45-17 start, and there are many, is the fact that they've compiled baseball's best record on just an average payroll. Next year, however, that $27 million salary figure will rise substantially. Darren Daulton's new contract kicks in and that will raise his salary by more than $1 million in the first year of his back-loaded four-year, $18 million deal. Dave Hollins' pay will increase by almost $2 million. More significant in inflationary terms, nine and possibly 10 Phils, including Terry Mulholland, Tommy Greene and Curt Schilling, will be eligible for arbitration between seasons.

The body language says it all. Dave Hollins stands at his locker, moments after a Phillies loss. He bites a fingernail, curses, picks up a can of beer. Curses again. Glares at the uniform he just took off. Minutes earlier, with the Phils down by 10-7 and two men on base in the ninth, Hollins had blasted a drive 400 feet to straightaway center. It had landed two feet short of the fence, in the glove of Braves centerfielder Otis Nixon. Almost a hero. Now, alone in a roomful of teammates, Hollins picks up a bat, tries to squeeze out its sawdust and lays it down.

Dave Gallagher's throw home was weak and off-line, hindered, no doubt, because the Phillies leftfielder was seated in foul territory, somewhere to the left of third base. And if that seemed a comical conclusion, you obviously missed the beginning of the play. Two errors by Dave Hollins and a momentary mental lapse by Curt Schilling turned an innocuous fourth-inning pickoff play into a Keystone Kops' kind of run, and the Cincinnati Reds defeated the Phillies, 1-0, last night at Veterans Stadium.

He spent the week trying to play Let's Make a Deal. But now, all of a sudden, it might be a good thing Lee Thomas never made one. Like everyone else, the Phillies' general manager thought he had to subtract an outfielder to make room on the roster for the return of Lenny Dykstra and Dave Hollins from the disabled list yesterday. But Thomas wasn't able to deal one of his outfielders. So last night, the Phillies cleared roster space for Dykstra and Hollins by taking the least complicated course of action possible - by optioning pitchers Andy Carter and Paul Quantrill to Scranton.

Black-and-white photos of a smiling Ernie Banks and a smiling Dizzy Dean hung above the locker of a real live player who looked as if he might never smile again. Several minutes after the Phillies' 5-4 loss to the Giants yesterday, 1 1/2 hours after the game's pivotal moment, Dave Hollins sat there silent and still. He couldn't imagine where that little baseball went. "I don't know how I didn't get that," Hollins said of Willie McGee's ground ball in San Francisco's three-run fifth.

There are always easy culprits after a Wrigley Field loss. The grass is as long as your lazy neighbor's. The walls, near and hard, occupy an outfielder's mind. And, always, there are the winds. All of those things played a role as the Phillies lost two of three to the Cubs over the weekend. But the real reason they will head back to Philadelphia downcast and a little deeper in last place wasn't the wind. This time, it was the games they blew. Back-to-back misplays on third-inning bunts led to three Chicago runs and the Cubs went on to defeat the Phils, 5-3, yesterday.

It was Nostalgia Day at Veterans Stadium. Kind of made you long for the days when the Scranton pitching staff was at Scranton. The Phillies wore bright 1948-style uniforms yesterday, but their biggest 1992 problem - starting pitching - still clung to them. Kyle Abbott, recalled from Scranton on Thursday, lost for the eighth time in as many decisions as the Cubs defeated the Phillies, 5-2, before the season's second-largest crowd at the Vet, 53,872. Abbott, one of three members of the current Phillies' rotation who pitched at triple A in the last week, allowed three runs in the fifth and another in the sixth, and the Phils could manage only Dave Hollins' two-run, ninth-inning homer off Chicago's Mike Morgan (6-2)

Less than three weeks ago, Dave Hollins' fly balls didn't have much distance. Not enough strength yet. And if that wasn't enough of a problem, the unpredictable throws from the Phillies third baseman were turning first baseman John Kruk into an overweight Fred Astaire, dancing every which way in an attempt to make a lunging stab or scoop. "It wasn't a fun time to be playing," Hollins said before last night's game against the Montreal Expos. "No one wants to go out and play like that.

First, Dave Hollins said he was surprised to hear Bill Giles say on TV the other night that the Phillies were thinking about making him a rightfielder. Now it seems to be a surprise to Giles that it was a surprise to Hollins. Giles said he thought his general manager and his third baseman had already been through all this. "I was told that Lee Thomas met with Dave Hollins a month or so ago, before he was hurt," the Phillies' president said last night at the baseball's owners meetings.

They weren't carrying any of their teammates off the field, weren't gloating, weren't filled with the unbridled optimism that had swept their clubhouse 24 hours earlier. But the Phillies, after last night's 14-3 loss to the momentum-stealing Atlanta Braves, weren't feeling bad about themselves, either. "We would have liked to have won two," rightfielder Jim Eisenreich said after Phils pitchers had served up four homers and gotten smashed in Game 2 of the National League championship series against the heavily favored Braves.

ST. LOUIS - The tone was conversational, the posture casual. But if you listened to the words that Charlie Manuel said, really listened, there was more than just the usual afternoon banter. The Phillies manager doesn't call out his players in public. That doesn't work anymore, not with the security that comes with high salaries and long-term contracts. But his frustration with the team's sputtering, stuttering offense has been bubbling just below the surface for a while now. So as he sat in the dugout before last night's 4-0 win over the Cardinals at Busch Stadium, his core message was strikingly similar to the look-in-the-mirror challenge hurled so effectively by Dallas Green 30 years ago. Don't look at him. Don't look at hitting coach Greg Gross.

Former longtime Phillies scout Hank King has filed a federal age-discrimination lawsuit against the organization, alleging that it created an "intolerable" working environment and that the team ultimately fired him because of his age and a liver virus that caused him to take a medical leave in September 2009. King, 66, worked for the Phillies from 1976 through the 2009 season, starting out as a batting-practice pitcher before joining the scouting department in 1983. King was part of an advance scouting team that shadowed the Tampa Bay Rays before the Phillies' World Series victory in 2008.

No one had to tell John Kruk to make himself at home. It's been 17 years since he wore a Phillies uniform, but he said it feels like he never took it off. Before the Fightin's played the Mets on ESPN Sunday night, the Baseball Tonight analyst - who's also doing new segments for the network called "Best Seat in the House" and "Top Ballpark Food" - gripped and grinned with various people all over Citizens Bank Park. Some he knew. Others, such as the ticket staff, he met for the first time.

CLEARWATER, Fla. - It was an otherwise routine South Atlantic League series, the Class A Lakewood BlueClaws visiting the Delmarva Shorebirds at Arthur Perdue Stadium. Except that the Phillies sent scout Dave Hollins and minor league hitting coordinator Steve Henderson to watch their Lakewood affiliate play the Orioles farm team last summer. Except that, back in Philadelphia, trade talks between the Phillies and Houston Astros regarding Roy Oswalt were heating up. The front office needed to find out something about BlueClaws first baseman Jonathan Singleton and they needed to find it out fast.

CLEARWATER, Fla. - Hook of Hamate . . . It has the same sinister ring as Horn of Africa. Straits of Hormuz. Golan Heights. Read any of them in print and bad news is sure to follow. This breaking news just in: Civil war is the typical Horn of Africa deal involving Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia. Iran controls the entrance to the Straits of Hormuz, which surrounds the entrance to the Persian Gulf. Syria looks down into Israel from the Golan Heights. Hook of Hamate?

CLEARWATER, Fla. - Pete Orr and Josh Barfield sat in the far corner of the Phillies clubhouse, the one reserved for players wearing Nos. 60 and 61, contemplating the day's crossword. It's a daily ritual for the two non-roster players. "Put the two of us together and we can almost finish it," Barfield said. They came here this spring because the Phillies were the first team that showed a great deal of interest in their services. Neither played at the major-league level in 2010.

Throughout his 14-year career with the Phillies, Darren Daulton gave plenty of on-camera interviews. Those came easy. Speaking into a camera with no one on the other end, that comes difficult to him, which is why Friday's Wall of Fame induction came with plenty of jitters. Upon learning that he would be inducted with other Phillie greats, the three-time all-star grew anxious at the idea of having to prepare a speech. He jotted down a few points, nothing too fancy. He just wanted to make it "short and sweet.

A SK AND YOU shall receive. You asked: "You gave us your All-Time Phillies Good Guys team from the 1950s . . . Now, what about the bad guys?" It's a slippery slope when you assign arbitrary negative labels to athletes based on personalities, demeanors and the dissonance that becomes pink noise in any baseball clubhouse. So, with apologies to anybody who might take offense, here are Bill Conlin's All-Time Phillies You Might Not Want to Marry Your Daughter. Infield Pete Rose : I had mixed emotions naming him because we had a great relationship dating to his Reds days.

INQUIRER STAFF WRITER 1995: The Phillies from 1992 to 1995 were a collection of muscle-bound players who, when healthy and playing for something, could be a physically intimidating bunch. The cast of 1993's Macho Row - Darren Daulton, Dave Hollins, Pete Incaviglia, Lenny Dykstra - was starting to change in 1995, but the team's demeanor remained somewhere between cocky and nasty. Dykstra once said the team's physical presence alone was enough to beat some pitchers or some teams. "They look at us, and they say, 'This is a bunch we don't want to mess with,' " Dykstra said.

1993: The Phillies had plenty of villains to motivate them. A year earlier they had been the National League's dartboard. They were hit by 51 pitches, 19 of them plunking Dave Hollins. The fact that their pitchers didn't retaliate created a schism in the clubhouse and left the '93 team to vow it wouldn't happen again. There were whispers that spring they they'd get even with a lot of pitchers and teams, including Greg Maddux, who had broken Lenny Dykstra's hand on the '92 season's second pitch.