The weather, as if saving the drama for tomorrow night's highly anticipated Cole Hamels debut, mercifully ended tonight's rubber match between the Phils and Mets after just five innings with a 2-0 Phillies win. The Phils quietly take two of three from the Mets while being outscored 17-11, however.

The Cole Hamels era thus begins with the Phils trailing the Mets by an improbable three games, having won ten of eleven games.

On the break of such an auspicious media event, I thought it might be interesting to look at the best Phils debut seasons for pitchers all time. If Hamels does establish himself as the number one starter, not exactly a Herculean accomplishment given the competition, and continues to strike out at least a man an inning with sub 2.00 ERAs, will his 2006 season be the best debut for a Phillies pitcher ever?

Here are the best first seasons for a Phils pitcher based on Win Shares. Notice that I don't say rookie season, given that a player can retain rookie status for years if his major-league experience is limited. This investigation is just looking for players in a similar situation to Hamels:

This is everyone with at least 10 Win Shares in his first year. You might notice that the only man on the list who debuted in the last twenty years is Bruce "Roughed Up" Ruffin, whose best years came in the Rockie bullpen.

Though you hear the organization stating that Hamels is the best young arm the Phils have developed since Robin Roberts—thanks for the pressure guys—, the man to aim for is really Ray Culp. If Hamels can equal his numbers, the Philly faithless will be quite happy indeed. As for the dead ball-era and nineteenth century pitchers, it's very difficult to compare a pitcher from this era especially a young one who has had a history of injuries and will be handled gingerly, like Hamels, to pitchers from those eras. Hamels has very little chance of bettering Grover Cleveland Alexander's 28-win rookie year.

Given the dearth of recent players on the list, let's look at how some of the more notable ones debuted:

Wow, that's a whole lot of pain, that is. Aside from Ruffin and Charlie Hudson, that's not much to crow about, and that's going back thirty-five years. Even when a pitcher had some career success (e.g., Jackson, Ashby, and Gross), very little of it was with the Phils.

One would be hard-pressed to find a worse track record than that. It doesn't give me a whole lot of confidence that the team will reverse this trend with Hamels, but I keep telling myself that this is why the team finally hired a real, life baseball man in Pat Gillick. He's developed pitching before. Hopefully, he can do it again with Hamels. Then I start worrying about his back, but I digress…