It's the end of an era we are told.

The era of over-optimistic, overspending Phils teams is through, and the era of austerity and rebuilding has begun. This weekend the Phils traded—or more properly dumped the salaries of—Bobby Abreu, David Bell, and Corey Lidle.

It all makes me feel wistful. A lot has happened to the Phils franchise in the last few years.

They have a new stadium and have gone through a ton of players and even more money.

They have bettered .500 each of the previous three seasons, but the closest they came to the playoffs was narrowly missing the wild card last year, technically after their regular season had ended. Reaching .500, let alone making the playoffs is a remote possibility this year.

They hired player-friendly manager Charlie Manuel as a caddy to then-franchise player Jim Thome (as well as a reaction to strident, A-personality manager Larry Bowa). The manager that tried to pry the job away from the Manuel, the man Ed Wade anointed Bowa's successor a year earlier, has since become the manager of the best team in baseball (i.e., Jim Leyland). Meanwhile, Jim Thome lasted just one injury-plagued, unproductive season under Manuel's reign. Manuel appears to be a lamp duck for the rest of the season, should he last that long.

Only five players survive from the 2002 season, the last before the Phils became the big spenders they had been until the weekend's salary dump. They are Pat Burrell (whose contract makes him close to untradeable), Jimmy Rollins (who has been in a season-long slump), Rheal Cormier (the requisite reliever), Randy Wolf (who is now on the DL more often than in the rotation), and Brett Myers (who, though an established major-league starter, caused the biggest black eye for this organization since Ben Chapman baited Jackie Robinson).

In truth this team has been careening toward the abyss since the trade deadline four years ago. That's when they traded then franchise player Scot Rolen to the Cardinals after failing to woo the third baseman into a long-term contract. As the press labeled Rolen clubhouse "cancer", the Phils were cornered into trading him at below trade value. The trade looked lousy at the time, even though they received Placido Polanco, who became a very fine player for the Phils before, of course, being traded away last season while leading the majors in batting for basically nothing.

The money that they offered Rolen was used or at least mentioned in seemingly every major contract they have signed since. David Montgomery has gone on the record saying that the ill-advised Burrell contract was basically a sop to the media and fans after the Rolen fiasco. When the Phils signed Jim Thome after the 2002 season, the money that the Phils had earmarked for Rolen was said to be used (along with the revenue sharing money that came indirectly from the Indians, Thome's former team) to corral the slugger. After that, signing Bell as a free agent and resigning guys like Abreu and Rollins to big-time contracts became the norm.

The names have changed, but the Phils are basically in the same situation they were in at the trade deadline in 2002. They have a few young stars, some pitching prospects, and not much else.

The one thing that has not changed in four years is the team's management, and if Bill Giles recent comments, made in the wake of the Myers scandal, are any indication, it won't be changing any time soon.

The problem with this team is at the top. I thought that replacing the woefully inept Ed Wade with an actual general manger in Pat Gillick would be enough, but given the recent salary dumps, clearly Gillick is working within a framework that is and never has been about winning. Wade, ever the showman, is clearly more concerned with milking the cash cow of having a team in the largest single-team market in the country. Montgomery appears too inept to provide any clear direction for the franchise. That leaves Dallas Green who at least is a knowledgeable baseball man but whose greatest legacy for the team is not managing their only world champion. It was stealing Hall-of-Famer Ryne Sandberg from the Phils, in one of the worst trades in baseball history, when he became the Cubs GM a few years later.

But I digress…

Bobby, We Hardly Knew Ye

Bobby Abreu came to the Phils following the 1998 expansion draft in what was one of the most lopsided trades in recent history. The Phils relinquished no-hit shortstop Kevin Stocker, who had just three seasons, none of which consisted of more than 112 games, left under his belt, to the newly minted Devil Rays, who had just drafted Abreu from the Astros.

Yesterday, after almost nine seasons in a Phils uniform, Abreu was shipped to the Yankees in a deal that looks just about as lopsided. The Yankees get Abreu and end-of-the-rotation starter Corey Lidle, and the Phils get four nondescript prospects.

Just as Abreu's tenure as a Phils has been totally misunderstood—"Why does he have to walk so much?"—the two trades that bookended his career in Philly have been just as misunderstood. When the Phils acquired Abreu, Stocker was a local hero—we do love our sub-par shortstops in the Larry Bowa mold—, a leftover from the 1993 NL champs. To trade him for a young unheralded outfielder—think Von Hayes—was not well received.

Though Abreu received a big hand from the Philly phaithless toward the end of the first game of yesterday's doubleheader, the fans and media have been rabidly calling for him to be traded all year. His $15 M contract for next year (plus either $2M buyout or $16M option for 2008) have been seen as an albatross around the Phils' necks. Curiously, the fans suffered through players with high price tags (though not quite as Abreu's) who were complete drains on the lineup for the past couple of years, specifically, David Bell and Mike Lieberthal. (Mercifully, Bell was also traded this weekend, for a bucket ice, er, the requisite minor-league relief pitcher.)

The four prospects the Phils received consist of three at or below Single-A ball (shortstop C.J. Henry, catcher Jesus Sanchez, and righthander Carlos Monasterios) plus a Quad-A 27-year-old pitcher (left-handed reliever Matt Smith) who because he can strike out about a man an inning appears the best pickup in the group. C.J. Henry was a 2005 first-round pick and is just 20, but has yet to prove that he can hit at even the lowest professional levels. For any of them to become productive major-leaguers would be a long shot at best.

Don't buy it when assistant GM Mike Arbuckle says, "We got value in today's market conditions." They dumped salary plain and simple.

Anyway, I wanted to take a quick look at Abreu's legacy as a Phil. He will not be well remembered, but he arguably was the team's best outfielder since Hall-of-Famers Ed Delahanty and Whitey Ashburn and their best overall player since Mike Schmidt, the best Phillies player ever.

Here are the Phils with the most Win Shares with the team. Abreu ranks seventh:

If you look at his Win Shares per year, he looks even better. He's second behind Grover Cleveland Alexander, another Phils who was traded in a woefully lopsided deal:

So long, Bobby. Good luck with the Yankees. Good luck getting your jersey number back from Larry Bowa.

Unfortunately, the mourning period won't be long as the parade of salary dumping continues today. Whether the next to go is Jon Lieber, Pat Burrell, Ryan Franklin, or someone else, rest assured that the Phils will get the requisite middle reliever in the deal.