Rich Hofmann: Will this be the year Phillies manager Manuel uses his bench?

IN THE ANNALS of baseball, as annal a sport as there is, there are records that mean something and records that simply help fill the conversational time between pitches. This is probably more the latter than the former, but here goes.

Last season, the Phillies tied a major league record when they had five players with at least 675 plate appearances: Ryan Howard, Jimmy Rollins, Chase Utley, Shane Victorino and Jayson Werth. No team in baseball has ever had more.

The 2000 Angels, the 1996 Orioles, the 1986 Red Sox and the 1929 Phillies also had five, and that's the whole list. (And since you were dying to know, the '29 Phils were Don Hurst, Chuck Klein, Lefty O'Doul, Fresco Thompson and Pinky Whitney; I don't know about you, but I always forget Thompson myself.)

If your team relies so much on a core of players, it means one of four things, or maybe a combination of four things: that you have a really good core, that you have a really healthy core, that you have a really lousy bench, or that you have a manager who doesn't play his bench.

For the 2009 Phillies, it clearly was a combination of all of those factors. As you watched their offseason and the acquisitions of Ross Gload, Juan Castro and Brian Schneider, you could see how much the team wanted to upgrade the bench and alter this reality in 2010. But the manager remains, and you wonder if this is the year when Charlie Manuel will give his regulars a breather.

We have all heard Manuel say it a dozen times, that because of his experience as a fringe major leaguer, he understands how hard it is to come off the bench and he knows how important some semblance of regular at-bats is to giving the extra men a fighting chance. As he says, "I was one of them. I know."

Still, in his five seasons as the Phillies' manager, Manuel has leaned on his core players more than any manager in the National League, and it really isn't that close. Even acknowledging the bench struggles the Phillies had last season, with Eric Bruntlett, Paul Bako and Matt Stairs all floundering at the plate, Manuel has a tendency to ride his key players hard.

He talks about it and he laughs about it, saying how he's willing to use his bench guys if there isn't too much of a dropoff but simultaneously acknowledging that when you are talking about guys the caliber of Howard, Utley, Rollins, Victorino and Werth, there's always going to be a dropoff.

"I want to win," Manuel says, simply. He never pulls a Frego; that is, he never rests three or four guys on the same day, as Jim Fregosi occasionally did when he managed the Phillies in the 1990s, giving away one game with the thought that the systematic resting of players might win him more games down the line.

But with good benches and bad benches, Manuel has never gone that way. In the last five seasons in the National League, only 76 players have had at least 675 plate appearances in a season. The typical team had four in that time period. Under Manuel, the Phillies had 14, by far the most in the league.

In the last five seasons, Rollins has the most plate appearances in the NL with 3,618. (Only Seattle's Ichiro Suzuki, with 3,654, has more in the major leagues.) Of the top nine in the NL, three are Phillies - Rollins, Utley and Howard. This was not just a 2009 thing, not just a 1-year phenomenon.

Of course, we are talking about the best shortstop, second baseman and first baseman in franchise history. It is a unique accumulation of ability, to say the least. In addition, Rollins and Howard are traditionally better second-half players, so it isn't as if we're talking about managerial malpractice here.

But you wonder, especially with Utley sometimes wearing down and especially given that everybody is 5 years older than when Manuel arrived. The organizational philosophy is to keep the window of opportunity open, and you wonder if rest for the key players doesn't finally become part of that equation. You wonder if this might finally be the year. *

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