The Phillies needed a miracle at the trade deadline. Instead, they got Jason Vargas | David Murphy

You can’t have needs in late July. That’s the bottom line the Phillies are realizing right now. You can have weaknesses, or vulnerabilities, or imperfections. But you can’t have needs. The July 31 trade market is not a magical place. A general manager cannot click the heels of his oxfords a couple of times and transform his roster into something it hasn’t been all season. The trade deadline is the final quarter pole, the place where only those in position can make a move of consequence. If you have paid any amount of attention to the Phillies this season, you will know that they are not in that kind of position.

The standings might suggest otherwise, at least to those inclined to the suspension of disbelief. Six games back is a hefty deficit but hardly insurmountable. In 2007, the Phillies were seven games back on Sept. 12. In 2010, they were six back on July 24. With seven games left against the Braves this season, the Phillies still have ample opportunity to make up ground. Half of their remaining games will come against teams who entered Tuesday with a losing record. The math is not impossible.

But this is not about math. The Phillies are closer in the standings than they are in real life. Look back through recent history at the World Series rotations of teams who won their pennants with middle-of-the-pack offenses like the one the Phillies currently boast. And then remind yourself that two of the Phillies’ top three starters at the moment are guys who would slot in a lot of other organization’s triple-A rotations.

No disrespect intended, of course. By any standard, Drew Smyly pitched well against the San Francisco Giants on Tuesday night. He kept his fastball down, with a good downward plane, and in doing so looked nothing like the guy who allowed more than a touchdown per nine innings in 13 outings for the Texas Rangers this season. He’d been sharp in three triple-A starts for the Milwaukee Brewers, with 18 strikeouts and three walks allowed in 12 2/3 innings. Perhaps this will go down as a small scouting victory. Once upon a time, he was the same pitcher we’ve seen in his first two starts for the Phillies. Between 2012 and 2016, he was roughly seven percent above league average with a 3.74 ERA and solid strikeout and walk rates in 570 1/3 innings for the Tigers and the Rays. He is only 30 years old. Perhaps he just needed time after arm surgery kept him out of the game for a couple of seasons.

Meanwhile, Jason Vargas is the sort of 36-year-old lefty of which we’ve seen plenty over the years, a soft-tossing gamer in the midst of a workmanlike season, with a 3.27 ERA in his last 16 starts. When the Phillies acquired him on Monday from the New York Mets for a piece of back-of-the-warehouse minor league inventory, it was a no-brainer. That they’ll have the option of keeping him around for $8 million next season is an added bonus, given their current straits.

There have been plenty of legitimate contenders whose regular season rotations have included an arm like Vargas’ or even Smyly’s. The problem with the Phillies rotation isn’t just that they have two of them, but that they just might be their second- and third-best pitchers. In fact, there probably isn’t any “might” about it, seeing as though they just dispatched the guy who had been their second- or third-best starter to the bullpen to make room for Vargas. That made Zach Eflin the latest passenger on a carousel that has seen Nick Pivetta lose his spot for Jerad Eickhoff, Vince Velasquez lose his spot for Pivetta, Eickhoff lose his spot for Velasquez, and then Pivetta lose his spot for Smyly.

In the customary post-demotion interview in front of his locker, Eflin declared that he still believes that he is a major league starter. That’s an admirable and entirely understandable mindset to take for an athlete. The Phillies’ problem is they entered this past offseason believing the same thing, despite 46 big league starts that suggested otherwise. Regardless of what someone’s FIP says, if he failed to get through more than five innings in half of his starts in what was supposed to have been a breakout campaign, perhaps he hadn’t quite broken out after all.

Same goes for Pivetta and Velasquez, both of whom at least boasted the sort of stuff that can excuse a front office’s rose-colored dreams. With Pivetta, you saw it last night in the two home runs that the Giants mashed as soon as he entered the ballgames. Some guys have fastballs that go a long way in the wrong direction, and time is not a remedy. As for Velasquez, the wait for big league consistency had already lasted four seasons. At some point, the evidence suggests that the bus ain’t coming.

The time to realize these things was the offseason, when guys in Smyly and Vargas’ peer group are sitting around waiting to sign the first offer that guarantees them multiple millions of dollars. If not Patrick Corbin or Dallas Keuchel, why not somebody, anybody who might have been an option before the middle of July?

You can’t fix that sort of miscalculation at this time of the year. Maybe if the offense was living up to its full potential. Maybe. As it stands now, the Phillies must keep an eye toward 2020 and hunt whatever value exists at the market’s margins. And if nothing further transpires before Wednesday’s 4 p.m. trade deadline?

“It’s a rotation that we are confident will give us a chance,” manager Gabe Kapler said.

I’ll have to go back and look, but I’m fairly certain that the spring training messaging coming out of Citizens Bank Park was a little stronger than “We’ll have a chance." If you are hoping for a miracle, I’d suggest whiskey instead.