Throughout the stretch run of the 2010 season and again in at least both the 2011 and 2012 seasons, given reasonable health, the Philadelphia Phillies will remain a contending baseball team.They will remain so because their trade deadline acquisition of right-handed starting pitcher Roy Oswalt has now made them virtually slump-proof.
Every team will go through slumps during the course of a 6-month long, 162-game season. The slumps will come because the team doesn't hit collectively on a consistent basis.
The slumps come because injuries hit. Sometimes, as with this year's Phillies team, those injuries occur to multiple key players at the same time.
They come at times because there is simply not enough pitching, and bad pitching gets beaten up by good professional hitters.
The one thing that can make a team 'slump-proof', or much more unlikely and infrequently than other teams to a slump or multiple slumps during a long season, is the presence of consistently strong starting pitching.
The Phillies now run three true ace starting pitchers at other teams: Roy Halladay, Cole Hamels, and Roy Oswalt. The odds that all three will lose their respective turn through the rotation are long. The odds that will happen twice in a row are even longer.
Most teams want to have what is known as an 'ace', or a 'stopper'. A true 'ace' is a top-of-the-line starting pitcher, one of the perhaps twenty best starters in the entire game.
