J-Roll: Yanks Would Have Kept Both Lee and Halladay

Jimmy Rollins was on The Dan Patrick show the other day and was asked about the Phillies letting Cliff Lee so they could acquire Roy Halladay, here's what he had to say (hat-tip to Subway Squawkers):

“That, I have no idea. I’m sure we could afford him. We turned nearly 4 million people through the turnstiles last year. I don’t know. You should have (Phillies GM) Ruben (Amaro) on here… When the trade happened, I actually got a text from Jayson Werth and he was like, ‘What are we doing?’ And I was like, ‘Didn’t we get Halladay?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, but we traded Lee.’ And my mouth dropped like, ‘That wasn’t part of the deal.’ I really don’t know. I thought we had enough to keep him. I thought we could have done enough to keep him."

"I guess that’s just a move the Yankees do… That’s just the truth. The Yankees would have been like, ‘Hey, we got a chance to keep both of them. We’ll pay them both for a year or two and we got a chance to win a championship.’”

Sounds like Jimmy is a little envious of the Yankees and how they do business, and he's right, the Yankees would have kept both if they had the opportunity to do so. But I wonder if it was ever a possibility to begin with. Lee was part of the deal that brought Halladay to Philly, and I'm not sure if that deal happens unless Lee and the Mariners were involved. Maybe adding Happ or another one of their top tier younger guys would have gotten it done. Who knows. What I do know is that it's never good for your starting shortstop to publicly question his team's decisions.