Fire the coach! It's the easy, if wrongheaded, way out.(changes in coaching staff around professional baseball)

Phillies pitching coach Vern Ruhle was so eager to exact revenge on the Astros for firing him that he offered bribes to his pitchers when they faced his former team at Enron Field in early May.

"Bonus incentives," Phillies lefthander Randy Wolf calls them, without revealing the values that Ruhle attached to each win and save.

"All I know," Wolf says, smiling, "is that Robert Person collected some money."

Person threw a two-hit shutout in the series opener. Amaury Telemaco pitched nearly as well in the middle game.

Even though the Phillies lost the finale, the lesson should not be lost on the Astros or any other club that tries to solve its problems by firing coaches in the middle of a season: Stop creating scapegoats. Stop playing The Weakest Link with coaches when players and managers are more responsible for a team's failures.

Royals pitching coach Brent Strom and White Sox hitting coach Von Joshua are the latest dismissals. Joshua's firing seems especially absurd, considering that the Sox last season led the majors in runs. But, hey, that's baseball.

Ruhle, 50, was not to blame for the Astros' pitching collapse last season, their first at Enron. But because the Astros needed to "do something," they dumped a coach who less than a year later has molded the Phillies' dubious collection of arms into a first-place staff.