Phillies a divided house to the end.(Knight Ridder Newspapers)

Byline: Bill Conlin

PHILADELPHIA _ There's an old saying, "A fish rots from the head." The fish running the Phillies have been out in the sun so many years now, downwind is the only place to stand.

Better get used to the odor of serial failure, however. Ed Wade, the Phillies' vice president and general manager, will be back for his eighth season. He will stuff that still-quivering, $93 million mouse into a Hefty bag and go back to the drawing board. Ed doesn't need to build a better mousetrap; he just needs to build a better mouse. And in 2005, he won't have the fat wallet club president Dave Montgomery and the Teflonics made available last winter from the projected money stream that indeed gushed from the packed Money Pit in its debut season.

Should the anti-Bowa wing of the clubhouse have its way and the intense manager walks the plank at batpoint at the head of a coaching-staff purge, my word to the mutineers is this: Be careful what you wish for. The list of candidates is underwhelming.

If I remember, Larry Bowa was hired as the anti-Francona, to kick some complacent butts and extract maximum effort from players accustomed to frequent stroking. Scott Rolen survived the abrupt sea change that ...