Time to have a debate, I think. We got into this a bit in June. In a comment thread on an excellent dajafi post, I said that, in all candor, in the spirit of an honest retrospective, but without fingerpointing or negativity, The Good Phight ought to go back and consider whether anything was amiss with some of the posts from 2011 that now seemed overly optimistic. Taco Pal challenged me to name a particular TGP article that actually looked bad in hindsight. So I went back and checked, and this is the one I had in mind, by Remember the Phitins. To reiterate, some of the quotes from RTP's article: “With the starting pitching and the bullpen that this team has for the next 3 – 5 years, the team will compete for the playoffs every year,” “That’s a breathtaking talent gulf between the Phillies and the out-of-contention pack (but less so vis-a-vis other playoff teams).” RTP suggested that we put that post on the shelf until October, during the discussion here. OK, now it's October. As I took pains to say before, I'm not here to pile on, and in fact I'm not even certain that the original post was all that wrong. RTP made reasonable arguments and backed them up with thoughtful arguments and evidence. And the original post, from Sept. 2011, was mostly about the mid- to long-term future. But, it pretty clearly suggest that we could expect the Phils to be right at the top of the leaderboard in the near-term future, yet here we are with .500 non-playoff club. And RTP's post was greeted with enthusiastic praise in the comments. It just seems like something that deserves its own post for a clear-eyed look back. Were RTP and the commenters who agreed with the article wrong, and if so, what did they get wrong?