Now Who's Getting Doc Halladay?

With the Phillies getting Cliff Lee, the matter of Roy Halladay is still getting some attention. With the Phils out of the picture, the front-runners appear to be the Los Angeles Dodgers and Boston Red Sox. From Tim Brown of Yahoo! Sports

In the wake of the Philadelphia Phillies’ acquisition of starting pitcher Cliff Lee(notes), the Los Angeles Dodgers and Boston Red Sox have become the frontrunners to acquire Toronto Blue Jays ace Roy Halladay(notes), according to baseball sources.

While other clubs – the Yankees, notably – remained peripherally engaged, there appeared to be a two-team race for Halladay with a little more than 24 hours left to the non-waiver trading deadline.

Blue Jays GM J.P. Ricciardi has asked for as many as a half-dozen prospects in return for Halladay, the former Cy Young Award winner who would lead the Dodgers’ rotation and join Josh Beckett(notes) atop the Red Sox’s.

The Dodgers’ offer is believed to be all minor league prospects except right-handed pitcher James McDonald(notes), who has pitched 38 major league innings. Starters Chad Billingsley(notes) and Clayton Kershaw(notes) have not been offered, and neither have any of the team’s starting position players.

The Red Sox’s offer includes top pitching prospect Clay Buchholz(notes), as Yahoo! Sports reported Wednesday. The Blue Jays also have been given the choice of reliever Justin Masterson(notes), Triple-A pitcher Michael Bowden(notes) or Double-A first baseman Lars Anderson(notes), with lesser prospects from the farm system filling out the Boston offer. The Red Sox from the beginning have included Buchholz because the Blue Jays made it clear he would have to be the starting point of any deal.

After weeks of believing that the Jays would indeed trade Halladay, I am definitley leaning the other way now. The bottom line is is that not a whole lot of words have been coming out of JP Ricciardi's mouth in order to get this deal done. Pretty much everything that he has said for the past few weeks has come straight out his ass and that is not going to get things done. It also does not help them that they want half of a team for Halladay either. It seems more and more that in the long run, Cliff Lee was the better option for the Phillies than Halladay would have been.

And just a little FYI for those that like to stay up late on the east coast, I will be over at Keith's Sports Journal tonight live blogging the Phillies-Giants game. He's a Giants fan. I'm a Phillies fan. Come on, you just know that this is going to be a good time!