Now, pretty much everyone in the baseball world has heard today's news out of Philadelphia. Ryan Howard signed a five-year, $125M extension with the Phillies that will keep him there through 2017, which will be his age 37 season.

Now, I was going to go through the many reasons why this was a silly move by Ruben Amaro and company, but I thought that it would just be easier to just let some other guys speak for me.

Such as..

• Matthew Carruth over at FanGraphs
• Rob Neyer on his SweetSpot Blog
• BTF's Dan Szymborski on ESPN's TMI Blog
• Keith Law on ESPN's MLB Rumors Page
• Craig Calcaterra on HardballTalk
• Kevin Kaduk over at Yahoo! Sports

If you read all of those, you'll notice a pattern: some really smart guys have a lot of smart reasons for why the Phillies shouldn't have made this deal.

But you know who had a really damn good day today? Mr. Casey Close, Howard's agent.