MLB

Lowly Phillies may clean house with Hamels, Victorino on block

Sure, this is just how you pegged it when you saw last September that the Mets and Phillies would be spending July 4 week together at Citi Field. Right?

The Mets? Active buyers.

The Phillies? Preparing to sell.

The Mets dominating the Phillies, to be more specific, 11-1 last night, as we arrive at the holiday benchmark.

“They kind of had things their way,” Phillies manager Charlie Manuel said of the team his club has tormented for the five prior seasons.

In this upside-down National League East, the five-time defending divisional champions are looking like the broken team. The club that appears poised to dominate the trade deadline like the Mets did in 2011. The guys giving away good players — Cole Hamels and Shane Victorino, in this instance — and looking ahead to next year, in other words.

The Phillies, having lost six straight, are now a stunning 36-46. The only team in the history of the 162-game schedule (since 1961) to win 36 or fewer games in the first half and proceed to qualify for the playoffs would be . . . the 1973 Mets, who went from 35-46 to 82-79 and won a very weak NL East — based on researched by Danny Knobler of CBSSports.com.

Granted, baseball now has two wild cards, increasing the temptation for teams to attempt a miracle run. Also, the fact teams acquiring these players can’t get compensatory draft picks if they go elsewhere as free agents, a wrinkle of the new collective bargaining agreement, will make it tougher for clubs like the Phillies to bring back a haul.

Nevertheless, Hamels is absolutely a high-impact player and Victorino is potentially one. And the way the last-place Phillies are playing right now, there’s little reason to think they can put together a run.

“We need to do it,” said Victorino, the “it” being winning, before the game. “We need to prove to them that we can do it.”

The “them” is Phillies general manager Ruben Amaro Jr., who attended last night’s game, and his lieutenants and boss, Philadelphia president David Montgomery. Amaro would be negligent if he weren’t already gauging the trade value of both high-profile players, collecting information in case his club can’t salvage this season.

The Phillies just welcomed back Chase Utley (knees) last week for his 2012 debut. Ryan Howard (torn left Achilles’ tendon), who has missed the entire campaign, is on a rehabilitation assignment at Triple-A Lehigh Valley. Roy Halladay (strained right latissimus dorsi) is still throwing off flat ground.

The return of a functional Howard and Halladay to the team, well, “There’s no better acquisition around the game,” Victorino said.

Agreed. No club can improve itself via trades as much as the Phillies can simply by getting healthy.

Nevertheless, as Manuel noted after the game of Howard, “He ain’t gonna make a difference in 11-1. Unless he just has a hell of a night.”

So the Phillies must improve dramatically pretty much now — they close the first half with a three-game home series against Atlanta — or else the status of Howard and Halladay won’t matter much. The Phillies will owe it to their fan base to seriously consider trade offers for Hamels and Victorino (who is having a subpar season) in order to build up a base of young talent for the future. The Dodgers, under new ownership, are expected to pursue Hamels aggressively in free agency this winter, and with so much money committed to other players, Philadelphia might have to let the talented lefty go.

It’s a stunning development for an organization that had seemed to figure out everything. Sure, industry folks wondered if the big contracts (Howard, Cliff Lee, Jonathan Papelbon) and win-now trades (for Lee, Halladay, Roy Oswalt and Hunter Pence) would eventually haunt the Phillies. Not this soon, though.

“We’ve just got to start pulling together,” losing pitcher Vance Worley said in a deathly quiet visitors’ clubhouse.

There are many contenders who are pulling for just the opposite, so they can pick apart the Phillies the way the Phillies usually do to others.

kdavidoff@nypost.com