Almaraz was the Phillies front-office version of square peg in round hole. The draft was not his experience base, nor his forted. He had a lot of good baseball background and was very highly regarded, from his time with Braves and I guess Reds, but he earned his spurs in Latin America. That's where we should have deployed him. More and more, it looks like the worship of Agostinelli is misplaced and his job should have gone to Almaraz. Almaraz also had background in player development.
I see Klentak as a smart guy who's trying to learn on the job. He has not impressed. I think fans prefer him to Amaro, Jr., because Klentak doesn't come off as being as obviously arrogant as Amaro did. Still, I think Amaro was better than Klentak and Wade was better than Amaro. Gillick did some things very well and was truly quite bad at others. The hire, which I see as the real killer was MacPhail. The Phillies apparently wanted a guy with royal baseball management bloodlines, just as Ruly Carpenter did, when he disastrously anointed Bill Giles as his successor. MacPhail doesn't seem to have done more than sit on his ass, ponder forever, collect a salary, and make the questionable hire of Klentak, whom he then allowed to sit and ponder as organizational changes to the baseball management progressed VERY slowly.
With all the changes, we still have zero evidence that the Phillies can adequately evaluate H.S. or 15-16-17 year old LA position players. That deficiency has been an organizational killer, as we've spent a ton of $ on these young position prospects and not struck out (which every team does to a significant extent, although less than us), but including guys who were just grossly misevaluated and never had significant talent -- a Duggan is bad luck on inuries, guys from LGJ to Moniak, Encarnacion and Ortiz are bad judgment.
And Senzel should have been under consideration by Phillies.
