Phillies Hot Stove, Winter 2023-24

[Chris23]

Diego leaving?

You might as well drive a stake thru my heart.

[zambonir]

I would hate to think that the Phillies couldn't outbid a baseball equipment company for what had become a key baseball operations position (as reflected by the fact that the next hire will be made by the front office not the PR department). So I'm assuming it is for other reasons (lifestyle change, greater opportunity for future earnings/advancement, just ready to do something different).

[Callison]

As an alternative to Yamamoto, Soto looks like a real opportunity. If you're able to take the financial hit, you're going to rationalize that they guy is young. So when you get held up for a ten year deal, it's one that the player might actually fulfill. You are planning for the future by signing this guy. The thought of adding a hitting star to the Phils is one of my favorites. Wouldn't be the worst thing to see the Phils win a lot of high scoring games because they outhit everybody.

[zambonir]

Trading for Soto and signing Soto are two different things though. They should and definitely will be interested in him as a free agent. But it still guarantees nothing. Just ask the Padres (every season they've had him).

[David_Criss]

https://www.mlb.com/phillies/news/rob-thomson-phillies-manager-extension

Thomson gets a contract extension through 2025.

[andyb]

One year extension feels odd unless Thomson really wants to retire at some point. Usually you get a 3-4 year deal after doing what he did.

Noticed they added some hitting instructors too, including one from the Astros. A little insurance against losing Long perhaps, though at his age he is probably not going to get managerial offers.

[zambonir]

Manager contracts are shorter than ever these days (Craig Counsell aside). It was a little weird they didn't give him three years in the first place. This is less an extension as a "not lame duck" move that they'll presumably have to revisit again next year. At that point they could tack on two years which would put him on the same timeline as Dombrowski. Or, sure, he could retire (or get fired).

They replaced the one assistant hitting instructor with two is all. Not sure that makes one of them an heir apparent or insurance. Long was already under contract for longer than Thomson (now it's the same).

[xogfog]

I think it's probably what Thomson wants, year to year deals from that point on, he's no spring chicken and the Phillies will be fine with him until they aren't. If they win the whole enchilada, he'll probably retire.

[zambonir]

he's no spring chicken

He's 60! That's not old in Major League Baseball or on this list I suspect.

But seriously, while it's true that he was thinking about retiring in 2020, and MLB managers are skewing ever younger, we just saw Ron Washington get hired again, and Bob Melvin change jobs. Topper's in the same age group as Snitker, Bochy (who already retired once), Martinez and Lovullo, and he lost to a guy over 70 in the World Series last year.

But I agree it's probably what he wants, mostly because he just doesn't get worked up about... well, anything. He doesn't need to know that he'd still get paid for a year or two if he got fired, and he likely has part-time income from the Phillies for life if he wants it. I would say it's 50-50 he coaches in 2025 either way. If they win it all he'll retire on that high note but if next season goes worse than this one he could also just step aside.

[andyb]

They replaced the one assistant hitting instructor with two is all. Not sure that makes one of them an heir apparent or insurance. Long was already under contract for longer than Thomson (now it's the same).

Yeah but bringing in 2 more coaches is something and none of us knows what it means. It could very well mean the team is thinking about what is next. It is really odd for the major league staff to have 3 hitting coaches for any team.

[bkox]

It is really odd for the major league staff to have 3 hitting coaches for any team.

True but it seems like it was just a decade or so ago that it was odd for a team to have more than one hitting coach.

[zambonir]

Yeah, I think it's just a natural by-product of the analystics and video/iPad era. There are a lot of coaching positions that didn't exist 10 or 20 years ago and the line between "field staff" and "analyst" is probably thin for some of them these days.

Meanwhile, in the bullpen what used to be a job solely to warm guys up is now "assistant catching coach," and the Phillies have two of those in addition to the bullpen coach.

Kapler, of course, had the largest staff of anyone in MLB with the Giants, and that's where we got one of these guys from too. I would assume one of them will be more involved in the front office communication and maybe even the minors communication, just as Kaplan is for pitching.

[BostonRoss]

Correlated with the coaches getting younger is that they have very little MLB playing experience. Of the current coaches, I think only Bob Meacham had more than a year or two in MLB, and most of them didn't play in the majors at all (including the manager). In 2003, the Phillies manager and five of the six coaches had played in MLB for at least eight seasons, and one of the other coaches (Joe Kerrigan) had four years in the majors. Only bullpen coach Ramon Henderson hadn't played in the bigs.

[bkox]

By 2050 dugouts will stretch the entire length of the foul lines as each hitter will have their own personal hitting coach, and the entire analytics department will sit in a makeshift office by the camera well

[zambonir]

Or there will be zero people in the dugouts, all coaches and data will just be projected into each player's brain implant.

[andyb]

We were stuck at 5 to 6 coaches for about 50 years. In the 60s and 70s most teams had a pitching, bullpen, 1st, 3rd, and hitting coach. By the 1980s we had a bench coach added. Then it was really only 10-15 years ago that we started to see assistant hitting and pitching coaches in addition to the analytics staff. Uniform coaches are limited to 6, but it really is an explosion in the number of coaches all in the last decade.

Hard to see how useful all this is. Most players probably have their personal coaches too. I think I'd rather have the extra short season league that might produce more actual players than these extra layers of even more expensive coaches at the major league level.

[zambonir]

It just seems like semantics to call them coaches. When Fuld became "director of integrative performance" in 2020 was he a coach or a suit (figuratively speaking)? For that matter what about before that when he was in charge of outfield positioning (badly) as a member of the 2018 analytics team?

Also, how did they get Howie Kendrick - a front office advisor - into the dugout in uniform during the playoffs, different rules/limits than regular season?

It will be interesting to see how the new translator hire is positioned too.

[zambonir]

No surprises here. (Also hilarious that it starts with "a source familiar with the club's thinking" but then quotes Dombrowski extensively. i.e., it's likely him, he just didn't want to go on the record about any specific player.)

Source: Phillies aren’t involved in trade talks for the Padres’ Juan Soto

At the risk of disappointing folks who want to see a big offseason splash, the Phillies aren’t involved in trade talks for Soto, a source familiar with the club’s thinking said Monday at baseball’s winter meetings.

Although the Phillies have been linked to star free-agent closer Josh Hader, Dombrowski said he’s content to wait for a less expensive reliever, even though the team must replace free agent Craig Kimbrel’s 69 mostly solid innings last season.

”If we’re going to sign a bullpen guy — and I would think somewhere in the winter we have a chance to do that, or a trade, or something along those lines — it’s probably going to come after more of them come off the list,” Dombrowski said. “Maybe they’re in a position to say, ‘OK, we’ll take a one-year deal for X-amount dollars, and [right now] they want a four-year deal for Y-amount of dollars.”

[zambonir]

Thomson joking that if he gets a ring he won't retire, but rather, will squeeze the Phillies for that big longer contract.

“It’s good to know that you’ve got that extra year,” Thomson said, “but if I didn’t get it, probably wouldn’t have bothered me.”

“He didn’t ask me,” Dombrowski said. “I approached him.”

“I’m waiting to win a World Series,” Thomson said, “and then I’m going to approach him.”

Phillies are banking on the value of continuity with a lower-key offseason

[zambonir]

And here's the division of labor on the hitting coaches.

Lind, who has a nontraditional background as a hitting coach through his use of biomechanics, spent the past four seasons with the San Francisco Giants as their director of hitting. He’ll be in the dugout to share information with hitters during games, which will allow Kevin Long to focus more on the at-bats. Peña rose through Houston’s farm system as a coach and was the organization’s minor-league hitting coordinator in 2023. He’ll work with hitters in the indoor cage during games.