Phillies Sign LHP Christopher Sanchez to 4 Year Extension

[zambonir]

Can't really compare Kingery to Sanchez, that was an entirely different kind of whiff. He'd only played three pro seasons and zero MLB games when they gave him that deal. Sanchez is already in his fourth MLB season (albeit intermittently) and 10th pro season - he actually played his first game before Kingery did (due to being an international player of course).

This is basically the same deal Nola got last time, just more modest, for a less accomplished/expensive player. Nola gave up one FA year on the four-year term and a second on the option. Sanchez would have gone to arb for all four years but is giving up two potential FA years on the options.

Nobody doubts the value of cheaper homegrown talent! It's not like Klentak et. al didn't believe in it, they just failed at it.

And of course right now this deal is also a testament to the value of trading away your homegrown talent in the right deal. Even if they could still lose the deal. It's just one of the things you need to have a good farm for.

[Austinfan]

I do think the Phillies devalued scouting and development for a stretch, seduced by the new found ability to buy talent.
It's not a deliberate thing, but a natural reaction to the removal of a constraint, it removes a sense of urgency in an organization.

Klentak did start the process to building a real organization, while he may have been unsuccessful, he did lay the ground work for his successors. Now we see an organization that is filling out from the FCL to high A. Still a couple years away from being a top ten farm system, but they actually have a solid group of prospects working their way up the ladder - compare to five years ago!

[zambonir]

I mean, yes, it's true that financial constraints make organizations more creative but the Phillies also literally devalued scouting and development by not spending enough on international. Domestically I think the failure was more about bad people running the show (and I don't mean Klentak though he chose to keep some of the folks he inherited and didn't hire that well when he didn't) and a bad culture (which had people pulling in opposite directions and was also a culture that historically devalued scouting and development and started the whole bad era by refusing to rebuild). What we see now is a credit to Barber first and then of course to Dombrowski (and Fuld, one of Klentak's hires) with Mattingly and the entire development infrastructure only just starting to catch up.

But I don't think the fact that they had money was especially seductive. They just legit didn't have internal options in most cases (and screwed things up along the way with Santana/Hoskins while also starting to get impatient in 2019, which I guess is a form of not prioritizing development).

[Aquapong]

Solid deal. Gives the team cost control and if he’s not performing we can cut him loose before paying him bigger sums.