Wait 'Til Who Knows When (Certainly not 2021!) ... (Winter 20-21 Off-Season Realism)

[fish]

If those cigars were mine I would do to Theo what he did to Curt Schilling back in the early 2000's. I would have Thanksgiving dinner with him and promise him complete control and a 1-2% stake in the club.

I'm a bit confused by what the rumors mean that Theo is interested in an ownership stake in his next job. I get the feeling it's role with a meaningful voice in the ownership ranks and a larger slice of the pie than simply a 1% cut and the headache of running the show for someone else. Kind of like what David Montgomery was.

[zambonir]

Herein is the problem. Its been tough enough to find five starters that can make a quality start. To attempt to find five relievers who can come in behind them and eat up the rest of the innings in almost impossible.

It's extremely possible! Easier than finding quality starters, even. The Phillies just haven't figured it out. But the teams who have thrived these past few years have, and usually on the cheap too, because young arms and fringe arms can still get the job done in limited, extremely targeted usage just as well as $10 million guys. And we saw so many bullpen games in the postseason itself - but you have to get there first.

Statistically speaking Morton was the Rays 5th starter last year. He missed a few weeks with an injury, that's always going to be a concern obviously. His playoff track record is certainly something else (but again, have to get there).

The shortstop question is still part of the same single, multi-pronged question. With or without a new GM, what sort of budget and goal for the 2021 season has Middleton truly set? And $-wise, we not only need to know what they are spending, but how JT fits in. I don't see it being like two years ago when they piled up transactions (including JT himself) long before Harper signed. If they are waiting on JT, we'll be watching certain players (shortstops, DHs) go to other teams. The question is can they afford to miss out on another catcher while they're waiting.

I think Theo wants to start an ownership group, not just be handed equity from an existing controlling owner. That could be a group buying a team, or waiting for expansion. Unlike the Phillies (or now the Mets) most ownership groups these days have 10, 20 even 50 investors, with the person at the top not holding anywhere near a majority, just the power of being the founder and managing partner (much like Giles back in the day). Theo still can't be that first guy, you do need more personal wealth than that, but he would be the Jeter to somebody's Bruce Sherman (Sherman owns 46% of the Marlins, Jeter 4%).

Either way, the Phillies can't offer him enough I don't think. Plus I believe he really will take a year off

[BostonRoss]

Who would want to own a MLB team. I hear they are big money losers!

[zambonir]

nice thread title change, btw.

[allentown]

nice thread title change, btw.

My major take on we whiners from this, and the prior few, off-seasons: we were overly optimistic about the state of the Phillies. For all the counter-arguments that we were too critical of Phillies baseball-side management, we were way too optimistic last season about: the commitment of ownership to spend to win, generally picking in the range of a better than .500 2020 season, overestimated the pitching, vastly overestimated the season Kingery would have, thinking the farm would be a bit stronger today than it appears to be, thinking the ownership/team was implementing a plan forward and developing a sense of urgency -- nobody predicted at this time last season that we would have no GM, a foot-and-head-out-the-door president cipher, no visible plan, and a focus on cutting salary expense. Most of us predicted at least a slightly above .500 season in 2019.

In recent years, it really has been virtually impossible to be overly negative/pessimistic about the Phillies organization.

[el-pietro]

Most supporters of a team will be more optimistic about their teams chances than they probably should be in reality, it goes with the territory.
The Phillies fell just short of .500 but did so with an historically awful bullpen. There were plenty of concerns about the construction of the pen ahead of the season here. If they had managed to put together a merely bad/below average pen then the Phillies likely make it into the playoffs, and quite possibly as the division runners up in place of Miami. From there they could have dispatched the Cubs. Whether they could have defeated the Braves or not is a different question. They almost certainly would have lost to the Dodgers though.
All that said, the team is in bad shape going forward.

[andyb]

I think the pessimism this year is an outgrowth of the disappointment last year - and the sense that any decisions made this year will just be betting again on areas where they failed dramatically last year. Most of our big dollar free agents last year (Harper, Gregorius, Arrieta, Cutch) gave a performance as expected in total (some better than expected like Didi, some worse like Cutch - Arrieta was kind of as expected). While money spent on the bullpen was a failure too, the premise of the bullpen was based on depth and even everyone healthy underperformed.

Looking at this season it seems management is pinning hopes for improvement on young players and small signings. Those are the very areas where we have underperformed in recent years, even with a nice debut by Bohm. Most of our high end pitching prospects have failed by now. We bet big on guys like Pivetta and Velasquez and to a lesser degree De Los Santos and Irvin and others).

The success of 2021 seems dependent on our ability to evaluate talent (like with Crawford and Sixto) and develop young players (Howard, Kingery, Haseley, and the next tier of pitchers) and that is our biggest failure the last few years. And we are going into 2021 changing little in terms of how we evaluate talent, still depending largely on Klentak's team and in zero hurry to hire a better team. That is a recipe for pessimism (though the optimists in us hope we are all wrong).

[Austinfan]

The only caveat I'd have about last season is it was a clusterf--- in general, due to the Coronavirus.
So a lot of things could change just getting back to normalcy, Kingery being a good example.

Same way we don't know if they've made real progress in player development b/c there was little chance to develop players into the fall, outside the few older prospects in Lehigh like Marchan.

[andyb]

The Klentak years showed an amazing consistency of being able to underperform in normal years along with extraordinary years like last year. They get zero passes. If Kingery was not ready to play he should not have played. Every team faced the same development problems. Most teams had COVID outbreaks that were worse than the Phillies. All we can do is evaluate the mediocre results and stop making excuses for them.

[Austinfan]

That's not my point.

It's simply that when looking at 2021, there is far more uncertainty than normal, how much you can glean from 2020 performances is questionable, 60 games in normal circumstances can be highly misleading (Herrera had a great first half before his career went into death spiral), in a season like 2020 I'd be extremely skeptical.

It would not surprise me at all if bad/good performers in 2020 reversed this season, or if prospects, who got a year to physically mature, come out of nowhere next season b/c we didn't get a year to observe their growth, and what would normally look like a steady ascent becomes an unexpected "jump."

[allentown]

Most supporters of a team will be more optimistic about their teams chances than they probably should be in reality, it goes with the territory.

I agree with this and have, despite my poor opinion of the way the baseball side of the Phillies organization has been run, have shared in that excessive optimism.

However, I think the period from the first game of the shortened 2020 season, up to today, has been the worst, most dispiriting period for me, and I think most Phillies fans, in the past roughly 15 years.

[flyers19rw]

Recently I have tried to be optimistic on the Phillies. AF sort of echoes my analysis of the last season; it was a disaster for MLB. Sure the fans got to see some games but what happened was not what the game is supposed to be. The season is a long 162 game haul which stresses the entire organization. 2020 was a short sprint that never did that.
As we head into 2021, we do not know what the organization will have at its disposal. That in itself is frustrating. Will JT be re-signed? Will the club make player acquisitions through FA or trade? How good/bad are the players in the minor league system? More importantly, who is going to run this show? Some people are functioning under the premises that ownership will do little or nothing and return to the days of a Giles like operation. If that happens, then the whining will be justified. My call is to just wait and see how it unfolds before hanging the black crepe.

[zambonir]

I found 2019 more disappointing. That was the team that was supposed to make a legit run at 90 after all the roster changes, kicking off a new period of competitiveness. In April there was even hope that Franco would thrive as a lower-order bat and Herrera would still be useful.

Going into even a normal 2020 most projections/pundits saw an 83-win team even with Didi, Wheeler and a new manager, and it was already obvious the club was not set up for multiple seasons.

And the bullpen plan for 2020 was basically to see what shook out in the first two months, which ceased to be an option in a shortened season. There's no desperation trade for Workman/Hembree, and more patience for both the young guys and the fungibles. Perhaps they would have busted the tax in a normal season (at the deadline) but the unwillingness to do that really hurt them too.

[andyb]

I was probably more disappointed with 2019 because it was a real season too, but I just don't give them a pass on 2020 either. Everybody else played by the same rules. 8 teams made the playoffs. And we collapsed in September yet again. When an organization fails to identify usable depth (in the bullpen especially) year after year it is hard to say "regression to the mean" about any forthcoming season.

The fan in me will always be an optimist and think our prospects and stalled development players will come through. The analyst though sees a system ranked in the mid 20s and wonders why we should expect more improvement than everybody else.

[Philsmania]

Philadelphia is a big media market and the rest of MLB knows it. If Middleton returns to the Giles era (aside from a temporary phase during a rebuild) and Philadelphia becomes a blight on the MLB landscape with perennially bad teams, low crowds and anemic TV ratings, the rest of MLB will pressure Middleton and possibly the entire ownership group to find to find an exit strategy just it did with Giles in 1996 and Nugent all the way back in the '40's (and the Macks with the Athletics in 1954).

[andyb]

80 out of 450 employees gone. Mostly buyouts and I guess all this was telegraphed. The timing of announcing this on the day before Thanksgiving seems a bit unnecessary.

Phillies eliminate more than 80 front office positions through buyouts, layoffs

[andyb]

The Phillies do appear to be making progress in their President search, so that is good. Apparently 3 interviews so far: Michael Hill, Josh Byrnes, and one more unnamed who is not Theo Epstein.

Stark: As the Mets back off, Phillies moving forward in front office search

[zambonir]

I wouldn't claim to remember but I don't think MLB pressured Giles. Giles was a good MLB soldier and Selig crony; that Seglig coterie of small-market owners surely loved having the Phillies more on their side than the Yankees side. It was actually Middleton who took the initiative to replace Giles with Monty, but even then Giles remained in the ownership group, and was the point man for CBP. And CBP is the only reason the Phillies turned into a big-spending club, with all the winning, and the revenue boom across MLB (TV deals, digital) keeping the party going.

And plenty of other big-market teams are getting ready to slash payroll, both because of the pandemic and because of where their team is at competitively. Houston, Chicago. Boston. Phillies are just the only team of those three that didn't have a winning cycle in the past five-six years, they skipped that part.

The media market doesn't really matter so much anymore. It's not like the Phillies have ever been great for Fox's ratings. And the Comcast deal isn't about ratings or advertising nearly as much as it is subscription fees (and either way, that money isn't going anywhere. It will probably outlast the current ownership structure, even).

[California_Dreamin]

zambonir...you are correct, MLB had nothing to do with Giles stepping down, JD Drew and Scott Boras did. Giles was running things in early summer of 1997 after the Phils drafted Drew when Giles made that foolish comment about the stalled negotiations with Drew about "the kid is not a free agent." I cringed when I read it and I suspect many Phillies phans and organizational types did too, and shortly thereafter Giles turned the reigns over to Montgomery.

MLB would NEVER have forced Giles to relinquish the reigns, after he was a Giles [his dad Warren was a baseball lifer] and he was also the ultimate "good soldier."

[bigegypt0417]

Byrnes seems like a longshot...no?