And this further illustrates why this was really a problem of ownership. Fired for PR reasons. But it goes deeper, to the whole organization and the inability to win more than one WS in the golden era of 2007-11. I thought Arby, rather than RAJ was the best choice for GM, but RAJ could have succeeded, if not cut off at the knees by ownership. Although RAJ was picked to be GM, he seemed to young an inexperienced to carry a normal GM's weight with ownership. It was a coup, which made the Phillies the prohibitive favorites for a WC when he assembled a rotation top 3 of Halladay-Lee-Hamels, but was forced to throw away Lee to stay within budget, when the difference was only about $6 million on a top team, which should have been expected to have huge revenue that year. This just needed to be a one-year over-budget. It was beyond foolish. Not to shop Lee to everyone was an awful choice following a foolish decision and Gillicks presumed ability to identify winners from the Seattle organization was a pipe-dream, which yielded zilch. The Phillies also departed from the earlier approach when Arby was responsible for both scouting and development and they worked together. This ushered in years of no coordination and bad production. Was this on RAJ, Gillick, or ownership? Thus began an excruciating, overly-long dark ages for Phillies phans.
