"It's pretty amazing," Amaro said at Citizens Bank Park.

From being a 15-year-old batboy with the 1980 world champions to being put in charge of the 2008 world champions three days after riding in the latest parade - "It's a little surreal," Amaro said.

A star athlete at William Penn Charter School and a Stanford University graduate with a degree in human biology, Amaro uses his own athletic career for comic material.

"My dad wanted me to be a soccer player or a doctor. I was probably a much better soccer player at the time," he said, remembering when that changed, while his father was a first-base coach with the Phillies and he did his three-year stint as a batboy.

"I got to be around some unbelievable players - Mike Schmidt, Larry Bowa, Bob Boone, Steve Carlton and Tug McGraw," Amaro said. "That was the point where I just kind of decided . . . baseball would be a pretty darned cool sport to continue with. I really started putting my eggs in that baseball basket."

This news conference was known to be coming: Pat Gillick had made it clear that he was retiring back to Seattle, parade or no parade. Amaro and personnel director Mike Arbuckle were the in-house candidates, both with support. Amaro was the favorite to ascend. The Phillies announced yesterday that Arbuckle had resigned.

An assistant GM for the last decade, charged with negotiating many of the contracts of the current players, Amaro, 43, is at the end of a "well-prepared path," as Phillies president David Montgomery put it yesterday. "He has had baseball as part of his entire life."

"I can't say too much about Ruben and his qualifications," said Gillick, who will be a consultant to the team. "I think he knows the challenges ahead of him. I think he's up to the challenges. I think he's prepared for them."

Amaro is at least third-generation top-level baseball. His grandfather, Santos, had the skills to play big-league ball, but this was pre-Jackie Robinson, when a black Cuban wasn't welcome in the major leagues. Santos Amaro immigrated to Mexico at age 31 and became a legend there, the Babe Ruth of the Mexican League, playing for 17 seasons. In 1941, he was second in the Mexican League in RBIs, behind Josh Gibson.

The longest big-league career belonged to Ruben Amaro Sr., a fine-fielding shortstop who played for the Phillies from 1960 to '65, a Gold Glove winner on the '64 team that has its own place in Phillies lore. No slugger, Amaro Sr. hit eight home runs in his 11 seasons, which included time with the Cardinals, Yankees and Angels.

Both Santos Amaro and Ruben Amaro Sr., who grew up in Mexico, have been inducted into Mexico's baseball hall of fame.

On his mother's side, Amaro Jr. is at least a third-generation Philadelphian. His grandmother ran a gourmet cheese shop at the Reading Terminal Market. His parents, now divorced, met at the market. Amaro grew up in a duplex in the Rhawnhurst section of Northeast Philadelphia. He didn't know anybody else with his specific ethnicity, from a Jewish mother and a father of Cuban descent who grew up in Mexico. A 2002 Inquirer profile related how he was such a good soccer player at Penn Charter that there was an offer to play in Germany, but his mother "nixed it because of her feelings as a Jew about the Holocaust." She was thrilled with his career in baseball, though.

A lot of Phillies fans remember when Amaro came up in 1992. He'd been picked up from the Angels, part of a trade that sent Von Hayes packing. At the start of the '92 season, Lenny Dykstra was hurt, and Amaro Jr. filled in, hitting three home runs and scoring eight runs that first amazing week.

"I don't think I was ever the same after that," he later told The Inquirer. "Instead of driving the ball like I knew I could do, I thought I would be a home-run hitter. People were saying I would be the next Willie Mays, and I guess I was listening. I look at films of myself striking out, and I say, 'What was I thinking?' "

In parts of eight big-league seasons, including two stints with the Phillies, Amaro hit 16 home runs. The 1992 season, when he had 374 at-bats, was the only time he had more than 175. In between, he played for Cleveland, where Charlie Manuel was his hitting coach.

"Unfortunately for Charlie - and I don't know if this speaks to his credibility - he actually traded for me," Amaro quipped yesterday.

He mentioned Dallas Green, Paul Owens, John Vukovich and, most of all, his father - a longtime scout after his playing and coaching days - as the guys who taught him the game. He said he would "forever be indebted" to former GM Ed Wade for bringing him into the front office as an assistant.

"It was a pretty tremendous leap of faith on his part," Amaro said.

He talked about the work ethic and integrity he saw in Wade - "he's the most honest person I've ever met in the game" - and the endless supply of resources Gillick had just by picking up his phone.

After the news conference, Amaro was to fly to California for his first general managers' meeting as a GM.

"Our goals will remain the same," he said.