Phillies show one way a bad baseball team can operate

Updated at 12:00 p.m. Friday: The trade is now official.

The Phillies, in a warped sort of way, just showed the world what a big-market team is capable of doing. The purse strings they pulled in order to get six players in return for staff ace Cole Hamels and wildly inconsistent reliever Jake Diekman showed that they are willing to spend in an attempt to get better.

It was the business of a bad baseball team, but not a cheap one. In order to get three of the Texas Rangers' better prospects - outfielder Nick Williams, pitcher Jake Thompson and catcher Jorge Alfaro - the Phillies opted to eat a lot of Hamels' money and take on the hefty contract of veteran pitcher Matt Harrison, who is unlikely to recapture the form that got him that huge five-year deal in January 2013.

The Phillies will send $9.5 million to the Rangers, according to Ken Rosenthal of Fox Sports. That amount will cover Hamels' salary for the remainder of this season and roughly another $1.5 million. Small-market teams do not do that because they cannot afford to do that. They also do not agree to pay out the $32.6 million that the Phillies will give to Harrison through 2017, but that was the cost of sweetening the prospect pot.

You can argue that the Phillies would have been better off keeping Hamels and using the $32.6 million in another way (free agency, signing a Cuban player). But the men in charge decided this was the way to go, and the fact that Hamels wanted out of Philadelphia made it inevitable that he was going to be traded.

Now the mission is to become the kind of big-market team that spends on players who want to come here rather than absorbing the money of ones who want to leave. How soon that happens will depend a lot on how well the new prospects perform.

In addition to the players listed above, the Phillies also received pitchers Alec Asher and Jerad Eickhoff in the deal. If either becomes an accomplished big-leaguer it would be a surprise. The same can be said about Nick Pivetta, the pitcher the Phillies acquired from Washington for Jonathan Papelbon.

It is Williams, Thompson, and Alfaro who will dictate the success or failure of this trade, which could be the last one of general manager Ruben Amaro Jr.'s tenure with the Phillies. It would be nice to know exactly how much input and influence Amaro had on the trade. It is known that the general manager ran all the meetings with the scouting staff in the weeks and days leading up to the trade deadline. It is also known that team president Pat Gillick and his future replacement Andy MacPhail remained mostly quiet in those meetings.

That, however, does not mean that Gillick and MacPhail remained silent once it was time to make the deal. Always underestimated in these decisions are the roles played by a team's professional scouting staff. In the Phillies' case, the strongest voice in that department belongs to Charley Kerfeld.

In his ninth season with the team, he has the title of special assistant to the GM. It probably should be special assistant to the president, because it was Gillick who brought him here and Gillick who has the utmost trust in him.

It is no coincidence that Kerfeld was the man in attendance at the parks of the Rangers' minor-league affiliates leading up to the trade of Hamels. It would also not be surprising if Kerfeld had more influence on this deal than Amaro.

Regardless, the trade will be placed on Amaro's resumé and it will be interesting to see if the performance of the three legitimate prospects involved can save his job. That seems doubtful, but the idea of letting Amaro orchestrate the team's biggest pitcher trade since Curt Schilling's also seemed unlikely.

Thompson, a 6-foot-4 righthander whom the Rangers got from Detroit in the Joakim Soria deal last July, and Alfaro, a 6-2, 225-pound catcher, were both ranked among Baseball America's top 100 prospects before the start of the season. Thompson, 21, was 43d on that list, but has been inconsistent this season. Alfaro, 22, is a power hitter with a big arm, but he might end up being an outfielder rather than a catcher.

The best player for the Phillies in the deal could end up being Williams. A second-round pick in 2012 out of the aptly named Ball High School in Galveston, Texas, he is a lefthanded-hitting outfielder with some power. Playing at double-A Frisco, Williams, 21, was among the top 10 in the Texas League in doubles, triples, home runs, runs scored, and OPS this season.

We won't know for a while if the extra money the Phillies spent to make this trade was worth it, but the fact that they spent it is proof that they are serious about getting better. It is still difficult to digest, however, that they have become such a bad baseball team that they must eat money in order to deal away their best player.

@brookob