If MacPhail's the man for the Phillies, they should hire him now

This may sound odd, but the Phillies need to be more in a rush to hire rather than fire right now. It's time for a new club president to take a long look at all that needs to change.

Current president Pat Gillick was unavailable for comment Wednesday and it's reasonable to believe that he was in the process of completing a deal to bring on Andy MacPhail as his replacement. CSNPhilly reported Monday that the Phillies have targeted MacPhail, a baseball lifer with an impressive resumé as a general manager and team president.

If MacPhail is going to be the Phillies' next president, then the sooner he gets here the better. The rebuilding process is not going to look any better upon his arrival, but he can at least spend the final 31/2 months of this season deciding who should stay and who should go.

It's interesting to note that MacPhail has ties with a lot of people already in the Phillies organization. Both assistant general manager Scott Proefrock and director of player development Joe Jordan worked for MacPhail in Baltimore. Manager Ryne Sandberg still had strong ties with the Cubs when MacPhail was the general manager and president in Chicago. MacPhail hired Jim Hendry as his general manager in Chicago. Hendry was the GM who bypassed Sandberg for the Cubs' managing job in 2010.

MacPhail, 62, or any other new team president has a long list of difficult decisions that must be sorted through. It's no secret that the sentiment around here is that it is long past the time to move on from Ruben Amaro Jr. as general manager. Sit in Citizens Bank Park for the remainder of the season and he can see that for himself.

Chants of "Fire Sandberg" also are starting to surface in pockets of the ballpark as the losses mount.

Extended time with the team would also give the new president a chance to observe Sandberg and his coaching staff as they try to keep the team together in these most turbulent of times. MacPhail could spend July, August and September gathering opinions from the players about Sandberg.

Rebuilding a professional sports franchise, of course, is never aesthetically appealing and always difficult to stomach, but even with those prerequisites, the Phillies have sunk to an unfathomable and indigestible low.

In response to their 0-8 road trip that ended Tuesday night with a barrage of Baltimore home runs and a 19-3 loss to the Orioles, the Phillies trotted out Amaro Wednesday afternoon to talk about his team's descent to the bottom of the baseball world.

Predictably, he did not have any great answers for all that is wrong with his team.

"Clearly we haven't been playing well now and it needs to be better," Amaro said. "Other than [Tuesday's] game, we've actually been battling pretty well. We had a decent weekend as far as . . . not wins and losses, but we battled."

General George Custer and his men battled, too, during their memorable Montana road trip, and my scouting sources tell me they had more hits and runs than the Phillies. The only difference between Custer's lopsided loss and the one the Phillies suffered against the Orioles in Baltimore is that the general and his troops did not have a home game the next night.

The Phillies have 95 games left to play and plenty of misery lies ahead. It continued with Wednesday's 6-4 defeat that extended the team's losing streak to nine games.

That they were made to look incompetent as well as inept in the course of their 0-8 road trip did not bode well for either Amaro or Sandberg. When second baseman Chase Utley stood on the pitcher's mound screaming at pitching coach Bob McClure in the middle of good-natured veteran outfielder Jeff Francoeur's second laborious inning of relief Tuesday, it was another embarrassing moment caught on tape for the free-falling franchise.

A dugout shouting match between Sandberg, McClure and reliever Ken Giles had taken place last Friday during a 13-inning loss in which the Phillies failed to score in Pittsburgh. Giles was upset because the Phillies had ordered an intentional walk, which was the right move, but it does not look good for the manager and pitching coach when they were questioned by a guy who barely has a full year in the big leagues.

"I'm not concerned at all because both [incidents] have been addressed in-house, and both were a result of players showing emotion and being frustrated as everybody else is - as I am," Sandberg said. "When it's dealt with and talked about, it's behind us."

Amaro and Sandberg both fielded questions about their job security before the Phillies resumed their home-and-home series with the Orioles at Citizens Bank Park.

"I don't worry about doing my job to save my job," Amaro said. "I have to do my job well so this organization can get back on its feet and do the things we need to be a perennial contender."

Sandberg offered a similar answer.

"I worry about the game today and what has to be done today," he said.

Both were reasonable answers, but it matters little any more what Amaro and Sandberg think about their own futures with the team. Those decisions lie elsewhere and it appears as if the man making them could soon be in place.

@brookob