Rebuilding the Phillies: Part 3

This is last of a three part series on the Phillies. Part I and Part II can be found here. 

WHEN I EXPRESSED skepticism about the Phillies' pursuit of Andy MacPhail in a column a couple of weeks before he was hired as the next president, I received a handful of emails accusing me of ageism. This was mostly because I couldn't resist the temptation to take a few gratuitous shots at the baby boomers, a generation which, it turns out, has quite a few members, plus a whole bunch of newly acquired free time that it is still trying to figure out how to fill. But there were also several readers who thought I was accusing MacPhail of simply being too old to be a capable chief executive in a sport that has witnessed a technological revolution over the last decade.

In reality, my skepticism lay, and continues to lie, not in his age but in his pedigree. Ironically, it is the same pedigree that attracted John Middleton and his partners to the man. MacPhail is a baseball blueblood, the son and grandson of longtime executives who are now in the Hall of Fame, the former president of two teams, the general manager of a third.

None of that eliminates the possibility that he has the right skill set for the job. But MacPhail spent a long time as a member of a baseball establishment whose way of doing things enabled executives like Billy Beane, Theo Epstein and Andrew Friedman to do them differently. While there is plenty of reason to think MacPhail is capable of building an organization, there is also plenty of reason to wonder whether the organization he is capable of building is one that is capable of competing against the National League behemoths that Friedman and Epstein appear to be building in Los Angeles and Chicago, not to mention the one that already exists in St. Louis.

And that brings us to our final installment of what I guess my editors are calling a series but is probably more accurately described as a manifesto that was so long they had to break it up into three parts and run it on three different days. Given the structure of the thing, you have probably arrived at this point thinking my solution to everything is to let the machines handle it, and that anybody who is not directly involved in the operation of the machines is little more than a speed bump on the highway of progress. And if life were a series of binary propositions, then maybe I would turn it over to the machines, because human beings can be really annoying to deal with.

But life isn't like that, which is why this final installment is less a standalone component and more a conclusion to the first two that ties them together with some important context. And that is this: Create a diversity of voices. If Andy MacPhail staffs his front office with a bunch of people who remind him of Andy MacPhail, the Phillies are bound to MacFail.

The Phillies' new president should strive to create a front office full of people who will bring a vast array of perspectives to every conversation about every decision, people who will challenge every assumption and force each other to look at things from different perspectives. The goal isn't to create an organization that runs like the Dodgers or the Rays or the Cubs or the Cardinals or the Giants, but to create an organization that drafts and develops like the Giants and Cardinals and finds value like the Rays and the A's and makes incremental improvements like the Cubs and maximizes assets like the Astros.

When Friedman became president of the Dodgers, he hired Beane protege Farhan Zaidi, who has a doctorate in economics from Berkeley, and Josh Byrnes, a former general manager of the Diamondbacks and Padres. They brought in Galen Carr from the Red Sox and Billy Gasparino from the Padres and former big-leaguer Gabe Kapler.

Perhaps MacPhail's absence from the game for the last three years will help him by forcing him to surround himself with a variety of people who have experience in all of the different areas that the game has changed in recent years, from the hard slots in the amateur and international markets to the paucity in the free-agent market to the opening of the Cuban market to the rising tide of television revenue that continues to lift all ships.

The Phillies should pursue innovative minds from all sectors of sports: economics, biomechanics, performance analytics, player development. The one thing MacPhail should learn in his three-month crash course in the organization is that he has a lot of ground to make up if he hopes to create a franchise that eventually has other franchises chasing it. And that should be the goal, not a perpetuity of 12-year boom-and-bust cycles. Given their ability and willingness to spend - neither of which should be up for debate - the Phillies should be a marquee destination. And they should be willing to spend to attract an array of the best and brightest that is both broad and deep.

Blog: ph.ly/HighCheese