Sielski: Phillies' plan is painful but proper

CLEARWATER, Fla. - There is a philosophical conflict playing out in three of the country's major sports leagues, and three Philadelphia franchises, each in its own way, are at the core of it.

At its essence, the conflict comes down to this question: What is the right way to build a winning team? The Phillies, the Flyers, and - most infamously - the 76ers have adopted similar approaches to answering it. After years of sparing no expense in pursuit of championships, each organization has, to one degree or another, become unwilling to sacrifice its long-term vision of sustainable excellence for the sake of a potential immediate payoff.

For three seasons now, the Sixers have made their win-loss record a secondary concern as they have cleared salary-cap space and hoarded draft picks. Once the model for "going for it," the Flyers let Monday's trade deadline pass without making a deal - the first time that's happened since 2010 - retaining the most alluring prospects in their farm system, remaining deliberate and cautious in promoting those young players to the NHL. And the Phillies, under new president Andy MacPhail and general manager Matt Klentak, are rebuilding in a like-minded manner. Their spring-training camp is loaded with fresh, unfamiliar faces, all here on the hope that, whatever lumps they take this season, they and the Phillies as a whole will be better for it years from now.

Whether it's the tyranny of a hard salary cap or a need to turn over a roster that had been stocked with players past their primes, those teams and others like them had logical reasons for implementing those measures. (Keeping a closer such as Ken Giles, for instance, didn't make sense for a team that won't often have a lead after eight innings.) But that logic creates the conflict, because it runs counter to the very principles that give sports its legitimacy: that every team should be trying to win every contest and chasing every championship at all times, that sports derives its entertainment value and intrinsic worth from that pursuit of victory, and that compromising the pursuit even for something possibly greater in the future is both dishonorable (i.e. "tanking," however one defines it) and bad for business.

(The Eagles and the NFL don't have to deal with this conflict. The volatility of the sport itself and the parity that the league enforces make it easier for a team to rebuild quickly, and when it comes to America's love of football, nothing seems bad for business.)

The Phillies' role in this conflict came up here Monday morning at Bright House Field, after Tony Clark, the executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, met with the team as part of his tour of spring-training camps. Though competition in the American League is expected to be well balanced this season among its 15 teams, the Phillies are among several National League clubs that have embarked on lengthy rebuilding plans, leading to a more top-heavy dynamic in the NL.

"We want to have flexibility," Clark said. "We understand there are certain challenges market to market. There are certain times where windows close. You've made a heck of a run, and you realize it's time to reboot it. We understand all that. But we also appreciate that certain markets need to act like certain markets, and it's in the best interests of the industry that they're navigated a certain way so the line keeps moving across the board. . . .

"I don't know that anyone would believe that in any particular market suggesting to the fan base that you're not trying to win is the best place for that organization or team to be."

Those italics were added for emphasis, for that assertion by Clark cut to the heart of the matter. A generation ago, the Phillies were lambasted when then-team president Bill Giles called them a "small-market team." Now, with their payroll hovering at $90 million, they would seem to be behaving like one again - only this time, people say they're smart for doing it. Clark has his own agenda, of course: He represents players who want to get paid, and the franchise in Major League Baseball's biggest single-team market isn't paying players the way it used to. But there's still a significant segment of Philadelphia's fan base that would rather see the Phillies exhaust every option to be more competitive this season, regardless of how it might affect the team's future.

There's just one problem with that thinking: Given how far they'd fallen since 2011, the Phillies are smart for finally recognizing that they couldn't buy their way back to success, and for recognizing how to start digging out of the rubble. You do it one stone at a time.

"The baseball industry is littered with examples of teams that, after a year or two or three, when the pressure mounted, when the frustrations came, when the losses piled up, changed their plans," Klentak said. "Those are the teams that oftentimes find themselves caught in the middle for longer stretches of time. That to me is very clear. We want to be on the side of the teams that have maintained their discipline and have achieved as a result of that."

So do the Flyers. So do the Sixers. The price of the strategy is the costliest and most exacting commodity in Philadelphia sports.

The price is patience, lots and lots of it.

msielski@phillynews.com

@MikeSielski