Phillies should just keep Pete

TO MANY in baseball, Pat Gillick's hire as the Phillies' general manager in late 2005 signaled impending doom for the brief tenure of manager Charlie Manuel.

It was just a matter of time before he would be replaced, until the savvy Gillick could get a lay of the land and bring in one of those big-name managers for whom everyone clamored.

And when Gillick's first move was to trade Manuel's protégé, Jim Thome, to the White Sox?

Well, you probably couldn't even have found a bookie to take a bet on ol' Chuck after that.

Three seasons later, Manuel and Gillick stood atop the same float amid a sun-saturated parade that both men now say was one of the highlights of their baseball-rich lives. It was the third such parade for Gillick, and in the previous two occasions, both in Toronto, the manager he stood aside also had been a head-scratcher.

Cito Gaston has two rings from his days managing the Jays. Manuel has as many as Jim Leyland does. The trick, Gillick said the other day, is "trying to realistically know where a club is and match the right guy up.

"It just depends. If you have a club you think is going to contend, you want an individual you think can put you over the top," said the Phillies' outgoing president. "If you have a club that's in the developmental stage and it's a couple of years away, then you might want somebody from a little different situation. I think it depends on how you evaluate your situation and what type of person you want in that role."

Pete Mackanin is 64 years old, and for 47 of them he has filled various jobs in the business of baseball. He has been a player in the minor leagues and in the major leagues. He has been a full-time manager in the minor leagues and served as an interim major league manager on three occasions, including now. He has been a pro and a minor league scout, and has directed those departments too. He has played, coached and managed over 14 seasons in the Caribbean.

"There's so many different ways to look at the whole game," he was saying in his office last week. "I've pretty much looked from every one of them."

As a minor league and Caribbean manager, he has won more than he has lost. He has walked into dismal major league managing situations like the one here and a similar one in Cincinnati and again, he has won more than he has lost. The Reds were 31-51 when he was plucked from the scouting office in 2007. They went 41-39 the rest of the way.

Here? The Phillies were 26-48 when Ryne Sandberg stepped down in late June, on pace for a 100-loss season. Heading into last night's game against the Mets, they were 21-12 since the All-Star break, fourth-best record in baseball.

"Teams before the break probably just laughed at us," Phillies rightfielder Jeff Francoeur was saying. "We've done some pretty good things with Pete. Look at the Cubs. We went in there and swept them in Wrigley. And I don't think they've lost there since we left."

The Cubs have lost three times at home since, compiling a 21-5 overall record since running into the Phillies.

The Phils won three of four over the weekend against Miami after splitting two hard-fought games against the wall-bashing Blue Jays last week. They roughed up AL Cy Young candidate Mark Buehrle in a 7-4 victory over Toronto, then rallied from an early 8-1 hole in Thursday's 9-7 loss to the Marlins.

"The one thing Pete has done here, which I give him a lot of credit for, is he stabilized things," Francoeur said. "Which is tough to do in this city. Especially with everything that went on with Ryno . . . We went out west [before] the All-Star break and just got our [butts] handed to us. And to come back and play the way we've played?

"Even the games we've lost, besides one or two, we have been in every game and been competitive in them. And that's something that's important and is a credit to Pete."

And yet . . . There is a prevailing opinion that Mackanin will again be out of a job come this winter, after president-to-be Andy MacPhail - who has traveled with the team extensively since his hiring was announced in late June - installs his guy.

Like Gillick, MacPhail has done it both ways in his three stops. In Minnesota, he hired little-known minor league manager Tom Kelly, whom players loved and media, at least early on, endured. In Chicago, with the Cubs, he hired former major league stars and seasoned managers Don Baylor and Dusty Baker.

In Baltimore, he plucked Buck Showalter from the broadcast booth to manage the Orioles.

Here's hoping he takes a page from Gillick's playbook, or remembers that it was Kelly who got him his two World Series rings, not those other, more famous names. Hire Mackanin, for all the reasons listed above and one more, presented innocently by Gillick.

"This is unfair, what I'm going to say," he said. "But it's tough to judge a guy on an interim basis. The players are a little harder to work with if they know the guy is only going to be there a period of time."

That hasn't happened here. If anything, the young Phillies are playing as if they want the guy to stay around, want that interim tag to disappear.

He deserves at least that for what he went through this summer.

And so do we.

philly.com/SamDonnellon