Friday, October 31, 2014

The Phillies No Way

Apparently Phillies GM has just unleashed a new organizational bible on the team called "The Phillies Way". 

This, as you might expect, is a terrible idea.
Sure, getting the entire org on one page developmentally and procedurally seems like a no-brainer, but let's think about context. For one thing, the Phillies' organization's procedures have been largely abominable over the last few years. Uber-prospect Dominic Brown got whipsawed to the point of uselessness. Cody Asche is....OK. Beyond that, the development pipeline has stalled out with alarming monotony. When the highest-impact guys you're spitting out are the Kyle Kendricks of the world, you've got a problem. A big one. 

Now, let's take the procedures that gave us that kind of success rate and codify and enforce them. Somehow, I don't think this is going to lead to a good result. But hey, other teams have "the Oriole Way" and suchlike, so the Phillies have to have one too. It's tone-deaf mimicking, opting for the label over substance by the team that basically had to be noogied into admitting that statistical analysis even exists. 

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the Phillie Way will be the blueprint for a teardown and rebuild of an organization that has made multiple expensive mistakes with mind-numbing regularity. Maybe this is what the team needs to reconfigure itself for the day when the bloated contracts of faded stars no longer clog up the payroll, and the faded stars don't clog up the lineup because at this particular moment they're still better than the kids coming up behind them. That's the thing about kids, though - they can get better. The Ryan Howards of the world, they can't. 

Not any more. 

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