Philadelphia Phillies and the free agent wait, doo-dah

It’s more of the same for the Philadelphia Phillies – hurry up and wait.

Philadelphia Phillies fans turned their calendars from January to Spring Training fewer than 100 hours ago, and that means those fans may have begun to consider whether “their team” may or should be damned for their Hot Stove season. Of course, baseball’s winter is now longer, with free agents and teams waiting far, far longer to shake hands and introduce new teammates.

No longer do big free agents sign around Thanksgiving or Christmas time as they once did, in this century, and with Philadelphia, and that has Phillies fans upset. It has been seven full years since the Fightin’s saw postseason action.

It is time, many say, for Bryce Harper or Manny Machado to end that. Waiting for one to sign what’s expected to be a long-term contract, however, has been like waiting for the 32 SEPTA bus to swing around City Hall while three 17s pass by in a row. Oh, everybody knows all the reasons for caution with long-term deals for MLB’s mega-stars (read, Albert Pujols, et al). Everybody knows the counter-argument (Harper and Machado are both six years younger than Pujols was when he signed with the Angels).

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That Matt Klentak is confident about signing one of this year’s big free agents does nothing for Phillies fans, even if Jim Salisbury points it out. Salisbury also pointed out when Cliff Lee and Jim Thome signed (see second link above), and fans are tired of hearing explanations from Klentak and others about “the new normal.” They’re tired of word salads like one Klentak put in front of Salisbury: “Our job as management is to be patient and understand the ebbs and flows of the free agency process and be ready to strike whenever that time is.”

Even the editors writing the URL for Salisbury’s piece seem tired of the procrastination. The end of that link reads, “matt-klentak-says-phillies-will-remain-patient-pursuit-manny-machado-bryce-harper-doda.”

That tail word seems to be an allusion to Stephen Foster’s “Camptown Races,” which involves a “Camptown race-track five miles long” and a repetition of the phrase doo-dah six times in the first stanza. Yes, the Phillies will probably have to “run all night” and “run all day” in order to get either Harper or Machado.

And here’s why that may well be stupid and deserves, now, to be damned. Both of the following arguments are well known to Phillies fans, and now deserve an ear in the Phillies executive suite if the team hopes to build on their 2018 modest gain in attendance.

First, there is the Jake Arrieta experience of last season. Arrieta signed with the Phillies on March 11, well into spring training, and most people were reasonably happy with his physical conditioning. The veteran pitcher does take care of himself. However, how did the ensuing season turn out for the former Cy Young winner?

Halfway through the season, Arrieta was 5-6 with a 3.54 ERA and had lost four of his five games in June. At the end of the season he was 10-11 with a 3.96 ERA, and his WHIP was 0.102 higher than his career figure (including 2018). The question is, then, can the Phillies be sure that delaying Arrieta’s spring training had no effect on the pitcher’s modest decline?

Second, Phillies fans know the team has plenty of money from a huge cable TV deal, and that principal owner John Middleton suggested he might be willing to spend money in a “stupid” way to make his team competitive.

Now, of course, one might well say it’s easy for anyone to spend someone else’s money, or even the wealthy should spend wisely, but implicit in Phillies fan demands that the team spend some money to “get this done,” whether this involves Manny or Bryce, is an understanding of the meaning of the term billion.

Before I stopped doing it, I used to have a brief discussion with college freshman writing students about the meaning of “a billion” and was (originally) somewhat surprised some of them literally did not know a billion means a thousand million. That figure is a bit difficult to wrap one’s mind around.

Let’s leave the Phillies contract with Comcast ($2.5 billion for 25 years) alone for a bit, and turn to Mr. Middleton as long as we’re going to spend somebody else’s money. According to Forbes, Middleton’s real-time net worth (Feb. 3) is $3.2 billion. This means he controls assets worth 3200 million dollars.

It is not lost on Phillies fans that, even if Middleton were to pay every penny of a 400-million-dollar contract out of his own pocket, which would not be the case, he’d have a “sizable” chunk of change left.

It is now time for the Philadelphia Phillies to sign one of the two players coveted by every MLB team this winter and make sure he shows up for spring training camp to prepare for the season for the actual duration of that camp.