Philadelphia Phillies seem to halt their shopping trip
By Rick Soisson
The Philadelphia Phillies may be closed for business already.
If you kind of blinked at the Philadelphia Phillies news conference Dec. 16 officially welcoming Didi Gregorius and Jake Wheeler to the team, you may have missed GM Matt Klentak quietly closing down expectations his team will fill any more roster holes with big names, or more precisely – not even one.
Asked by a reporter if he thought the team “as it’s currently constructed” is good enough to win the NL East, Klentak said simply, “I do.” He went on, then, to point out the team won 81 games in ’19 having “a lot of things go wrong.”
Klentak’s manner suggested he was happy to leave “…and now we’re better already” unspoken at that particular moment.
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Gregorius and Wheeler are pushing the team within about $6 million of the luxury tax line in any event, and unless, say, a Wade Miley-type is signed inside that figure, Phillies fans can sort of forget about anyone, including Hung-Jin Ryu or a trade for Kris Bryant. Ken Rosenthal agreed with that view in a separate podcast interview, nonetheless suggesting the Phillies would likely remain “active in the margins.”
Perhaps Klentak will prove to be an unexpected genius at working the margins and somehow talk Chicago into letting Bryant go basically two years early. Bryant going somewhere is expected, but perhaps…
(Would Chicago’s new manager, David Ross, see any value in Odubel Herrera, perhaps? Are he and GM Jed Hoyer getting along? Herrera is an enigma-athlete, and one who badly needs a scenery change. Would Phillies manager Joe Girardi really want to work with Herrera at this juncture?)
Here’s a challenge for Girardi, though, beyond that sort of question, which I would hope he’d consider a real annoyance when taking on a new team: He has to worry about the back end of his rotation, where Klentak has decided (again!) that Vince Velasquez, Zack Eflin, and Nick Pivetta are good enough.
Or two out of three of them are. The problem once again is figuring out which two, although for a couple of years another guy was maybe screwing up the whole evaluation process. There must be another algorithm now that that other guy is gone – no, wait he isn’t. Well, that’s a mess. Oh, and once again, the rotation is all right-handed.
That would seem to bring the Philadelphia Phillies back to journeyman Wade Miley. Oops, the Reds snapped him up.
Next. Requests from Phillie Claus. dark
Klentak was just being honest, I suppose, admitting that ownership has given him a different credit card, one with a lower credit line, for the time being.