NL East News: Phillies expected to Hire Dombrowski as President of Baseball ops. ⚾️

NL East News: Phillies expected to Hire Dombrowski as President of Baseball ops.

[matthewbrittingham]

This signing by the Phillies is a little perplexing to me. Dave Dombrowski is good at 2 things. He's good at trading away great prospects for major league talent and he is good at spending tons of money to buy top end free agents. The Phillies are in no position to do either of those things. Philadelphia has one of the worst farm systems in baseball so no team is going to trade them top end talent for whatever is in their system. The Phillies also have no money to spend because the last GM spent it all on players like Harper, Wheeler, McCutchen and Segura. McCutchen and Segura won't net much of a return in a trade. The Phillies owner has already said he won't trade Wheeler. He actually said he WOULDN'T EVEN trade Wheeler for Babe Ruth. He said he wouldn't trade him for Mike Schmidt or Ted Williams either. Either way Wheelers contract is so large that they couldn't get much in return anyway without eating a ton of money. Last offseason no team thought Wheeler was worth what the Phillies paid him so I doubt they have changed their minds now that Wheeler is more than a year older. The Harper contract is totally unmovable. They pay him over $26 million a year and he has a full no trade clause and says he wants to stay so they are basically stuck with him for the next 11 years. I just don't see what Dombrowski can do for this team because he doesn't have any of his typical tools to work with. He has been known to draft good players (albeit usually trade them away later anyway). The Phillies could be hoping that he does well in the draft for them but those players won't make it up to the majors until years from now. They already spend top dollar on their roster and the result is they are barely a .500 team. I would find it hard to believe that the Phillies plan is to continue spending a ton of money on a team that isn't playoff caliber just so they can try to compete years from now when the prospects advance. By that time their highly paid stars like Wheeler and Harper will be several years older. It will be interesting to see which route the Phillies try to take but I think they would have been better off taking the same route as Rays, Red Sox, Giants, Dodgers and Marlins by hiring someone similar to Farhan Zaidi, Chaim Bloom or even the currently still available Michael Hill. The Alex Anthopolous plan of attack is still way better for the Phillies than the Dombrowski model. How is a big spending, big trading GM going to succeed when he has nothing to spend and nothing to trade? As a Braves fan I just hope he makes a mistake like he made in Boston when he signed Chris Sale to a 5 year $145 million extension while Sale was injured. Sale is still injured and hasn't pitched since and that was years ago. That was a big reason he got fired and a big reason the red sox were forced to trade Mookie Betts. That on top of paying David Price $217 million and Nathan Evoldi $85 million really hurt the Red Sox payroll. I feel bad saying that but as a Braves fan I really hope he continues to make similar deals for the Phillies.