At some point, Dave Dombrowski is going to have to start being right.
A .333 batting average might get you into the Hall of Fame as a hitter, but it’s a recipe for disaster as an executive.
To understand why the Phillies were where they were on Monday afternoon, you need only look at the president’s scorecard.
Justin Crawford as the everyday centerfielder?
Whiff.
Adolis García as the everyday right fielder?
Whiff.
Andrew Painter as the No. 4 or No. 5 starter?
Whiff.
Brad Keller as the bridge to Jhoan Duran?
Whiff.
What does disaster look like? Well, let’s start with what it sounds like, because it sounds a lot like Dombrowski’s voice.
“Our first goal is to make the playoffs,” the Phillies president said Monday, prefacing an answer about the potential postseason impact of a day headlined by the acquisition of free-agent-to-be Luis Arraez for fast-rising pitching prospect Ramon Marquez, “so, I hope we’re dealing with clubs in the postseason.”
The words that followed don’t really matter. What matters is the qualification. I have written this plenty of times before. Hope is not strategy. It is a lack of options, one that is usually a function of decisions made prior.
Dombrowski has been the man in charge of making the Phillies’ baseball decisions for five-and-a-half years. Five-and-a-half years into Andrew Friedman’s tenure with the Dodgers, he was en route to his first World Series win, after having already lost two, one in seven games. He’d salvaged Max Muncy from the scrap heap, signed Justin Turner and Chris Taylor, traded for Kiké Hernandez, and then Mookie Betts, drafted Will Smith, Andy Pages, and Walker Buehler. Just as important, he’d swung a series of minor league trades that helped lay the groundwork for the Dodgers’ recent acquisition of two-time defending AL Cy Young Award winner Tarik Skubal.
Long story short, Dombrowski has reached a point where the problems he must solve are all of his own making. He did not draft Alec Bohm or Bryson Stott, but he did not pivot off them, either. He signed Trea Turner to a $300 million contract. He oversaw the move of Harper from right field to first base. Four years ago, he could have leveraged top prospect Logan O’Hoppe in a trade for a young, cost-controlled right-handed hitter, or a young, cost-controlled pitcher instead of Brandon Marsh. He did not lose the trade. But, in the grand scheme of things, given the circumstances, did he win it?
The circumstances are this:
It isn’t necessarily a disaster to ask three-fourths of your infield to change positions midseason so that two players can continue to play a position where they aren’t the best defensive option.
It isn’t necessarily a disaster to move one of those players from the infield to the outfield, where he hasn’t played more than eight games since 2021. Nor is it to move another of those players (Stott) from second base to third base, a position where he has started just 12 games since high school.
It isn’t even necessarily a disaster to do all of these things in order to add another lefty bat to a lineup that already suffered from a glut of them. Nor it is necessarily a disaster that the new left-handed bat is a top-of-the-order bat, and thus does little to remediate the lack of middle-of-the-order thump behind Harper and Kyle Schwarber.
Don’t get me wrong. Any one of these things could be a disaster. One might argue that, in sum, the odds are strong that they will be a disaster. But these are perfectly defensible moves in isolation, and maybe even in sum. The Phillies can, did, and will continue to argue that Arraez is exactly the kind of bat their lineup needed. They can, did, and will continue to argue that he can play good enough second base to warrant the downgrade there along with the question marks at third base and in the outfield.
The real disaster is that the Phillies found themselves in a predicament where they needed to make these moves. The real disaster is that these moves so preoccupied their energy and resources that they failed to address what were arguably their two greatest needs. The real disaster, above all else, is the desperation premium that the Phillies and Dombrowski were forced to pay just for the hope that it might somehow work.
Marquez may never amount to anything as a major leaguer. As devastating as his changeup is — the minor league strikeout rate is absurd — the fastball and the health are what matter first and foremost. He is 20 years old. He is befuddling class-A hitters. But the success or failure of the Arraez trade isn’t just a matter of who Marquez will be as a major leaguer. It is also matter of who else the Phillies might have traded him for.
This past offseason, Arraez signed a one-year contract with the Giants worth $12 million. That’s roughly $2 million more than the Phillies paid to Garcia, for whom nobody would be trading, even if healthy. They did the same thing last season, albeit at a far lower price, acquiring Harrison Bader to help replace free agent mediocrity Max Kepler. In fact, the Phillies have done the same thing every season of Dombrowski’s tenure, to one degree or another. They are the little boy at the leaking dam, their fingers outnumbered by the holes they must plug. It is losing math, even before you factor in the market.
Dombrowski and his minions will argue that they could not have simply signed Arraez for $12 million. They had Stott at second base, after all. And they had Bohm at third. They couldn’t move either because they had Turner at shortstop and Harper at first. And yet, here they are.
For nearly six years they’ve been here. Each of the last three have been as obvious as the last. Bohm, Stott, J.T. Realmuto, Justin Crawford, Marsh, Garcia — none of them has underperformed any realistic expectations. And yet, here they are.
“We added the top hitter in the league to the offense, a different type of hitter than we have,” Dombrowski said of Arraez. “Somebody that gets on base, sets the stage for some of our big guys, doesn’t strike out as often, who can do things with the bat.”
These are helpful things, no doubt.
More helpful is to build an organization that avails you with those things before the panic sets in.
