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April 9, 2006

Why The Phillies Are No Good, Ever (The Long And Short Answers)

With the start of a new baseball season in Philadelphia, the local papers wonder why the team is always so bad

Without dwelling too too much on the team's 1-5 start (that's one win and five losses at home, mind you), one can safely say that it seems that very little is surprising and/ or different about this year's version of the Philadelphia Phillies. This is the team that's made the playoffs just once in the past 22 years, and has managed a winning record only six times during that same span. For a while, the problem was mostly that the team was cheap, but not anymore. Lately they've spent the money that befits the baseball team in the nation's fifth-largest market (and where the people are "pretty excited" about pro sports), and they've still failed. Hmmm. Not so impressive. You know, like the Mets.

Actually, it's more than unimpressive. It's actually remarkable. That is, it's actually pretty difficult to perform as poorly as the Phillies have over the past two decades. If it was a real business, it would have gone under long, long ago. So how have the Phillies managed to be so bad for so long?

That's the question that the Philadelphia Daily News attempted to answer in a three-part report that ran last week. Why are the Phillies so bad? Nothing like a three-part treatise on the lousiness of the product to get the people excited to head down to Citizens Bank Park for a new season of Phillies baseball! Whoa. This was not a polite or generous piece of reporting. If nothing else, it offered me a whole new perspective on the craptasticness of the Phillies organization; I'm more convinced than ever that this is a broken organization.

Anyhoo, it's definitely worth a read -- links below, you'll need to register, but it's all free:

Part 1: Anatomy Of A Drought
Part 2: Bad Luck -- Or Bad Decisions?
Part 3: Gillick Is Main Ingredient

Again, while it's certainly worth reading through all three (and with titles like "Bad Luck -- Or Bad Decisions?" how can you resist?), I'm happy to summarize: the Phillies are no good because they are organized such that no one is really accountable for any of their poor decisions, and because the folks running the show (with an assist from the marketing department) don't let the -- wait for it -- baseball people do their thing. That's right, the old we-hate-those-eggheads-in-management cliche: you need to let the baseball people make the baseball decisions, you can't interfere!

If pressed for a single bullet point, I might even go so far as to summarize the last two decades of Phillies baseball as "These guys aren't very clever." Still, the borderline hilarious part of the article(s) was the ending. After going on for who knows how many thousand words about how the Phillies were incompetent from top to bottom, we get like three paragraphs on how Pat Gillick is just the guy to turn the whole thing around (which I actually do kind of believe, but that's for another posting). And after killing the Phillies for a week, the whole kit and kaboodle ends with the following single-sentence paragraph:

Mix it all together and the Phillies could, once again, give the city something to cheer about in October.

Ha! After detailing just how incompetent and mismanaged the entire organization has been, the Daily News drops this little nugget in at the end! Talk about adding insult to injury -- you could just taste the bile-coated sarcasm through the page. Phillies suck, Phillies suck, Phillies suck, and, oh yeah, maybe they won't suck this year. Take that, Phillies PR department (who the article describes as unduly influencing roster decisions over the years, no less)! We didn't really kill you! We ended on a happy note!

High comedy. Go Phillies.

Posted by thatkid at April 9, 2006 11:21 PM under Philly , Sports

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