Let’s get it back to baseball.

The Phillies are reportedly set to hire Dave Dombrowski to be their President of Baseball Operations. The announcement apparently may be coming as soon as today, Friday.

Andy MacPail currently holds the position of “President,” and Dombrowski would come on board to make the personnel decisions, so we’d think of him as a Matt Klentak replacement. MacPhail could retire early, become an advisor, or retain some other title. We’ll find out soon.

Dombrowski has a pair of World Series titles to his name, one in 1997 with the Marlins and one in 2018, with the Red Sox, so there’s a recent track record of success there. He brought in Chris Sale, David Price, Craig Kimbrel, J.D. Martinez, and hired Alex Cora en route to that Boston championship. Dombrowski was cleared of wrongdoing in the sign-stealing scandal that saw Cora suspended and briefly, mutually, separated from the franchise.

He does have a track record of taking stinky teams and turning them around. The Marlins were an expansion squad when Dombrowski joined up in 1991. They won a ring six seasons later. He also took a Tigers team that lost 119 games and won four-straight division titles with that squad (plus a couple of pennants). He remains the only executive to lead three different teams to the World Series in the modern era.

The main issue is that Dombrowski is a win now/trade all of the prospects type of guy. The Phillies are not exactly set up for either one of those things, and they now have a skittish owner crying poor as we slowly exit a pandemic that hurt more teams than just the Phillies. My knee-jerk reaction is that this seems like a right hire/wrong time kind of move, and while this appears to be an upgrade over Klentak, that’s not saying much. The bar has been set relatively low. However, Dombrowski is not the analytics type of guy that we got from the prior regime, and at least his pairing with Joe Girardi will be a breath of fresh air in the gut feel department.

Let’s check in with our friend Jack Fritz at 94 WIP:

https://twitter.com/JackFritzWIP/status/1337114245662728192?s=20

That was Jack’s first impression. I think he’s now trying to talk himself into the hire. Here are CB baseball guys Bob and Anthony to weigh in:

Bob: He’s honest. Doesn’t hide. Very accessible. Much better at messaging than previous guys, which in my opinion, is a huge part of their problem. The message that was being conveyed often wasn’t as bad as its delivery. For instance, if we don’t, we don’t. That was more to say they simply didn’t feel as if leveraging their future was worth stepping on the gas in 2019. In hindsight, that was one of the few correct assessments that front office made. But to say it the way he said it was insane.

Ant: Hiring Dave Dombrowski will split generations of Phillies fans. The younger sect will hate the hire because he’s part of the good ole’ boy network. The older fans will like it because he’s more of an old-school executive who isn’t a slave to analytics. But what can’t be argued is his track record – he wins. And he’s done it in different ways. He built from the ground up in Florida. He took over moribund franchises in Montreal and Detroit and turned them into winners. He was tasked to “win now” in Boston and did so. The whole narrative of him burning a farm system is recency bias. Yes, he depleted Boston – but he did it to win a World Series. Yeah, he eventually tore it down in Detroit too, but that was during a run of four straight division titles and a World Series appearance, and it was after he built up their farm system to begin with. He drafted Justin Verlander, Cliff Lee, D.J. Lemahieu, Josh Beckett, Adrian Gonzalez, Curtis Granderson, Cliff Floyd, Charles Johnson, and Rondell White, among other successes. In short, hiring Dombrowski now is like when the Phillies hired Pat Gillick. Similar resume. Same goal. Dombrowski can get there. The question is, will the bumbling ownership group led by John Middleton stop crying poor and allow him to do his job the right way?