Middleton makes clear who is running Phils
PHILADELPHIA >> Somewhere in the Phillies’ executive office, or so it must be, there are tasteful appointments. John Middleton is not one. John Middleton is no ornament.
“I’m not a potted plant,” he said, “sitting in the corner.”
He’s the CEO, something he mentioned a dozen times Friday in a rambling blast of static that was to serve as both a recap of a rotten season and an explanation why Gabe Kapler was blamed for it all. He’s the boss, the managing partner, the corner-office guy, the one with one of those $3 billion worth of big cigars his family business has sold.
He makes the decisions around there, at least the ones that matter, like whether to spend a third of a billion on one player, or when to charter to California to personally serve a manager with a firing notice. So that would make someone else the office leaf arrangement. And fortunately Friday, he was seated between the two redwoods.
To his right, looking as terrified as if he’d had just seen Vince Velasquez walk to the mound to pitch a sixth inning, there was Matt Klentak. To his left, looking like he was waiting out a lengthy rain delay just because he had nowhere else to go, there was Andy MacPhail. And in one of those press briefings destined to become a remember-when reference point (think an Allen Iverson talkingabout-practice moment) everything was revealed about how the Phillies operate.
Though MacPhail is the team president and Klentak the general manager, Middleton made it clear that they are responsible only for the decisions that he finds inconvenient. “Signing a relief pitcher for $2 million for one year?” he said, adding a shooing-away motion. “I’m not even touching that.”
And so it went, over and over, with Middleton stressing that the Big Decisions belonged to him, and that firing Kapler was a Big Decision.
“I felt strongly enough about that,” Middleton said. “And I talked to a lot of people in July and August, too.
But I sat down with Gabe toward the end of July and had a long conversation with him. And I sat down with him for two and a half hours Sunday after the last game. I sat down with him for five hours about three or four days later. And I kept bumping up to the September collapses.”
The CEO nailed it. The Phillies did collapse in the last two Septembers, and rarely played with enough demonstrated urgency in March, April, May, June or July either. Kapler had his strengths, among them creative and courageous batting orders, which at first glance often seemed odd, but that he could explain and sell with patience and wisdom. Yet the Phillies were paid to be more than a fourth-place team, and, in any business, the boss has the right to demand better.
The only problem Friday was that in so openly flexing while literally seated at the same table, Middleton publicly made his general manager and his president appear useless. That MacPhail literally would share that he and Klentak had doubts that Kapler should be fired only underlined that the Phillies are a one-man operation when that one man decides they should be a one-man operation.
“What happened here happens every day in businesses,” Middleton said. “It has happened repeatedly in my 40 years. If you talk to the people who ran the companies and reported to me over those 30 or 40 years, they will tell you, ‘John steps in and says you can’t do that, you’re going to do this instead.’ There is talk about how that emasculates people. But that’s nonsense. That doesn’t do anything like that. This happens all the time. And, in fact, it’s a learning experience.”
That’s what Middleton kept stressing, that his 39-year-old general manager swung and missed at his first chance to select a manager, but that it was somehow a teaching moment. Yet while he wasn’t ready to buy out the extended contracts he had given Klentak and MacPhail last offseason, he made it clear that, at some point, he is going to have to approve or disapprove of whomever they present to him as Kapler’s replacement.
In many ways, the Phillies were desperate for a managing partner like Middleton, who at least had the awareness that he enjoys baseball’s largest monopoly market and should bid accordingly for top talent. Clearly, MacPhail was disinterested in diving too deep for free agents last offseason before Middleton jetted in on a Phillies-decorated aircraft and gave Bryce Harper the money Scott Boras was demanding. Harper, as it happened, was worth every dollar.
But the more Middleton demands managers to be fired and diminishes the worth of his higher baseball executives in public, the more it makes the Phillies look confused. And if they look confused, then the more appealing available managers will have reason to avoid such dysfunction. Stupid money will always talk. But do Joe Girardi, Mike Scioscia, Buck Showalter, Joe Maddon or Dusty Baker really need to be thrown into such a swirl?
“This was not John going above everybody’s head and coming in with an iron fist,” Klentak said. “It really wasn’t. This was as collaborative as it could be, and I understand this.”
They collaborated. Middleton made the decision he wanted to make all along. And if you don’t know who the potted plant in the room is, start feeling around for leaves.