The Phillies’ first goal is to beat the Braves. Their second goal is to become them.

Roughly 29 years after John Middleton purchased his initial stake in the Phillies for a reported $18 million, he stood in the middle of a beer-drenched clubhouse and contemplated an opponent he has never quite escaped.

Back then, the Braves were the team the Phillies had just defeated to become National League champs. Now, they are the team the Phillies must defeat for a second straight year to defend their title.

The three decades in between are where the subplot lies.

The Braves aren’t just an opponent. They are an aspiration.

“They’re the best,” Middleton said.

He has never been shy about his ultimate goal for these Phillies. Playoff berths are nice. World Series berths are nicer. The nicest thing is when they unfold as a near-inevitable consequence of extended periods of success.

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Throughout Middleton’s history in the ownership suite, the Phillies have spent most their time fighting their way to the surface. Each time they pop their head out of the water, the same ship is there.

The goal isn’t just to beat the Braves. It’s to become them.

“They have a really, really good scouting and player development system,” Middleton said. “And we’ve had it at times in the past. We get it for five to seven years and then we lose it. And we’ve got to stop that. We’ve got to get that.”

Middleton knows this as well as anybody. It was the driving force behind his ascension to the managing partner’s seat in 2016. It has lurked in the background of every one of his decisions since. From Andy MacPhail and Matt Klentak to Gabe Kapler and Joe Girardi to Dave Dombrowski and Rob Thomson, the Phillies have spent the last six years scrambling to make up for lost time.

Beating the best team in the majors for a second straight year would be a good sign they are getting close.

Nobody who is old enough needs to be reminded of the behemoth the Phillies will confront on Saturday. The last 33 years have seen the Braves average a remarkable 91 wins per 162-game season. Their .565 win percentage during those three-plus decades is best in the National League and second only to the Yankees. Of the last 32 major league postseasons, only eight have not included the Braves.

They are an institution in every sense of the word, one of the few organizations that has arrived at point where success perpetuates itself. They have had three ownership groups, three managers, four presidents, five general managers, and one identity.

“I really respect the Braves,” Middleton said. “From the top, all the way down.”

The formula has been remarkably constant.

1. Identify and develop polished young pitchers who will be ready to contribute early in their primes.

This season, 60% of the Braves games were started by pitchers aged 25 or younger. They are led by Game 1 starter Spencer Strider, a 24-year-old righty who led the majors in strikeouts while going 20-5 with a 3.86 ERA in 186⅔ innings over 32 starts. He is the quintessential Braves success story: a polished starter with excellent stuff and a preternatural command of the strike zone. In 2020, he was a fourth-round draft pick. By 2022, he was dominating big-league hitters as a Game 1 starter.

Every team gets lucky every now and then. The thing about Strider is that he is not an exception. Two of his fellow draft picks in 2020 were Jared Shuster and Bryce Elder, both of whom were in the big-league rotation this year. Before them came Kyle Wright, a 2017 first-round pick who went 21-5 with a 3.19 ERA last season, and Ian Anderson, and A.J. Minter, all the way back to Steve Avery.

Since 1991, the Braves lead the majors with 57 pitchers who aged 25 or younger who finished a season with an ERA+ of league average (100) or better.

2. Invest in raw young hitters with massive upside and develop them with patience and care.

Their latest budding superstar, third baseman Austin Riley, was the No. 41 overall pick out of high school in 2015. Their fully formed superstar, outfielder Ronald Acuña, was signed as a 17-year-old international free agent in 2014. Center fielder Michael Harris II was a high school draft pick. So were Jason Hayward, and Chipper Jones, Andruw Jones, Brian McCann, and Freddie Freeman.

3. Rely on your big league scouts to fill in the rest.

The Braves hit a couple of home runs in trades for Matt Olson and Sean Murphy over the last couple of years. In doing so, general manager Alex Anthopoulos displayed the same keen eye for undervalued talent that has characterized the organization’s amateur successes over the last several decades.

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As far as theoretical frameworks go, the Braves’ hardly is revolutionary. As with most things in life, the difficulty lies in the execution. It is here where the Braves have somehow managed to thrive. The secret almost always is a robust base of human capital: scouts who have an eye for a certain trait, coaches who have a feel for understanding the talent at their disposal, decision-makers who have the ability to see both the forest and the trees. The Braves have been cultivating their people and processes for a long enough time that they have achieved a certain self-driving capability. That’s how institutional knowledge works. It reaches a certain point where it can operate at high level independently from whatever suit happens to be at the controls.

The Phillies have never reached that point. It was those failures that hastened Middleton’s ascension from committee member to The Man. He deserves plenty of credit for recognizing the stasis that had infected the team’s baseball ops department. The Phillies of a decade ago were an organization that had fallen inexcusably far behind baseball’s avant garde. This was bigger than analytics. Winning wasn’t a simple numbers game. It was the end result of an objective process that approached every level of performance with an objective mind and a simple goal of finding the best way to do it, feelings and traditions be damned.

They are getting there. The development of Bryson Stott, Alec Bohm, and Ranger Suárez. The shrewd signings of Kyle Schwarber, Zack Wheeler, and Bryce Harper. Dombrowski, Sam Fuld, and Preston Mattingly are laying an infrastructure that is already paying dividends.

“To be the best, you have to beat the best,” Middleton said.

Are they close? Time will tell. But at least there is a goal.