Phillies continue to enjoy front row seat to the progress of everybody else

I will write more about this later. For now, just know that, as of about 2 p.m. West Coast time yesterday afternoon, five of the 15 teams in the National League had relieved a general manager of his duties in advance of baseball's upcoming offseason.

Three of those general managers had presided over teams who have produced a better record than the Phillies over the last three seasons. A fourth, Arizona's Kevin Towers, won one fewer game.

Of the teams with the nine lowest win totals in baseball since the end of the 2011 regular season, seven have made a change at the general manager or president level during that stretch, the lone exceptions being the Mets, who hired Sandy Alderson to rebuild their franchise from the ground up after the 2010 season, and the Phillies, who hired Amaro to replace the retiring Pat Gillick after their World Series victory in 2008.

Yet the real cause for concern amongst Phillies fans should stem from the recent machinations of two organizations who are among the top seven in the majors in wins since 2012.

When the Braves fired general manager Frank Wren, I reiterated what I had written in the middle of the summer: the Phillies' organization is an old school organization attempting to compete in a market that has been radically reshaped by technological innovation and new constraints imposed by the Collective Bargaining Agreement, and the longer they wait to hire a president with a keen understanding of said market, the longer they will spend staring at everybody else's rear end whenever it is they finally decide to make an earnest attempt to catch up.

Yesterday, the Dodgers showed themselves to be the latest team with a firm understanding of the new world order, luring Rays wunderkind Andrew Friedman from Tampa Bay to reshape their organization despite back-to-back playoff berths.

You can talk about Yasmani Thomas and the recent amateur drafts all you want, but this is the kind of move that a true big market, big revenue organization makes when it feels itself slipping behind the rest of its brethren. There are proactive franchises, and there are reactive franchises, and there are whatever you'd consider the Phillies to be as they sit on their front porch, watching Main Street become an Interstate, yelling at the traffic.

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