As Phillies GM, Matt Klentak shows he's more than just a stereotype | Mike Sielski
Matt Klentak graduated from Dartmouth College in 2002 with a bachelor's degree in economics. He became the Phillies' general manager in October 2015, when he was 35 years old. He looks as if a morning shave requires him to do nothing more than pick up a pair of tweezers and pluck three or four shafts of hair from his chin.
Matt Klentak graduated from Dartmouth College in 2002 with a bachelor's degree in economics. He became the Phillies' general manager in October 2015, when he was 35 years old. He looks as if a morning shave requires him to do nothing more than pick up a pair of tweezers and pluck three or four shafts of hair from his chin.
If there is a stereotype of the modern major-league executive as a data-loving, Ivy League-educated egghead, Klentak would appear at first to be its quintessence. He's the personification of the break that the Phillies have made with a longstanding tradition - their adherence to old-school baseball philosophy, the age in their history that ended (symbolically anyway) when Dallas Green died last week. But there is an interesting and significant aspect of Klentak's academic career that's incompatible with that image.
While at Dartmouth, Klentak wrote an independent study on the meaning and validity of the phrase "in the zone." Did such a state really exist for collegiate or professional athletes? Was there such a thing as a "clutch player"? Was it all just a myth, a cliche that ballplayers recite to account for a hot streak at the plate? He spent months asking athletes what they thought and how they felt when they were playing at their best or in a game that mattered more than most. Do "clutch players" exist? Actually, Klentak concluded, yes. They do.
"I think some athletes have the ability to slow down the game in a pressure-packed environment, remain levelheaded, and think about things," he said. "I do believe there are certain athletes, certain leaders or executives or parents who are less susceptible to environmental changes than others."
The task of building any organization - a baseball team, included - comes down to such observations and analysis, and the team the Phillies will field this season will be a greater reflection of Klentak's answers to all those questions. He has set up if-then situations throughout the roster, at multiple positions, and at multiple levels of the Phillies' minor-league system, and it will be fascinating this season to track the changes that Klentak, manager Pete Mackanin, and the Phillies' other decision-makers make to the club and the criteria they use.
Already, Klentak has demonstrated that he takes more than just a player's advanced-stat line into account when weighing whether to make a free-agent signing, pull off a trade, promote a prospect, or make a surprising call about an open (or not-so-open) roster spot. Yes, the Phillies once relied too much on a scout's eyeball-based evaluation of a player - He looks like he has found his swing again - and Klentak certainly has a healthy skepticism for the trust-a-good-baseball-man's-gut ethos that the organization stuck to for too long.
"People are still too quick to see a late-inning home run and anoint that player a clutch player," he said. But he doesn't dismiss completely the value of the intangible.
"In any of the player-acquisition arenas, it's all about what you're passing by," Klentak said. "In the early stages of a draft, or with your top expenditures internationally, or with your top expenditures in free agency, we not only want to make sure it's a talented player but it's a healthy player. It's a player whose makeup and leadership fits into our group, players who are more than one-dimensional. . . .
"You don't want a roster that's all just about themselves. You don't want a roster that is all selfless individuals who just want to get the bunts down and will bat ninth. You have to have the balance on the roster to make it all work, and that's hard."
His acquisitions of Howie Kendrick and Michael Saunders, for example, were as much about adding veteran professionalism to a young clubhouse as much as they were about improving the lineup's offensive punch. (That neither player's contract is so expensive or onerous that he would necessarily block the path of Nick Williams or Roman Quinn, the franchise's two most promising outfield prospects, is of course also a substantial benefit.) Clay Buchholz and Joaquin Benoit, in theory, could do the same for the pitching staff. Even the club's best story of spring training - Brock Stassi's cracking the opening-day roster - illustrates Klentak's and the Phillies' willingness to go beyond the cold, hard numbers in front of them.
Remember: To keep Stassi on the roster, the Phillies first had to release 31-year-old veteran Chris Coghlan, who is just four years older than Stassi and already had shown over his eight seasons in the majors that he can come off the bench, play the outfield and the infield, and hit righthanded pitching. The Phillies needed to fill that role, and Coghlan would have been the surer bet. But Stassi had been the Eastern League's most valuable player in 2015, had hit .333 with six home runs this spring, and had surpassed every reasonable expectation that could be placed on a 33rd-round draft pick. How would he have reacted and performed - and what message would it have sent to him and every other up-and-coming player in the organization - if, after doing everything the Phillies asked of him and more, he didn't make the team?
A long time ago, Matt Klentak realized that he had to at least consider such a question. Funny, though: He hasn't paged through that independent-study project in years. "My best guess," he said, "is that there's a hard copy in a box somewhere in my parents' basement." You know, a place where you keep the things you still carry with you.
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