Nick Piccone
The one thing first-year general managers have to learn how to deal with in professional sports is a lot of criticism. Whether they make good moves or bad moves in the eye of the beholder, the general manager needs to have one focus – get their team to win a championship.
That’s Matt Klentak’s focus. It has been since he became the Phillies general manager in October. He traded away Ken Giles in December, who was one of the most promising young arms on the roster at the time, along with shortstop Jonathan Arauz, who likely wouldn’t have gotten much playing time in the bigs anyway with the emergence of J.P. Crawford. Klentak wound up getting five pitchers in Vincent Velasquez, Mark Appel, Harold Arauz, Brett Oberholtzer and Tom Eshelman.
Maybe that’s why people were so eager to see Jeremy Hellickson go. Maybe they thought Klentak could net another Velasquez or a diamond in the rough. But it’s a lot harder than it looks.
I love what Klentak has done so far because he’s really aiming at re-stocking the farm system and putting the team in a great position in the future. And they’ll have tons of money to spend. They’re in a great spot. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone Klentak wasn’t going to just make a trade to make a trade on Monday before 4 P.M. And that’s what he said during an appearance on the WIP Morning Show on Tuesday.
“I’m not frustrated at all. I’m very mindful of what our record is right now, but the truth is — the fact, particularly in the starting rotation, the fact that we run somebody out there every night that gives us a chance to win. I like that.”
Klentak, 35, is concerned with building a winning culture no matter the team’s record, and even managed to take a swipe at former Sixers general manager Sam Hinkie and The Process.
“We will put forth our best effort to win whenever we can,” Klentak said. “That’s part of the reason we didn’t trade Jeremy Hellickson and others in the last few days. We want them to help us win. We want them to help build a winning environment, even in a year that may not end in the playoffs, we want to make sure that we’re doing the right thing organizationally. And whether it’s this offseason or next year or in the following years, there will certainly be aggressive activity to spend more money, to add free agents, to make trades. When that is? It would be unwise of me to guess at that. I don’t actually know.
“The process here — and I’ve learned, I think from your show, that process is not the best word to use when we’re talking about things like this.” he continued. “But if you use the word I’ll use it. The way we go about things here, we were here all weekend. Our whole stuff…we’re all around the table and everyone has their information that they’re providing…We come to a decision on whether we’re going to pursue something or not.”
So, are we going to #TrustTheProcess again? I wouldn’t put it past the Phillies to re-sign Hellickson, and we still have the waiver trade deadline that ends on the last day of this month where Hellickson could still land with a new team in time for a playoff run. If Hellickson doesn’t re-sign with the Phillies and signs with another team after becoming a free agent, the Phillies would receive compensation as long as they make a qualifying offer to Hellickson. So there’s still more left to the story. Here’s a great explanation on the qualifying offer system.
Listen to Klentak’s entire interview on WIP this morning below.