Stop Worrying About the Phillies’ Payroll

I remember hating the New York Yankees as a kid for no better reason than their status as the “Evil Empire” with the ability and willingness to buy whoever they wanted, whenever they wanted.

But as I grew up and I compared the way George Steinbrenner conducted himself and was unselfish with his money in an attempt to have his team try to compete for the World Series year in and year out, I realized that my hate was more accurately described as jealousy. And as my Philadelphia Phillies continued to nickel and dime fans with their unwillingness to commit to the big-market mentality my jealously turned to anger and disdain, particularly when we were forced to see the likes of Curt Schilling and Scott Rolen leave for teams whose millionaires where more willing to spend more of their money in an attempt to fill voids on their Big League rosters. And that feeling of disgust continued for me while the Phillies initiated an unheard of agenda to spend money in the early 2000s so that a better product would exist for the shiny new ballpark they were desperately trying to fill with season ticket holders. I feared that the organization’s desire to spend money would be smoke and mirrors, a fad that would go out of style commensurate with attendance glory. Well, it took about 10 years, but we’re finally at that point where the ownership is again putting a price on winning.

The Phillies had no qualms last week with making it publicly known that they’re now operating on a strict, self-imposed budget. It’s a budget that comes with it no definition of logic and doesn’t even coincide with Major League Baseball’s luxury tax — a tax that through fallacy is considered to be a penalty, but in reality is just what it claims to be, a tax to be paid for the benefit (or luxury) of having big money to spend on rosters. It’s no different than an income tax, which any honest working American will pay to the government for the benefit of being able to earn a living in this country.

And the budget brigade comes on the “eve” of a soon-to-be-realized, enormous TV contract that will make the ownership group and executives even more than the beyond rich that they already are.

This is what should be making your blood boil as a Phillies fan, not that they’ve been “spending too much money,” not that they recently gave free agent outfielder Marlon Byrd a $7 million per-year “raise,” not that they bought a proven closer in Jonathan Papelbon in 2012 to try to replace the MVP-like performance of Brad Lidge when the team moved on from Ryan Madson, and not because they’ve been signing players older than the age of 30 to new contracts. Don’t let the Phillies fool you. General manager Ruben Amaro Jr. hasn’t been spending too of the team’s much money. They don’t have to be mindful of a budget and, seriously, the Ryan Howard contract is in no way, shape or form an albatross to their spending habits. Enough with that one already.

This organization, which once blindsided us with its willingness to spend big, has once again gone to its nickel-counting ways. This offseason thus far validated that long before Amaro ended the winter meetings by telling us in a few subtle terms.

Yes, even when considering the “raise” they gave Byrd, which isn’t what it may seem because the guy made more than $6 million in a season with the Cubs as recently as 2012 before being caught using performance-enhancing drugs (which I’m not advocating, but that’s a whole other issue), the Phillies have not spent too much money. Until they go out and purchase what they still need in order to be more competitive in 2014 (i.e. more starting pitching in the form of players who haven’t gone through name changes, more middle relief and more right-handed pop, whether that be off the bench or not) among the top players available they haven’t spent enough money.

True, Byrd will be earning $8 million for each of the next two seasons versus the under $1 million he made while playing in New York and Pittsburgh last season. And though his signing ignited a firestorm aimed at Amaro that hadn’t been seen in this town dating all the way back to the dismissal of Charlie Manuel late last summer, a move that we all knew was inevitable anyway, the Byrd deal is easy to assume to be out of, ahem, right field, but the Phillies didn’t overpay him. Nor did they “establish” the market for him as a member of the deep, albeit aging, free agent pool this year. In fact, by signing Byrd when they did, prior to the likes of Jacoby Ellsbury, Carlos Beltran, Nelson Cruz and Curtis Granderson being inked by other clubs, the Phillies avoided the real market completely. Had they waited deeper into the offseason to make their first outfield acquisition, whether or not the player signed was Byrd, the price of that player was only going to go up had one of the top available options already signed and the trickle-down effect been initiated. They elected to roll the dice on what they consider to be a fiscally wise deal, securing it before the Ellsbury and Beltran deals most notably. And although it looks like any deal that the more recently PED-suspended Cruz signs will not be to the level of what he and his agent envisioned at the 2013 season’s end, it is mostly likely to be more than that of Byrd.

Trust me when I tell you that Amaro (right here and now I’m denouncing the all-too-tired moniker of “Ruin Tomorrow Jr.”) didn’t see Byrd, Wil Nieves and Fausto Hernandez Roberto Carmona, who’s one-year deal at $4.5 million was finally confirmed by the club on Wednesday (must have been some extensive physical he went through), as the crown jewels of this free agent class. These signings are the result of a newly adjusted budget that says “Sure, we’d like to win … if it doesn’t cost too much.”

True story: If the Seattle Mariners can pay Robinson Cano $240 million the Phillies can spend some more coin to sure up their rotation, outfield and bullpen, especially when you factor in the potential money that would have been on the books had Roy Halladay not retired and eliminated any opportunity for them to resign him this month. But, no, the organization group would rather replace a former ace with a guy who has had all of two effective years as a starter since 2006 and hasn’t been an All Star since 2010. Or maybe they just wanted to say they have a player who could be renamed later?

No, their signings this offseason are merely the product of Amaro being given specific confines within which to shop — the MLB’s Thrift Store. Now, the market wasn’t going to produce anyone who could replace the potential Hall of Fame Halladay talent-for-talent, but the mere fact that Rodriguez was even on the club’s radar shows the scope of their search from a financial standpoint. And even though his contract, like Byrd’s, looks like a lot of money through the glasses of real life, it’s not a lot in terms of baseball money. And it shows the Phillies current agenda has them shopping among others’ undesirables. I’m not taking the scope of their payroll the last few years as an excuse for a team that historically has not spent. At least Amaro, up until this offseason, spends and takes risks.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not absolving Amaro from any fault related to the current state of the team or trying to say that every cent he doled out or transaction he made was well worth it, but I’m also not allowing this organization to get away with him serving as a bumbling fool of a GM in my mind’s eye. I’m also not using hindsight to ridicule certain moves that rank high on the payroll amount and not coincidentally rank just as high on some fans’ ire meter, for example Howard’s five-year, $125 million extension of 2010; Papelbon’s $50 million deal; the three-year contract for Jimmy Rollins (which expires after 2014) and Chase Utley’s two-year, $27 million agreement that was reached this season.

Scoff at Amaro all you want for giving the former Rookie of the Year, National League MVP and quickest player in MLB history to collect 200 home runs (not to mention a guy who to that point had averaged 50 home runs and 143 RBI over the previous four seasons) a big pay day after age 30. I’ll instead sneer at the organization’s reluctance to tie him up sooner at a longer clip, which would have avoided paying him his most hefty salaries during injury-impacted seasons that could not be forecasted.

For fans, I’ve always thought it to be misleading and even dangerous to exercise our inherent “right” to play GM, since most of us, I can safely assume, don’t know what it’s like to handle $1 million versus $100 million, so I don’t know what the worth is for a player who ranks in the top 10 of MVP voting for his first six full seasons. All I do know is that Howard was deserving of his big pay day. He earned it, he’s got it, deal with it. Move on. Don’t for one second envision a reality in which you see the Howard contract as a hindrance to the Phillies purse strings, because he’s been anything but. Consider: Since his extension the Phillies have in no particular order resigned homegrown core players such as Utley, Cole Hamels, Rollins and Carlos Ruiz; signed Papelbon and Cliff Lee via free agency; and acquired through midseason trades Roy Oswalt and Hunter Pence, both of whom were marquee players of their respective trade seasons. Alex Rodriguez, Johan Santana, Mark Teixeira, Prince Fielder, Joe Mauer, Vernon Wells, Adrian Gonzalez and Matt Kemp all earned more than The Big Piece in 2013. Howard should not be the scapegoat here. He’s not the only player on the Phillies or around the league to be paid for past performance. It’s how baseball has always conducted itself.

Neither should Amaro be the scapegoat. I’m not nominating him for “GM of the Year” any time soon, but make no mistake about it — he’s just the guy who gets to take the blame for any season that the Phillies don’t make the playoffs, regardless of team money spent, because of his job description on its face. That’s perfectly fine to a point, but clearly the landscape of his actions are the result of a reality of what it’s like to have more wealthy, powerful bosses/partners than you can count on four hands who have contrived a phantom player budget and are going to hold varying opinions and willingness to dip deeper into their own pockets.

Think about it. Is it really plausible to believe that Amaro would trade for Lee in 2009, for whom he gave up four prospects, only to jettison him and his impressive postseason performance to another club after that season upon acquiring his long-held prized position in Roy Halladay a few months later?  Sure, it could be assumed that he came to this conclusion solely on his own two feet to pluck back a few minor leaguers in an attempt to replenish prospects for what he was charged to get Lee (if you really want to believe as much), but his eventual re-signing of Lee the following year doesn’t support that. It’s more likely a faction of the ownership group didn’t want to pay both Halladay and Lee at the time, forcing Amaro to choose between the two. He wasn’t going to stop chasing his “white whale.” And none of us would have wanted him to.

Is it also reasonable to think that Amaro would so quickly give up on Pence, whom he snatched up from atop the trade-bait class of 2011 in exchange for four prospects when the guy, in his ages 28 and 29 seasons mind you, never got the benefit of playing a full campaign in a lineup with Howard and Utley? Or, is it more realistic to think that ownership members wanted to recoup whatever they could for Pence while dumping salary as they slipped from contention? I’ll choose the latter. It was a miserly move for a team that had long-established a trend of taking under-30 players into arbitration, for which Pence remained eligible.

To me, it’s hard to hate on Amaro for being the guy who has sewn up just about every major piece to the core puzzle that took this organization to the 2008 and ’09World Series in an approach to get back to the championship. He’s no Pat Gillick, who made a number of shrewd under-the-radar moves en route to the 2008 World Series, where Amaro’s attempts at role players such as Lance Nix, Ross Gload and Delmon Young, as well as pitchers like Mike Adams, Danys Baez, John Lannan and Cad Durbin floundered. But Gillick also made some poor decisions, all GMs do. Gillick also invested in an aging, injury-prone Lidge during his time. I don’t see anyone wringing their hands in hindsight at that one. Amaro can’t fire himself, so if the Phillies are going to continue to employ him, we might as all well root for them to spend money and more of it. Don’t make empty promises about being more willing to go to the ball park if they give all their youngest, less-expensive players more playing time while doing everything and anything to unload higher-contracted players. How well is that working out for the Sixers attendance?

Forgive me if I’m scratching my head — ripping the roots of my hair out actually — with the newfound mantra in this city among some who are calling for this team to spend less money and to be targeting unproven commodities in the minor leagues via the trading of proven stars in an attempt to simply get younger. Can someone tell me exactly when this not only became accepted in this town but downright expected? I didn’t sign up for this, and frankly you shouldn’t be either. Remember all the times we heard about the Eagles’ approach to always having enough of a financial cushion to ensure that they always remained among the “Gold Standard” (yes, I know, another tired cliché)? And what happened? They eventually ended up in the toilet before that regime ever won a title, regardless of the fact that they may have been quickly rescued by Chip Kelly et al (we’ll see) after the departures of Joe Banner and Andy Reid. But at least they actually had a salary cap to contend with to offer as an excuse.

For the Phillies, the luxury tax should be something to be mindful of, not concerned about. Fans need to avoid the increasingly popular idea that “getting younger means getting better.” This misconceived notion that what the Phillies owners must do is to bury their wallets for anyone 30 or older and to instead retool the farm system for a potential run years down the road boggles my brain. No team has been as good at cultivating young star talent years on end then the Atlanta Braves. And how many rings have they won since winning one 1995? I know I don’t have to tell you the answer is zero. Of course the Phillies and their scouts should also be making it a priority to draft well and develop talent that can flourish in the majors. But that should not come in lieu of doing what it takes to try to win now by spending money, because no matter how much older the core of this team is compared to five years ago it still in fact remains this team’s core. And it’s a core that has won, and attempting to build around it to win again was never a bad idea.

Here’s hoping that window remains open another year or two. In any event, the Phillies as an organization should be willing to pay more for what it is they may need to contend, not less.