Bad Decisions: Gutting the Phillies’ Farm

Before the 1982 season, the Philadelphia Phillies had an embarrassment of riches when it came to the shortstops in their system.

Larry Bowa had been their regular shortstop for 12 seasons, during which time he made five All-Star teams and won two Gold Gloves. He couldn’t really hit much, though he managed a .264 overall batting average in those years. He didn’t walk, or have any power to speak of, so his OPS+ in those years was 28% below the league average, but he was still a valuable player because he could run well (24 annual steals) and was an exceptional defensive shortstop.

Bowa turned 36 after the 1981 season, though, so the Phillies may have decided they needed to get younger. Fortunately for them, they had a variety of good options available to them.

One of them was a shortstop prospect in Triple A Oklahoma City who looked pretty good. Batted .293, stole 32 bases, drew a fair number of walks, played decent defense. They even called him up briefly in September of ‘81 and gave him a few at bats. You may have heard of him, a 22-year old kid named Ryne Sandberg. Made the Hall of Fame a few years later.

And, in case they had doubts about Sandberg for some reason, the Phillies’ shortstop prospect in Double A Reading was a 23-year old who hit .301 and stole 27 bases in 1981. A guy by the name of Julio Franco. Maybe you’ve heard of him, too, since he went on to play 23 years in the big leagues.

And, as if that wasn’t enough, they were pretty stacked around the rest of the infield, too. The best player in franchise history, Mike Schmidt, anchored third base. They also had good depth at second base. Multiple Gold Glove-winner, and sort of league-average-ish hitter, Manny Trillo held the job in the big leagues, plus they had 23-year old Juan Castro in Triple A where he hit .303/.371/.475, 23-year old Rusty Hamric at Double A where he hit .307/.350/.389 and stole 20 bases, and 20-year old Juan Samuel in A ball, where he hit just .248 but stole 53 bases while hitting 11 homers, flashing the sort of bat that led to a 16-year major league career.

So, if the Phillies were looking to move on from the aging Bowa, they had any number of good options available to them. What they did instead, of course, was trade for another shortstop who couldn’t hit.

No, really, that’s what they did.

On January 27, 1982, the Phillies traded Bowa to the Cubs in exchange for shortstop Iván de Jesus. He was basically a clone of Bowa. In the five prior years as the Cubs’ regular shortstop, DeJesus had:

• Batted .261 (Bowa has hit .264).

• Averaged 31 steals (to Bowa’s 24).

• Had an OPS+ of 79 (to Bowa’s 72).

• Played good defense, 1.0 dWAR annually (to Bowa’s 1.4).

The difference between them was that DeJesus was seven years younger than Bowa. To give up the younger player, the Cubs asked for a prospect in addition to Bowa, which seemed like a fair request.

Since former Phillies manager Dallas Green was now the Cubs’ general manager, he was familiar with Philadelphia’s various prospects, and knew that they didn’t see either Sandburg or Franco as being good enough defensively to stay at shortstop. They wouldn’t have traded for DeJesus if they did. But Green also knew that the Phillies weren’t likely to move either of them to a different infield position since Schmidt was locked in at third and they had a parade of people lined up to play second.

That made Sandberg and/or Franco sort of misfits in the Phillies’ organization, so Dallas Green did the smart thing; He asked the Phillies to include Sandberg in the trade. He agreed with the Phillies about Sandberg’s likely inability to play good defense at shortstop, but that wasn’t a problem to him. The Cubs had gaping holes at both second base and third base, either of which was a better fit for Sandberg’s glove.

Newspaper reports at the time said that Green insisted on Sandberg being included or else the deal was off. Whether this was accurate or not, I don’t know, but Sandberg ultimately was included in the trade.

Phillies’ General Manager Paul Owens made a string of bad decisions with this deal.

• He wildly overestimated DeJesus. While he was right to suspect that Bowa’s best days were behind him, thinking that DeJesus would be an improvement was a terrible miscalculation. As already shown, he was really just a younger version of Bowa. There was some value in that, because Bowa had been a decent player for them, but DeJesus wasn’t going to make the Phillies BETTER. Barring a massive jump in his play, the best he would do is keep the Phillies treading water in terms of the quality of shortstop they put on the field. At worst, he was going to decline, because he was already almost 30 and showing no signs of improvement. And that’s exactly what he did. Bowa had averaged 1.8 WAR per season for Philly, and DeJesus had averaged 1.7 WAR for the Cubs, but for the next three seasons as the Phillies’ shortstop, DeJesus averaged only 1.0 WAR per year.

• He didn’t trust his own prospects. Maybe Sandberg couldn’t have stuck as a shortstop, but he became a 9-time Gold Glove winner at second base, and it’s likely he could have been an adequate defensive shortstop. Franco played over 700 games as a big league shortstop, and was a subpar defender there, but his bat more than compensated for that. In his five major league seasons as a shortstop, Franco averaged 2.3 WAR per season, better than either Bowa or DeJesus did for the Phillies. But he did that for Cleveland because Owens dealt him away, too, 11 months after he traded Sandberg.

• He didn’t fill any holes in his roster. Owens’ decision to trade some of his shortstop depth was a good one. That’s what teams are supposed to do when they have multiple quality options at one position, but holes elsewhere. You trade some of your depth to fill those holes. But that’s not what Owens was trying to do. He wasn’t filling a hole, he was trying to maintain existing production from his shortstop. And the roster has plenty of real holes that needed filling. The Phillies’ pitching staff had the worst ERA in the league in 1981. The team had the second-worst defensive efficiency rate in the league, and Bowa wasn’t the problem. The problem was Pete Rose at first base, and Gary Matthews in left field, and Bake McBride in right, all of whom were terrible defenders. Trillo had slipped a bit at second base, and so had Bob Boone at catcher. In the cases of McBride, Trillo and Boone, none of them hit well enough to warrant being in the lineup if their defense was below average. And yet Owens didn’t trade some of his shortstop depth to fix any of those problems. He traded two of them to get another glove-first shortstop, which he already had.

• He didn’t follow his own operating model. Owens had built the Phillies into a perennial contender, including winning the World Series in 1980, by following two standard GM strategies. First, he developed players from his own farm system. He did that with Schmidt, and Bowa, and Boone, and Greg Luzinski, and Larry Christensen, and Tom Underwood, and Dick Ruthven, and others. It was a strong, solid core. Next, he augmented that with trades for younger players that filled holes. He got Steve Carlton at 27, and Dave Cash at 26, and Garry Maddox at 25, and McBride at 28. But in the early 1980s he deviated from that, appearing to be more desperate to win another title before his stars - Schmidt and Carlton - got too old. He started acquiring older veterans, like Rose and Matthews and Mike Krukow and Sparky Lyle and Bo Diaz and John Denny and DeJesus, then even older ones like Tony Perez and Joe Morgan and Bill Robinson.

For one year, it looked like this desperate gambit might work. The Phillies managed to win a weak NL East title in 1983, beat the Dodgers in the NLCS, and slide into the World Series, where they were defeated by the Orioles, 4 games to 1. One year later, Owens was fired. The Phillies didn’t return to the postseason for a decade.

Among the young talent Owens traded away was Sandberg, Franco, Keith Moreland, Mike LaValliere, and Bob Dernier. Add those five to Schmidt and Samuel and the Phillies would have had a mostly young, strong lineup for most of the 1980s, along with the core of a strong bullpen with Kelly Downs, Lance McCullers, and future Cy Young winner Mark Davis, all of whom were also traded away for veterans.

Instead they threw a Hall of Fame second baseman into a trade for a light-hitting, aging shortstop they didn’t need, and compounded that mistake by gutting the rest of their farm system instead of trusting their own talent development staff.

The result was a lost decade of Phillies baseball, and the squandering of the final several years of Schmidt’s remarkable career.