The Phillies front office came together behind the goal of winning one for retiring general manager Pat Gillick.
That goal accomplished, the next question is how soon the Phillies front office will come apart.
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| Pat Gillick, 71, ends his Phillies run with the 2008 World Series title. (Getty Images) |
Amaro and Arbuckle are both longtime Phillies employees, with Arbuckle joining the team as scouting director in 1992 and Amaro coming aboard six years later. Each believes he's qualified for the top job, and each believes the other is qualified for it, too.
"Mike and I have had a good relationship," Amaro said during the World Series. "And we'll continue to have a good relationship, whatever decision is made. He's a great baseball man, and he's greatly respected by me and by others in the industry."
Amaro insisted that the two can continue to coexist, which may be easier for him to say since he's regarded as the strong favorite for the job. Arbuckle won't admit to any friction, but he's more cautious in predicting what will happen.
"I haven't even thought that far," he said. "We've got to see what shakes out. We'll make those decisions after the fact, and see where it goes."
With the major league general managers gathering on Monday at their annual meetings in Dana Point, Calif., and with free agency and the trading season arriving soon thereafter, some of those decisions will have to come quickly. And while the Phillies mostly held off on front-office talk during the World Series, out of respect to Gillick and also to the task at hand, the questions can't be avoided now.
Gillick was very much in charge during the postseason, even to the point of running an organizational meeting the day after Game 3 of the World Series. Game 3 ended at 1:47 a.m., but the Phillies staff was back at the ballpark for a 1:30 p.m. planning meeting the following afternoon.
Gillick also had his major league scouts working during the World Series, continuing to scout both his own team and the Rays for any tendencies or changes. A longtime big league scout said he had never heard of teams having their advance scouts continuing to work during a World Series, but a longtime Gillick associate said that Gillick had done the same thing with Toronto in 1992-93.
Gillick has been successful at every one of his stops, building playoff teams in Baltimore and Seattle as well as in Toronto and Philadelphia. Before Wednesday night, though, his only two World Series titles were the ones he won with the Blue Jays.
Now, at age 71, Gillick is retiring. It may not be a permanent retirement -- many who know Gillick expect him to return to the game in some capacity -- but Gillick associates indeed expect him to take at least a year off.
In any case, 2008 may have been his last year as a general manager. That's one reason that those who work for him were so driven to win this year, and a big reason that this championship meant so much to them.
"We were all pretty emotional," said Amaro, who was with Gillick when Brad Lidge recorded the final out. "When I grabbed him and gave him a hug, I just told him I was happy how this had worked out, and just so happy for him.
"He works so hard, and he's been doing this for so long. He's a very positive karma guy. He's a guy we would love to have stick around. I know David would love to have him stick around."
David is David Montgomery, the Phillies president and the man who will name the next general manager. The long-held assumption has been that Amaro will get the job, but officially Montgomery and the Phillies have avoided the question.
"We're pretty singularly focused," Amaro said during the World Series. "Everybody knows there's the big elephant in the middle of the room."
Both Amaro and Arbuckle were Phillies long before Gillick arrived. But Gillick's style has always been to work with the group that's in place, and he did just that with the Phillies.
Amaro, a Philadelphia native and a former Phillies player, had already been the assistant GM under Ed Wade. Arbuckle also held the assistant GM title under Wade, after nine years as the Phillies director of scouting.
Arbuckle was the scouting director when the Phillies drafted or signed the core of the championship team: Jimmy Rollins, Ryan Howard, Chase Utley, Pat Burrell, Brett Myers, Ryan Madson and Carlos Ruiz. In the celebration Wednesday night, Amaro credited him, as well as current scouting director Marti Wolever (who drafted Series MVP Cole Hamels in 2002).
Amaro also thought back to the long nights working with Gillick.
"Sometimes we'd get mad at him because he wanted us to work until 3 in the morning," Amaro said. "I remember one time we were working on an extension with (Jamie) Moyer, and I was in a party in a basement somewhere, in a bowling alley. We did hours upon hours that were necessary to bring these pieces together.
"And it was absolutely worth it."
They won. They won for themselves, and also for Pat. They worked together to do it.
Now he's going to be gone, and now the question is how much of the Phillies front-office unity will leave with him.
