SAN ANTONIO — The night the Phillies’ season ended in disappointment, many players, coaches and front-office officials took late-night buses home to Philadelphia. Some stayed in New York. John Middleton chose to drive back the following morning. He walked into the executive offices at Citizens Bank Park around lunchtime and found Dave Dombrowski.
“Do you have time to talk?” Middleton asked Dombrowski.
Sure, the veteran executive told the Phillies owner.
“Let me tell you,” Dombrowski said, “about the conversations I’ve already had.”
Middleton was angry in the immediate aftermath of the team’s postseason exit in the National League Division Series. Still is, he said. Middleton wanted to force tougher conversations about how to push forward. But Dombrowski, the club’s president of baseball operations, forced those issues first.
“That’s what I wanted to see,” Middleton said. “I wanted to see people reacting in a way, like, the house is on fire. Not: We got time. Let’s go lick our wounds. Let’s spend a couple of days off. Let’s relax and unwind. Then we’ll come back. It is like, literally by noon, David had three major conversations with all these key people. And that’s exactly what it should have been.”
An important Phillies offseason officially began Monday when free agency opened and executives from across the sport gathered at a posh Texas resort for the annual general managers’ meetings. The Phillies plan to spend. They’ll pursue trades. The transactions won’t be immediate.
But the changes, in Middleton’s mind, were.
“Dave brought everybody in,” Middleton said. “That’s the sign of a healthy organization. That’s a sign of an organization that says, ‘You know what? This really didn’t go well and we need to do something about it.’ We need to be very intentional and specific about what we need to do. We need to be careful, thoughtful and accurate in our evaluations of people and situations. We need to think about what needs to be changed and then how we’re going to change it. And they did that. That book was written in the first week to 10 days.”
In a wide-ranging interview this week with The Athletic, Middleton detailed the tone set at the organization’s meetings, why the club sought new investors for its ownership group, and how the team can sustain a high payroll.
(Answers have been edited for clarity and length.)
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As you reflect, how much do you weigh one week in October versus two months of subpar play versus the bigger picture, which was 95 wins and a division title?
You have to separate what my initial thinking was versus my thinking as the organization met and talked about things. Because when you sit in a group — as I did for many days — and you listen to different people’s ideas, you come away with all the things that you didn’t think about. Those ultimately shape your opinion.
I don’t think you can forget the postseason. I don’t think you can forget the last couple of months of marginal play. It was more like three months of marginal play. There were some peaks and valleys in that second half. But we really didn’t play consistently well for quite a long sustained period. Some of that is we have guys who just chase too much. And they have to stop. They just have to become more disciplined. It’s not enough to say, “Well, look, this is just the way that person is.” The person has to change.
The other thing is, it’s not enough to say, “Well, that’s baseball.” That’s just an excuse for not having to really think about what went right, what went wrong, and what you can do to right the wrongs.
I was talking to Dave about it. I said, “Dave, I hate this expression.” He goes, “I hate that expression more than any other expression in baseball.” Because it allows you to think anything you want to think. Oh, we didn’t do well? That’s baseball. I’m 1-for-20? Well, that’s baseball.
We need to learn from (the NLDS loss to the New York Mets). I think some old dogs need to learn new tricks. I know by the time you get to the majors, and particularly by the time you’re a veteran, you’ve got a style. It’s yours. But I’m going to remind the guys in spring training of two stories.
In 2010, we’re playing the Rockies out in Denver. Roy Halladay is pitching one of those days. His father lives about an hour away. And his father and I are sitting there watching Doc mow them down. I turned to his father and say, “I understand that you were Doc’s first pitching coach.” He said, “That’s right.” I said, “How many of his pitches that he uses today did you teach him?” And he said, “None.” None? “None.” Not even a fastball? “No.” He said when (Roy) was sent back down to the low minors, he jettisoned every pitch and he learned five new pitches. He said, “I’m not going to be successful (in the majors) if I don’t change.” So I said, “Oh, he’s using those pitches?” No. Over time, he was afraid he was too predictable. People knew his pitches. He either completely changed or materially altered every single pitch.
So I’m kind of incredulous about this whole thing. Two weeks later, I’m sitting with Mike Schmidt at a game. I relate this story about Doc’s father. And Mike just looks at me and he goes, “Yeah, I can understand that.” I said, “Really? All that change?” He goes, “John, in my career, I had three completely different swings. Every one of those three swings, I made a significant adjustment to the swing about halfway through. People adjust to you. You have to adjust to them.”
And that’s the message I’m going to give people in spring training. The reason those guys are in the Hall of Fame is because they were willing to change. They were willing to adapt. … If they can do it, then we have to at least try to do it. People have to adjust.
I’ve seen people develop two-strike approaches at the plate. People can do it. People on this team have done that. Bryce (Harper) learned a whole different position, for God’s sake. But everybody’s got to do that.
John Middleton, pictured with Dave Dombrowski and GM Sam Fuld last spring training, says he’ll share two stories with the players next spring on the importance of making adjustments. (Nathan Ray Seebeck / Imagn Images)
How confident are you that your people have the answers internally and possibly externally to facilitate these changes and build a better club?
From the standpoint of internal work, there’s a clear understanding and agreement among all of the hierarchy — the front office people, the coaching staff — that collectively we’ve got to be more forceful in getting players to address their areas of weakness.
We’ve been having conversations in a more forceful way, instead of making suggestions. This isn’t going to change just because you show up in the middle of February or something like that.
Some of the solutions to what we need to do have to come from the outside — be it a free agent or trade. That process is just starting. I don’t know how those dominoes are going to fall, but we certainly have ideas. And everybody’s pushing. Dave is the guy who’s leading the charge there. You have to be very creative. We have to be willing to think about things that we maybe weren’t willing to think about in the last two offseasons.
Three of the final four teams in this postseason had payrolls over $300 million. There is typically a strong correlation between spending and winning. Do you foresee the Phillies being able to sustain payrolls in that $300 million range to compete with the bigger spenders?
Yeah, I do. I do. Stuff’s going to have to give. The ability to afford that is not because you do one thing differently tomorrow than you’ve been doing it heretofore. There are different things. Part of adding the new investors (to the ownership group) is it broadens our base. It gives us more financial flexibility and more financial depth. That’s not the only reason, but that’s an important reason. In order to do what we think we need to do strategically, we wanted to have a broader financial base and a deeper financial base. So we weren’t just dependent upon a smaller number of families. We also have to find new revenue sources that push. And we also have to find ways to reduce expenses that we think are non-essential in other parts of the organization.
We have a very aggressive (facilities renovation) project planned in Clearwater. It’s temporarily on hold because of the hurricanes. We’ve been planning that. We’ve been talking to the city and the county about that. And we’re going to do that at some point in the near future. That whole project is a lot easier for the Phillies to swallow — because it’s hundreds of millions of dollars — with a broader financial base.
We have a lot of stuff we want to do to Citizens Bank Park, too. Some of it is on a tight timeframe because we want to get it done before the All-Star Game in 2026. If we’re going to be here long term, we’ve got significant things to do. The way people watch games today is totally different than the way they watched 25 years ago. We have to update our stadium. And that’s hundreds of millions of dollars to do that. If we were making money or just breaking even and we didn’t have all these aggressive plans for the future, we didn’t really need to (add investors). But we do.
Did you divest some of your family’s stake?
Yeah. Our interest went down a little bit, but not a lot. I didn’t want it to go down a lot.
Anecdotally, there have been teams that paid luxury tax but said there would be a time when they step back, lower payroll, and reset the penalties. Do you foresee a time when that’ll have to be the case for the Phillies?
Neither Dave nor I have ever broached that strategy. Never talked about it. Neither of us has thought about it individually and neither of us has ever voiced it to the other. And neither has our CFO (John Nickolas) for that matter.
My guess is, for better or worse, we’ve chosen our path. So, no, I don’t see that happening. The rules are the rules. You just follow them and you just kind of accept the consequences.
Do you see any parallels between this group and that 2008-11 run where the Phillies won more games every year but were eliminated a round earlier every year? Are there any lessons from how you guys handled the subsequent years that might guide you now?
Going back to what I said earlier about actively talking to players, that’s not something that really went on back then. It just wasn’t. There was too much of a “That’s baseball mindset” to it. And I think you need to be more intentional and more active in your assessment of your organization and yourself personally. Take more responsibility for changing.
The lesson there (from 2012 on) is you really have to maintain a strong farm system. And it’s harder to maintain a strong farm system when you’re losing draft picks because you’re signing free agents. It’s harder to maintain your farm system at the same level when you’re drafting like 25th versus 12th or even fifth.
Dave’s on top of that. And it’s always been a big focus of his. Brian (Barber) does a great job. Preston (Mattingly) does a great job developing the players that Brian drafts. The two of them talk a lot. Preston weighs in on potential draft picks and Brian weighs in on the draft picks he’s supplied Preston and how they’re doing.
One of the knocks if you go back to the (Matt) Klentak era — we had some phenomenal success down in the farm system for several years, but everybody said, “Well, they have high floors and low ceilings.” And they just couldn’t hack it.
Now people are criticizing us for having a farm system that’s not deep enough. But the top of our farm system is extraordinary. You look at (Andrew) Painter and (Justin) Crawford — they’re the first two who are going to come along. They’re really talented. And I think they can have a big impact.
We have vastly better players today than the Phillies had in ’11, ’12 and certainly beyond that. Vastly better players. That’s how you regenerate yourself. That’s how you keep the window open. … Our farm system is substantially better off than it was in the latter years of that earlier run and certainly in the years immediately after the run. We’re much, much better off.
John Middleton: “The fan in me has to drive the CEO in me. Not the other way around. Ever.” (Bill Streicher / Imagn Images)
You are passionate about winning. Has it become any harder for you to separate the fan in you from the CEO?
There’s a lot of overlap. No, I don’t think it’s harder to separate. I’ll go even a step further: I don’t think it’s a good idea, frankly, to separate. Because I think you have to be passionate about your business no matter what the product is. … If you’re not passionate about it, I don’t think you’re focused on the right things. I don’t think you’re focused on the fans or customers. I don’t think you’re focused on the product.
In the family’s other businesses, we were obsessed with things like product quality and customer satisfaction. And we did some things as a result of that obsession that, if you were an analytical, detached senior executive, you would have looked at it and said, “You shouldn’t be doing that. It’s just not cost-effective.”
Being passionate about your product is, I think, the foundation of greatness in any industry. The fan in me has to drive the CEO in me. Not the other way around. Ever. As soon as you start thinking like a CEO — to the extent that you’re detached from your product, detached from your fans, detached from your employees — you’re lost. You should never be detached from any of those three things. They should be at the forefront. They’re all priorities and you have to be passionate about them.
(Top photo: Chris Szagola / Associated Press)
