PHILADELPHIA — Trea Turner owned the stage, but the venue belonged to the man wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a brown blazer with elbow patches. John Middleton went out of his way to make this something other than his day. But that’s what it was.
“It’s clear,” Phillies manager Rob Thomson said on Thursday evening as his boss stood a few feet behind him with a broad smile on his face. “We want to win, and we want to win for a long time.”
Some people put their money where their mouth is. For the fourth straight offseason, Middleton is putting his where his heart is. The path that the Phillies have blazed over the last decade on their majority owner’s watch hasn’t always been the straightest or the most sensible. But the one thing that has become abundantly clear is that Middleton has blazed it with his best intentions. For years, he watched from the shadows of the Phillies’ arcane ownership structure as the organization plodded along without an identity or voice. Now, they are indisputably his. And days like Thursday reflect the pride in ownership.
Whatever you think of the wisdom of signing 30-year-old players to 11-year contracts, or the sustainability of the approach that has brought the Phillies to the brink of the 2023 season as the defending National League champions, the one thing that you cannot question is the immense value they have placed on winning.
That means something. It means a heck of a lot. You look north to Boston and you see a team like the Red Sox trade away a young superstar in Mookie Betts and fail to re-sign a young superstar in Xander Bogaerts and you realize how easy it is for even one of the most storied franchises in baseball history to become content with becoming the Nationals. You look West to the Dodgers and see another one of those franchise’s outbid for a player it too considered one of the best in the game. And then you look a hundred miles up the Jersey Turnpike and you watch the Yankees do what they needed to do to sign a player they needed to sign. And that’s when you realize the rarity of what the Phillies are doing.
Turner is a player that they needed to have. They needed him to replace Bryce Harper’s bat for 3½ months. They needed him to replace the pitching that they have consistently failed to develop from within. Simply put, they needed him to have a fighting chance at improving, of positioning themselves for the kind of run that nobody would find surprising.
After introducing Turner to a crowd of media and employees at Citizens Bank Park on Thursday afternoon, Middleton and the rest of the Phillies brass listened to him say all the right things. It wasn’t just what he said but how he said it, right down to correcting his grammar after mistakenly referring to himself and his wife as, “Me and Kristen.” On and off the field, the Phillies newest mega-millionaire star exudes the identity that the Phillies revealed to the world en route to a Game 6 loss in the World Series. He is cut from the same cloth as his old buddies Bryce Harper and Kyle Schwarber, as his new first baseman Rhys Hoskins, as both of the aces who will top this rotation.
The fit was evident from the moment Turner first met with Middleton, Phillies president Dave Dombrowski, and general manager Sam Fuld. Be honest with me, Turner told them. You’re our guy, they told him.
“You learn that through these meetings — you learn how much family means to these guys, to John, to Bryce, to Schwarber, and other players with kids on the team,” Turner said while glancing at his wife and their toddler son Beckham. “You ask them about their experiences. It added up.”
He is an electric player, one who does a lot of the things the Phillies could not do in their World Series loss to the Astros. And he is joining an electric team, one that Middleton and Dombrowski both deserve credit for fashioning. It isn’t often that a roster built on a foundation of dollars achieves an identity that feels homegrown. There aren’t a lot of big-ticket free agents who have the exact sort of makeup that can enhance such a thing. The Phillies knew that Turner had it. And they had the will to make it happen.
“Obviously, we won, and now we take this extra step in signing arguably the best shortstop in baseball,” Thomson said. “There’s this momentum that keeps coming, and we’ve got to keep it going.”
If you’d stood in the visitors’ clubhouse at Minute Maid Park after the Phillies’ season-ending loss to the Astros in Game 6 of the World Series, you might have wondered where they possibly could go next. They easily could have decided that they were playing with house money, that the goodwill they’d achieved could carry them through the offseason. Instead, they did the opposite, and they did it as definitively as they possibly could have done it.
They say that money can’t buy happiness, but if it can buy the best one or two shortstops in baseball for the National League champions, well, what would you call that?
