The Phillies are Dave Dombrows...

The task of building a World Series team has changed dramatically from 1997 to 2006 to 2012 to 2018 to 2022, but two things have remained true: It’s incredibly hard, and Dave Dombrowski has managed to do it anyway. As Game 3 brings Philadelphia its first taste of the World Series since 2009, you’ll see the factoid that the Phillies president of baseball operations is now the first executive to lead four different franchises to the pennant. You might miss that he was already the only one to do it with three. But when we look back in 10, 20 years, maybe when Dombrowski is inducted to the Hall of Fame, what might be even more striking than his track record of success is that in the GM-centric era ushered in by “Moneyball” and Billy Beane, Dombrowski has twice been fired despite it all. From the spark of baseball’s information age to its spiraling acceleration beyond the spectrum of the casual fan’s eye in recent seasons, the concepts at the heart of “Moneyball” — and the terms it ushered into the sports lexicon — have become both ingrained, flattened, dressed up as a bogeyman and stripped of all meaning by decades of inane crosstalk. It’s worth remembering the simple idea that started it all: Seek out advantages that are undervalued by the bulk of the competition. Moneyball, as defined by economists after seeing it in action for years, is “buying assets that are undervalued by other teams and selling ones that are overvalued by other teams.”

What going against the grain means now in MLB

Michael Lewis’s 2003 book documenting Beane’s purposeful zigs with the Oakland Athletics glorified and reshaped the job of running a baseball front office. With Beane’s successful strategies elucidated and validated, the previously underground sabermetric movement of quantifying player performance and value rapidly took root everywhere, even with teams not operating on Oakland’s shoestring budget. There are two levels to the lasting ripple effects that we still summarily call Moneyball, and they are important to distinguish. On a practical baseball decision-making level, Beane’s central insight held that quantitative analysis should be used in addition to the qualitative recommendations of scouts to evaluate players and field the best team. There’s still a push-pull to find the right balance, but this is now just common sense. “He possesses the essential qualities to establish a sustainable baseball operation throughout the organization,” the press release said, attributing the comment to chairman Tom Werner, “with an emphasis on long-term success at the major league level.”The intervening seasons have lent clarification to that corporate-speak: Dombrowski was fired on a hair trigger as the league’s top payroll sputtered to 84 wins. Two of Bloom’s three teams have finished dead last in the AL East, but they have been cheaper. So he’s still in charge.

Dombrowski represents Phillies' refreshing ambition

You can find a “new Moneyball” in almost every good team, a tactic or player preference they have leaned into that has led to wins. I’ve done it myself! But what Dombrowski represents is less a novel or innovative scheme to win baseball games and more a (relative) purity of approach. The vast majority of MLB teams in 2022 are playing Sustainaball, and the Phillies are doing something else — something that, ironically, might be more aptly dubbed Moneyball. The Phillies tried something like that with a day-late, dollar-short rebuild, and failed. By the time team owner John Middleton demoted former GM Matt Klentak and convinced Dombrowski to come aboard, the team was already pulling from the Dombrowski playbook. Klentak signed Bryce Harper to a 13-year, $330 million deal and traded for J.T. Realmuto, a rare superstar-level catcher, trying to get the team over the hump.