My take on the Brookover story is that his source is Girardi. Often the source is still named in the story in some other way. I feel like this passage:
It should be noted that the team source is not making the call here, but it was a voice that should be heard by Middleton. The Phillies' managing partner made it clear before the season that one of the voices he definitely still listens to is former general manager and team president Pat Gillick. I don’t know how Gillick feels about Klentak’s job performance after five seasons.
Eliminates both MacPhail and Gillick. I suppose it could be Bowa, Mackanin, Charlie or even Jimmy Rollins (who is actually an advisor to MacPhail and Middleton, not Klentak).
The other thing that jumps out at me in the story is this passage:
The Phillies, under Middleton’s orders and Klentak’s direction, have built a formidable analytics department that many baseball people inside and outside the organization believe is relied upon too much at the expense of human opinions.
The possibility that the analytics department simply isn't that good doesn't seem to be considered.
And then there's a long digression where Arbuckle says that in his time working for the Phillies, not one of the GMs - Thomas, Wade, Gillick - overruled him on a first-round pick. That would seem to imply that Klentak is more hands-on, though Brookover only seems to be making that assertion to circle back to the old outdated Moneyball gripe.
Arbuckle’s greatest strength, in turn, was listening to the people he had hired first in the scouting department and later in player development. You get the sense around One Citizens Bank Way that analytics too often rule the day and that the opinions of some very smart baseball people are often ignored by the general manager and his small circle of decision-makers.
Who are these very smart baseball people, is what I want to know. Were they hidding from 2013-2015?