This is the logic from you and Big E that I object to. The one thing that the Phillies have in what at the moment is effectively infinite supply is money. You have your preferred way to spend it: one-year deals on vets to play and then flip. The fact that you are now saying "who cares if they're traded, we'll only get 2nd and third-tier prospects who won't move the needle" strikes me that this is an admission, which you are unwilling to type out explicitly, that the $60+ million spent on one-year vets, as well as the money spent on vets the two prior years, has not been money efficiently spent.
Rather than paying a fortune to accumulate vets that you may or may not actually be able to flip for anything of value, why not instead invest those $ directly on young prospects, whether consistently going to 150% of our international allocation, to being the leader in the over-23 market (no longer a possibility)? I feel very sure that efficiency of future WAR acquired in prospects would be vastly more efficient than the future WAR from the prospects obtained in vet-flipping deals for the $100 mill or so we've spent on vets the past 3 seasons. Is spending $1 million on international amateurs outside the top 10 or top 20 slightly inefficient? It might be, but it's more efficient than what we've been doing and it definitely is a way to increase our odds of adding a star player to the system.
Big E thinks I'm too negative, yet I freely recognize that we have at least a top 10 farm, and I believe a top 6 farm. My simple question is this: wouldn't you rather have the #1 farm? My second question is: wouldn't you really rather have some of the A+ prospects who powered the Cubs and Astros rebuild, and which we don't have at present? I freely admit that someone is likely to pop up from the farm who will fall into that category. I hope you are willing to admit that it is going to take more than one and probably more than 2. That's what got us to 2008.
To me, it only makes sense to spend as much as we legally can on prospects and add as many potential A+ prospects as we possibly can, at least until we have the necessary core of A+ prospects on the farm. I fully admit and have often written that our farm is very deep and that this is a very good thing. It is a very good thing, and yet it is not enough. We need our 1, 2, 3 star/superstar players. We had them in 2008. 2008 did not happen because we spent big $ for FA at the last minute, after the core was in place. We really added only LIdge, at not huge trade cost, going into 2008. There were good deadline deals. As we started to add top SP, beyond Hamels, and as we added Pence, we made it less and less far into the playoffs. 2011 was the peak in wins, but 2008 was the peak.
We have the very difficult task of moving our MLB team from last to the WS. I don't think there presently is enough talent in the system to do that. I want us to keep pedal to the metal on amateur talent acquisition, until we have enough to win a WC, with the help of not huge trades or FA signings to add the necessary final push. After that, I want to keep healthy spending on the farm and never again see the neglect we saw while the golden age was underway and during most of the Giles/Montgomery era. Good enough should never be accepted as satisfactory. That's how organizations rot.
For those of you who see MacPhail/Klentak/Middleton as saviors and brook no criticism whatsoever of their performance: I'm sorry, but there is grounds for some criticism and it is best addressed contemporaneously, not held in abeyance until 2020 and 2021 and we observe how well things worked. I think we will get back to the WS on this cycle, I think whether we win or lose is more or less irrelevant luck. I'd like us to get there sooner rather than later and I'd like us to challenge for a WS berth for at least a decade after we get there. Both of these objectives require adding as much amateur talent to the system as we possibly can -- each and every year.
