Former GM Matt Klentak’s mark on the Phillies’ roster remains strong. Now the team is reaping the benefits.

John Middleton barely finished posing for photos with ace pitcher Zack Wheeler when he walked to the back of the room to chat with a few reporters.

This was March, and the Phillies had just staged a spring-training news conference to announce a three-year, $126 million extension that will give Wheeler the third-highest annual salary ever for a starting pitcher (non-Shohei Ohtani division). But the owner was less interested in talking about Wheeler’s new deal than his existing one — five years, $118 million, on the books through the end of this season.

”It’s a great contract,” Middleton said. “I don’t think there’s been a better pitching contract in baseball in a long, long time.”

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And then, without provocation, he doled out a heaping portion of credit.

“Matt Klentak was the general manager who got both Zack Wheeler and Bryce Harper,” Middleton said. “Whenever you want to write about what Matt did and didn’t do here, you’ve got to start with, he signed probably the best pitcher in baseball and arguably one of the greatest position players in baseball one year apart. That’s a heck of an accomplishment.”

In fact, as the Phillies float into the weekend with baseball’s best record — 40-18 entering Saturday night’s home game against the Cardinals — Klentak’s thumbprint is on nearly one-third of the active roster.

Before the Harper and Wheeler signings, Klentak pulled off a trade for J.T. Realmuto. Alec Bohm and Bryson Stott were first-round draft picks during Klentak’s five-season run as general manager. Johan Rojas signed as an international amateur. Aaron Nola agreed to his first multiyear contract. Ranger Suárez came to the United States, developed in the Phillies’ farm system, and graduated to the majors in the Klentak years.

Oh, and then there was the November 2019 swap for a tall, skinny lefty in A-ball who couldn’t throw enough strikes and was getting squeezed out of the Rays organization.

But we’ll get back to Cristopher Sánchez shortly.

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Klentak was hired to help steer the Phillies through a rebuilding tunnel and into the light. He came here as a whiz kid, a Massachusetts-born, Dartmouth-schooled scion of the Theo Epstein generation of executives who could bring cutting-edge data and analytics to an organization that had fallen woefully behind the times.

For the most part, Klentak did that. He built a research-and-development team that didn’t exist before his arrival and hired highly regarded scouting director Brian Barber. He couldn’t engineer timing. The Phillies picked first overall in 2016, a draft that produced a historically thin first-round class. They weren’t a World Series contender yet in the 2018-19 offseason, but with generational free agents Harper and Manny Machado on the market, they had to jump before they were ready.

There were missteps. Klentak’s handpicked manager, Gabe Kapler, wasn’t a fit for Philadelphia. Mickey Moniak didn’t pan out. Neither did Scott Kingery. Critics pushed back on Klentak’s analytical bent, accusing him of undervaluing scouts and not utilizing Pat Gillick, Terry Ryan, and other longtime executives at his disposal.

Ultimately, the Phillies just didn’t win enough to forestall Klentak’s removal from the GM’s chair after the 2020 season.

This feels like a good time, though, to reconsider Klentak’s tenure. Because while his erstwhile team is winning like it’s 2011, his current club — the Brewers, led by popular ex-Phillies slugger Rhys Hoskins, who returned Friday night from a strained right hamstring — is due to roll into town Monday with a surprising lead in the NL Central.

Klentak, 43, is in his third year with Milwaukee as an inner-circle adviser to general manager Matt Arnold. In time, maybe he’ll get another chance to lead a front office. Maybe not.

Either way, his Phillies ledger retroactively and objectively looks better. Middleton has praised Klentak several times since he dismissed him. When they clinched a wild card last year, he mentioned Klentak and current president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski in the same sentence.

And Middleton’s reverence for Dombrowski is off the charts.

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So, since Middleton brought it up, how does Klentak look back on his tenure?

“We didn’t get everything right, but I hope time has shown that we got a lot of the big things right,” Klentak said. “The timing wasn’t perfect, obviously, and it took longer than we all hoped. But the goal all along was to put a team on the field that the city would be proud of, and I’m very happy for the fans that that has happened.

“Dave and his group have done a great job of augmenting the roster, and it has been awesome to see the energy that has returned to [Citizens Bank Park]. I’m really happy for everyone who has worked so hard to help the organization reach this point.”

In anticipation of Klentak’s return, let’s revisit a few of his best moves, including some that flew under the radar:

The Phillies went into the 2019-20 offseason shopping for a starter to pair with Nola atop the rotation.

One option: Kyle Gibson.

But while Gibson eventually got traded to the Phillies at the deadline in 2021, he wasn’t interested in coming to the East Coast as a free agent, instead signing with the Rangers.

» READ MORE: Where does Zack Wheeler rank among the best free-agent signings in Phillies history?

The Phillies looked into lefties Dallas Keuchel and Madison Bumgarner. They discussed Hyun-Jin Ryu, runner-up for the Cy Young Award for the Dodgers in 2019. None seemed to have as much upside as Wheeler.

After missing two seasons early in his career with injuries, including Tommy John elbow surgery, Wheeler was coming off back-to-back seasons of 182⅓ and 195⅓ innings and had a 2.83 ERA after the All-Star break in 2019.

Klentak and his staff figured the Phillies were paying more for Wheeler’s upside than his past performance. With free agents, it’s usually the other way around.

Good call. Wheeler had a 2.92 ERA in 11 starts in the shortened 2020 season and was the Cy Young runner-up in 2021. In 113 regular-season starts for the Phillies, he has a 2.98 ERA, including a 2.32 mark so far this year. Since 2020, he has worked 703 innings, second among all pitchers behind only Nola.

But Wheeler’s peak dominance has come in the postseason. In 11 games (10 starts) over the last two years, he has a 2.42 ERA in 63⅓ innings. Among all pitchers who have faced at least 200 batters in postseason history, Wheeler has the lowest WHIP (0.73) and opponent on-base percentage (.210) and second-lowest opponent batting average (.161).

» READ MORE: Zack Wheeler wanted fewer years in his new deal. What it means for him and the Phillies’ ‘championship window.’

Wheeler also leads all pitchers with 22.4 wins above replacement since 2020, a $171.6 million value, according to FanGraphs, on the Phillies’ $118 million investment.

It’s no wonder Middleton preens like a peacock over Wheeler’s contract.

By 2019, it became clear that the small-market, development-rich Rays had an enviable problem: a backlog of talented minor leaguers.

Take Sánchez, for instance.

At age 22, Sánchez notched a 1.94 ERA in 74⅓ innings at two A-ball levels in 2019. But the Rays had to either put him on a crowded 40-man roster or leave him exposed in the Rule 5 draft. And there were questions about Sánchez’s command and future role (starter or reliever?).

» READ MORE: From spring training: The Phillies' trust in Cristopher Sánchez endures even with star pitchers still on the market

In studying Tampa Bay’s and other teams’ farm systems for potential offseason targets, Klentak’s group reached a consensus. While the scouts liked Sánchez’s size (6-foot-6, 190 pounds) and stuff (high-90s fastball, changeup), the Phillies’ analysts saw things they liked in the data.

Klentak pulled off a seemingly minor swap in November 2019, sending minor-league infielder Curtis Mead to the Rays for Sánchez. And even though the Phillies didn’t expect Sánchez to pitch in the majors in 2020, they stashed him on the 40-man roster.

Initially, it looked like a lopsided deal. While Mead soared up the Rays’ prospect chart, Sánchez couldn’t command his high-octane heater. He shuttled between triple A and the majors in 2021 and 2022, never sticking around long.

But Sánchez represents a triumph for both player procurement and development. The Phillies got him to dial back his velocity, improve his command, and incorporate a slider. They called him up last June because they were desperate for a No. 5 starter, and he posted a 3.35 ERA in 17 starts.

Sánchez has only continued to improve, with a 2.83 ERA so far this season (2.03 in May), cementing his place behind Wheeler, Nola, and Suárez in the best rotation in baseball.

“Man, he’s got electric stuff,” right fielder Nick Castellanos said this week. “And just the more innings he has under his belt, the more that he’s able to find himself in familiar situations, the better he’s going to get.”

» READ MORE: Almost two years later, the Brandon Marsh-Logan O’Hoppe trade has ‘worked out for everybody’

Klentak’s front office will get credit for drafting Bohm and Stott in the first round in 2018 and 2019, respectively, and dinged for missing on Moniak and Adam Haseley in 2016 and 2017. The jury remains out on 2020 first-rounder Mick Abel.

But a few longshot picks bore fruit, too.

In 2017, the Phillies took 6-foot-6 righty Ben Brown out of a New York high school in the 33rd round. A year later, they selected catcher Logan O’Hoppe, another Long Islander, in the 23rd round. Players who are drafted so late don’t typically lead to much.

Brown and O’Hoppe exceeded expectations, ascending the Phillies’ minor-league ladder. In 2022, with Brown having a breakthrough season at high-A Jersey Shore and O’Hoppe banging homers at double-A Reading, Dombrowski cashed them in at the trade deadline for reliever David Robertson and outfielder Brandon Marsh from the Cubs and Angels, respectively.

The Phillies wouldn’t have won the pennant and gotten to the World Series without those deals.

Add an assist, then, to Klentak, whose stamp on the Phillies’ success remains considerable four years after his departure.