Phillies owner John Middleton should not miss the opportunity to upgrade at manager | Bob Brookover

You’re John Middleton, it’s the final weekend of your team’s tremendously disappointing season, and you can’t decide what to do about your manager. We suspect that’s not the case but play along anyway.

Sure, the Phillies’ paying customers are willing to help. They want Gabe Kapler fired yesterday, and they’d be thrilled if general manager Matt Klentak and team president Andy MacPhail exited along with him.

“We need a new manager, and we need a new pitcher,” one discontented fan yelled Friday night after Vince Velasquez surrendered a first-inning run against the Miami Marlins.

While Klentak and MacPhail are as much to blame, if not more, for the Phillies’ 2019 failures, those two received recent contract extensions and are the point men for Middleton’s command to make the franchise more analytically driven. They are not going anywhere right now.

Kapler, on the other hand, will be entering the final year of his three-year contract in 2020, and he’s expendable at a minimal cost. That, however, should not even factor into Middleton’s decision. The feelings of the fans are always taken into account because no owner wants an empty ballpark, and Middleton often likes to reference his own time as a Phillies fan. In fact, he did so after signing Bryce Harper in March.

“This is much more like when we signed Pete Rose after the 1979 season,” Middleton said of the Phillies’ $330 million free-agent addition. “We didn’t sign Pete Rose just to be good in ’79. We signed Pete Rose to be good for another five or six years and to be competing for the World Series throughout that five or six-year run.

“On the flip side, remember what happened in 1979? You had a team that won three consecutive divisional titles, lost in the NLCS three straight times, and you sign Pete Rose, who is one of the three or four best players in baseball at the time. Now he’s on a team with Mike Schmidt and Steve Carlton and a lot of other great players around him, and we promptly finish in fourth place and don’t even get close to the playoffs.”

That sounds a little similar to how the 2019 season unfolded except for the part where the Phillies were good for quite some time before the disappointing 1979 season that cost Danny Ozark his job as manager with 30 games left to play.

“You don’t know who’s going to get injured, who’s going to have an up year, who’s going to have a down year,” Middleton said. “I expect them to play hard. I expect them to compete.”

And?

“I would be disappointed if we’re not a contending team because I think we’re built to be a contending team,” Middleton said. “I think compared to a year ago where everything had to go right to be a contending team, we have much more margin of error. You look at the starting eight, they’re really good position players. It’s deep. The lineup is just going to be a nightmare for opposing pitchers. There’s nowhere to hide. There’s no time to relax.”

We now know that starting eight did not produce the way the Phillies expected, and it cost hitting instructor John Mallee his job even though he was doing his job exactly the way that Klentak and Kapler wanted him to do it.

“We have given Gabe and his coaching staff a much better group of 25 players to coach and to manage, and now it’s up to them, and it’s also up to the players,” Middleton said before the season. “I expect them to come in wanting to win every day. I expect them to come in hungry. I expect them to fight and claw for 27 outs, and I think if we do that and they play up to their abilities, we’re going to be more than in contention. This is a good group of people. It’s a really strong lineup. It’s the best starting eight I think we’ve had since 2009.”

If Middleton really believes that, it’s hard to fathom that he also believes that Kapler and the Phillies’ coaching staff got the best out of the talent this season even though injuries certainly played a factor.

To refer back to 1979, Paul Owens, the general manager at the time, decided that year that fiery farm director Dallas Green would be a better manager for the ballclub than the laid-back Ozark. We found out a year later that he was right when the Phillies finally won their first World Series. The Phillies, by the way, went 41-22 in Green’s first two Septembers as manager. Heading into their final series of the season against the Marlins, they were 18-35 in Kapler’s first two Septembers, the month when the good teams typically separate from the bad.

The biggest question now for Middleton is whether he thinks he can do better than Kapler as manager for next season. That should be his primary concern this weekend.

It appears as if Joe Maddon is going to be available after being fired by the Chicago Cubs, and it’s a well-known fact that Joe Girardi wants back in as a manager after spending the last two seasons as a television analyst.

It’s very possible that Girardi, an Ilinois native who played seven seasons with the Cubs, will replace Maddon. The Phillies, meanwhile, might be a dream job for Maddon, who grew up 97 miles northwest of Philadelphia in Hazleton, Pa.

You can argue that Maddon is 65 years old and oversaw a monumental collapse of his own this season with the Cubs. He has also won more than 1,200 games, reached the postseason eight times in 16 years and won a World Series. That’s a pretty good resume. Maddon is also the perfect mix of old school and new school. Analytics is not only a language he can speak, he also helped start the revolution.

In short, he’d be a better option than Kapler, who himself is a huge Maddon fan and former player.

It’s Middleton’s call, and he should be just as determined to find his next manager as he was to sign Harper.