Dave Dombrowski needs to fix his big 2024 mistake and find a left fielder

There’s a saying in the construction business. The first 90% of a job takes 90% of the effort, and the last 10% of a job takes 90% of the effort.

That feels like where the Phillies are at right now. It took them 10 years to build a roster capable of winning a World Series. Yet they are no closer to winning the darn thing than they were three seasons ago, when they broke their decade-long playoff drought.

That’s partially because of competitive realities. The hardest thing to do in sports is go from good to great. We’ve seen that with the Sixers. We saw it with the Eagles during the Andy Reid era, with the Flyers in the Legion of Doom years. Baseball just so happens to be an especially bedeviling endeavor, with a high degree of chance baked into its in-game outcomes and a playoff format that does not benefit from the law of large numbers to nearly the same extent as the regular season.

» READ MORE: As Phillies stress continuity, outfield will be the most likely spot to bring change and lineup balance

But, then, nobody said the task was easy. The big question for the Phillies is whether the man in charge is the man to complete it.

Dave Dombrowski needs to have a better offseason than he had last year. He needs to have a better year than the one he just had. That’s not all the Phillies president needs. He needs Trea Turner to rediscover his line-drive swing and table-setter approach. He needs his starting rotation to report to camp healthy and ready for another season of 180-plus innings top to bottom. He needs his hotshot pitching prospect to turn promise into reality. All that stuff more or less is out of Dombrowski’s control. If things break wrong on more than one of those fronts, there may not be anything he can do this offseason to make up for it. But he needs to ace the decisions that are within his control, which is something he did not do in 2024.

A playoff roster is a snowball at the bottom of a hill, its ultimate breadth and depth and momentum a function of all of the decisions made on the way down. The Phillies didn’t have a ton of room to maneuver with their lineup last offseason. But they never managed to escape the one critical decision they faced. They had a chance to upgrade their lineup in left field. They thought Whit Merrifield would do it. They were wrong. They thought Austin Hays would fix that mistake. They were wrong there, too. The end result was $10-ish million in salary spent on players who did not contribute in the NLDS, plus one fewer bullpen arm in Seranthony Domínguez, whom the Phillies traded to the Orioles along with Cristian Pache to acquire Hays. Most significantly, it was a lack of options in left field and center, where the combination of Brandon Marsh and Johan Rojas yielded a fraction of the offensive punch that the Phillies could have realized with Marsh in center and any of a number of options in left.

The upcoming offseason is a do-over of sorts. Left field was the Phillies’ most glaring liability, relative to the rest of the league. It also is the easiest path to an upgrade. The free-agent market offers an obvious fit in Orioles switch-hitter Anthony Santander, a 30-year-old who is coming off a career-best 44 home runs to go with an .814 OPS. There are a variety of other options who might cost a fraction of the price. If they can afford a proven middle-of-the-order hitter like Santander, great. If not, Dombrowski needs to put those scouting and projecting chops to better use than he did with Merrifield and Hays.

Decisions like this aren’t the only judge of an executive. The Phillies are in a much better place under Dombrowski than they were in the years before he took over. The next five years will be determined as much by the farm system that he and his staff are building as they will the veteran free agents he acquires in offseasons such as this one. At the same time, the teams that survive the postseason tend to be the ones that make the right calls.

» READ MORE: Murphy: A few hard truths about the Phillies before we blow them up this offseason

Look at the Dodgers and their decision to sign Teoscar Hernández to a one-year, $23.5 million deal last offseason. Out of the Phillies’ price range? Maybe. But not nearly as much when you consider the money they spent on Merrifield and Hays, not to mention the $18 million a year they have been and will continue paying Taijuan Walker. Remember, decisions are a snowball. Each one you miss raises the importance of the next. Each of those you miss compounds the previous ones.

The Mets struck a big victory with their signing of Jose Iglesias last offseason. The Phillies could have signed someone like Randal Grichuk, who signed with the Diamondbacks for a couple million bucks and ended up hitting .291/.348/.528 with 12 home runs and the 10th-highest weighted on-base average among outfielders with at least 100 plate appearances.

Look at the trade deadline. While it’s true that Hays’ season was derailed by injuries and a kidney infection, it’s also true that the Phillies are unlikely to bring Hays back, despite his being eligible for arbitration one last time. Meanwhile, the Guardians and Mets continue to reap dividends from trade-deadline acquisitions Lane Thomas and Jesse Winker.

“We were very happy with the trades we made at the particular time,” Dombrowski said Tuesday in his year-end news conference. “I’ve been in this role before where sometimes you make moves and they turn out great and sometimes you make moves that don’t turn out as well as you would like.”

That’s fair. In fact, a lot of what Dombrowski said on Tuesday was fair, however poorly it will sit with a fan base that just burned through a season’s worth of emotional energy watching a week’s worth of plate appearances that felt doomed to failure even before they failed. The Phillies president did not make any bold declarations about his vision for the future. He did not promise any roster shake-ups, or strategic pivots, or missing pieces. He endorsed his veteran core. He vouched for his third baseman. He announced a contract extension for his manager.

That’s probably the right course of action. The right tone to strike.

The Phillies are at a point where everybody needs to do their jobs a little bit better. That includes Dombrowski.