Ruben Amaro Jr. fired by the Phillies

ONLY SEVEN YEARS ago, the Phillies were the toast of the town, the team that created a nightly, Delaware Valley-sized buzz from the club's epicenter at Citizens Bank Park, the organization that paraded down Broad Street and ended a quarter-century-long professional championship drought in this sports-crazed city.

Ruben Amaro Jr., a lifelong Phillie, received the keys to that darling of a possible National League dynasty three days after the Halloween parade. Then 43, the Philadelphia native was living a charmed life.

The son of a former Phillies player and coach of the same name, Amaro was a bat boy at Veterans Stadium from 1980-83, watching his boyhood team play in two World Series. After graduating from Penn Charter and Stanford University, Amaro spent five of his eight big-league seasons playing for the Phillies, including in 1993, when the team again went to a World Series.

Amaro worked his way through the front office after retiring in 1998 and was on top of the world 10 years later, when he was tabbed to succeed Pat Gillick as the Phillies' general manager.

He made two more trips to the World Series as a Phillies executive - under Gillick in '08 and from the GM's chair in 2009. He aggressively added All-Stars and Cy Young winners at trade deadlines, put together a rotation for the ages, and built a pennant winner and a 102-win team among his three NL East winners.

Amaro's good fortune, however, came to an end yesterday, 24 days before the Phillies play their final game of the year.

Amaro was fired.

The Phillies announced that Amaro would not have his expiring contract extended beyond this season, that former assistant GM Scott Proefrock would take over in an interim role, and that the search for a replacement is underway.

"The conclusion that I reached was that we needed a fresh perspective in the baseball information department, a fresh approach," said incoming team president Andy MacPhail, who was hired in June. "I'm entrusted with creating a baseball operations department that's going to compete and achieve success and sustain success over a long period of time. I felt that a change was required."

The Phillies have the worst record in baseball. They will fail to finish with a winning record for the fourth straight season, despite having a top-10 payroll (they were top three in payroll in the previous three seasons).

The rebuild might have began 10 months ago or so, but the architects of that rebuild have already changed hands more than a couple of times in the last 14 months. Amaro helped begin the process, trading away seven veterans in the last 10 months, including franchise icons Chase Utley, Jimmy Rollins and Cole Hamels.

But the Phillies are flirting to become the first team to lose 100 games in franchise history since 1961. The announced attendance of the just-completed three-game series against the Braves was 45,976, a little more than 500 more bodies than they averaged per game in 2011 (45,440).

As the team nosedived from perennial contender to last-place pretender, from being praised for its home-grown talent to mocked for overspending to keep that talent, while also adding to it with pricey free-agent contracts and win-now trades, Amaro became the pariah of a fan base that had poured money into the pockets of the people at One Citizens Bank Way.

As his former boss acknowledged yesterday, bringing Amaro back on a new contract would have been an awfully tough sell.

"It would have been a very hard decision for Andy to bring Ruben back," Gillick said. "I think, from a public standpoint, I don't think the public really would accept that."

John Middleton, the powerful ownership partner who has made himself more public since hiring MacPhail, made that point on his own in his opening statement at yesterday's news conference.

"We recognize and appreciate we have the greatest fans in the country," Middleton said. "And we owe them our very best efforts all the time. Our obligation to our fans requires us to focus on what's important to them, and that's winning. And that focus requires us to confront difficult decisions from time to time."

Amaro was unavailable for comment.

The search for Amaro's replacement is expected to be thorough. MacPhail said it would be "ambitious" to think he could hire a permanent GM before the team holds its annual organizational meetings at the end of October.

But that doesn't necessarily mean he won't be able to fill the position in the next three to four weeks, either. MacPhail almost surely will take a smart, methodical approach.

Some possible candidates: Matt Klentak (Angels, was with MacPhail with Orioles); Jim Hendry (Yankees, worked with MacPhail with Cubs); Jerry Dipoto (formerly of the Angels); Thad Levine (Rangers); Chaim Bloom (Rays); John Barr (Giants); and J.J. Picollo (Royals). The latter three are all Philadelphia-area natives.

When MacPhail was asked what he would consider the top criteria for that candidate, Middleton interrupted.

"I've told Andy what he needs to do: He needs to hire himself," Middleton said, calling on the younger version of MacPhail who was aggressive and competitive as a 30-something, first-time general manager in Minnesota, when the Twins won two World Series titles.

"He has to find a partner who can drive that culture, who can drive that change and work with him to do that," Middleton continued.

MacPhail didn't identify any specific criteria, but it would be somewhat surprising if the Phillies did not hire an executive with an analytical leaning. Middleton mentioned more than once about the organization's slow move into the sabermetrics scene when MacPhail was hired in June, and MacPhail himself comes from a more traditional baseball background; his father and grandfather also were executives eventually enshrined into the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

Although he will be the president of baseball operations, and thus, have final say on all baseball matters, MacPhail made it clear that the incoming GM will be far more than his errand boy.

"I've been in this role before," MacPhail said. "I've had GMs under me before. If you talk to them, I think they feel like they had a fair amount of autonomy. Which I think is important to them to be able to do their job. They can't be in short pants running back to the president every time they have to make a decision. I have to create a culture where they have fairly [strong] autonomy. Now they should keep me apprised, but that is a balance I'm going to have to strike."

Although no official announcement was made yesterday, there isn't expected to be a sweeping change through the rest of the baseball operations department that worked under Amaro. According to MacPhail, it was the first thing Amaro brought up when he was told he wouldn't be back in 2016.

MacPhail said the rest of the staff "should feel their immediate future going into the '16 season is secure."

"I met privately with them before this press conference," MacPhail said. "And I had the good fortune, because Ruben was very inclusive, of being in that room the entire month leading up to the trade deadline. They are a very collaborative group. I thought they handled themselves well collecting the information they needed to collect. I went to some effort to assure them that, in the event there is a new hire, and when that happens, we're not going to allow a bunch of changes just so they can bring in people that they're familiar with. That's not going to happen. These people have earned the right to stay here, they've distinguished themselves in my mind."

Amaro, meanwhile, is free to find another home in baseball. Amaro, 50, leaves his hometown as the latest fall guy of a once-proud franchise, exiting through the same doors former manager Charlie Manuel walked through two years ago. He learned under Ed Wade and Gillick and rose to become one of the more popular figures in the Philadelphia sports landscape when he added the likes of Pedro Martinez, Cliff Lee and Roy Halladay in his first 14 months on the job.

But he also raided the farm system in his attempt to extend the window for the Utley-Rollins-Hamels-Ryan Howard core. Amaro (and the ownership group, too) didn't spend money wisely or prepare for any season that wasn't the current one, or start a rebuild until two years too late. Amaro's tenure began with promise and success, but, in the last three seasons, he became a target for disgruntled Phillies fans who regularly called for his ouster or called him "Ruin Tomorrow Jr." - or both.

That said, Amaro's current, interim successor said he was "stunned" to hear of his former boss' dismissal.

"I was surprised the change was made," Proefrock said. "I know we got a late start on the rebuilding process, but I think we were headed in the right direction. I think we are headed in the right direction. I think we've made some positive moves and helped put talent back in the system, and a lot of good things are happening in the minor leagues."

But baseball is a business and the business at the big-league level has not been a thriving one in 2015. Entering play yesterday, one National League team had a lower average attendance than the Phillies: the Miami Marlins.

There are customers to please and television executives to appease.

"You look at any business, the decisions made are made not exclusively by one person in isolation, but from everybody else in the organization," Middleton said. "So there are lots of people who are involved in those decisions, but that doesn't mean in well-run and successful companies there isn't accountability. So even though people are making decisions in groups, there is still a person who is primarily responsible for that decision and has to be held accountable. So I think we recognize that we had a problem, and we're trying as fast as we can to get out of that problem and get back to winning. That's what this is about. This decision was only about how we get back to winning sooner rather than later."

Blog: ph.ly/HighCheese