Matt Klentak reflects on tenure as Phillies GM
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It’s been almost three years since the Phillies demoted former general manager Matt Klentak.
Klentak, who was hired by the Phillies in 2015, remained with the Phillies for a year as “strategy development officer” — a position outside of baseball operations — and was hired by the Milwaukee Brewers in January 2022 as special assistant to the general manager.
He oversaw Milwaukee’s international scouting department that season. Klentak has since shifted his attention to the major league side of baseball operations, assisting new GM Matt Arnold and the rest of the front office with roster construction and trade discussions amid David Stearns’ departure in October.
His tenure with the Phillies can be described as a mixed bag. He was hired to lead the Phillies through a deep rebuild and into the club’s next window of contention. The Phillies failed to make the postseason and did not have a winning season under Klentak, but many of the players he has signed and acquired — Bryce Harper, Zack Wheeler and Jean Segura to name a few — were significant contributors for a pennant-winning team.
Since leaving Philadelphia, Klentak has offered few — if any — public comments on his time with the Phillies.
Klentak recently participated in an hour-long candid chat with SABR’s Badger State Chapter. While giving a rundown on his two-decade long career in baseball, Klentak reflected on his tenure with the Phillies.
These comments begin at around the 21-minute mark of the video:
As I reflect back on it now, I’m really proud of a lot of what we accomplished there and I say that as a guy who lost his job at the end because we didn’t win enough games and I can still tell you I’m pretty proud of it. Not even so much because of some of the players that we acquired, although you mentioned a few that worked out pretty well, but more just the way we were able to — I guess manage the organization. The Phillies have a very proud culture there. A very family friendly, a lot of long-term employees, but they were also in desperate need of change and they had fallen well behind the rest of the industry in a lot of the ways they operated. And trying to thread that needle of pushing forward and making the necessary changes while not upsetting the well established and really positive culture that existed there, was hard to do. That, in some ways, is what I’m most proud of. I’m not saying we did it perfectly by any means. I’m sure we didn’t. I think we did a reasonably good job at that and what just happened is that we didn’t win enough games in time.
Matt Klentak to SABR on his time with the Phillies.
It’s interesting to hear Klentak speak about this aspect of the job. An ESPN study declared the Phillies as “stubborn nonbelievers in analytics” in early 2015. He was truly building certain areas from the ground up and although there were some positives, his hit rate on big-name free agents being one of them, the Phillies struggled to cultivate the depth needed to get over the hump. It ended up being his downfall.
In the end, some of the players Klentak either signed, drafted or acquired via trade became part of the next great Phillies team and for that, he deserves at least some credit.
It ended up, it appears anyway, that it worked. It was all worth it. They’re hanging a National League pennant flag up there right now in part, and I’m certainly not going to take all the credit for it, but at least in part because of some of the things we did while I was there. And it just didn’t happen fast enough. And I hate to use that as a cop out, but sometimes, that’s what happens. These are baseball players and as much as we make projections and we have plans and we think it’s going to go a certain way, sometimes it doesn’t work that way. If you’re off by plus or minus one or two, it changes everything. And I think that’s unfortunately kind of what happened for me. I don’t regret it. I really have no bad blood there. I’m really close with their owners to this day. It was as amicable a separation as you could probably have. It was a good experience overall for me.
Matt Klentak to SABR on his time with the Phillies.
Ironically enough, the Brewers’ failure to close out a wild card berth in 2022 probably had as much to do with the Phillies making a run to the World Series as the cumulative impact of Klentak’s tenure as general manager. One of the topics that came up in the discussion was the front office perspective of the Josh Hader trade.
Anyway, it was a great discussion. Klentak spoke candidly about many other topics, including Bryce Harper’s work ethic and impact, how he connected with Andy MacPhail while working in the league office and his perspective on club control for international signees and how the rules negatively impacted the development of former Phillie Jorge Alfaro.
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