It was the last _ if not the lasting _ image from the Phillies' 2019 season.
The final out had just been made. Players were still streaming off the field. But owner John Middleton left his suite, stood on the steps near the entrance to the dugout _ in full view of cameras _ and waited to shake manager Gabe Kapler's hand.
Eleven days later, Middleton fired Kapler. Two weeks after that, he hired Joe Girardi. And nothing else the Phillies did in the offseason _ not throwing $118 million at free-agent pitcher Zack Wheeler nor signing shortstop Didi Gregorius _ carried more weight.
In replacing a manager who had a 161-163 record in two seasons at the helm with one who made the playoffs six times and won a World Series in 10 years with the New York Yankees, Middleton made his opinion clear: The manager matters. Maybe even as much as the makeup of the roster.
"People were telling me, 'You had injury problems and you can't blame Gabe for that,'" Middleton said in October. "But ultimately, I felt, if I was going to bring Gabe back, I had to be very, very confident we were going to have a different outcome in 2020. I couldn't get confident enough that if I brought him back we wouldn't run into other problems."
It was a fair take. The Phillies did underachieve in going 81-81, their eighth consecutive nonwinning season _ after Middleton green-lit half a billion dollars in player additions, no less.
But the managerial upheaval, at a time when the Phillies have a club-record payroll that is approaching the $208 million luxury-tax threshold, also raises reasonable questions. Over the course of a season _ 162 games in normal times or 60 in the middle of a pandemic _ how many wins and losses can be traced directly to the manager? In the absence of an equivalent to the WAR metric that is typically applied to players, and considering the myriad facets of the job, is a manager's impact even measurable?
"I think managers are undervalued in baseball, to be honest," said Phillies catcher J.T. Realmuto, who has played for five of them since 2014. "Just putting your players in the best position to succeed is not as easy as it seems."
Middleton seems to concur. He made a calculation that Girardi _ along with new pitching coach Bryan Price _ is good enough to bridge the roughly 10-win gulf between a .500 record and the postseason appearance that has eluded the franchise since 2011.
Is he correct?
As with most things, it depends on who you ask.
