"This was an opportunity we couldn't pass up," Klentak said Monday in a conference call with reporters. "We feel like we've made our club better, both in the short and long term. We hate to lose a player like Ken Giles. I've said all along that we're trying to add good players, but in this case it's an opportunity for us to add five starting-pitching candidates to our system. And it improves the state of our organization moving forward. That's a very exciting thing for us."
In the end, it simply made sense for the rebuilding Phillies to trade Giles' 65 innings a season for the opportunity to develop two or three pitchers who could pitch 180-200 innings a season.