Last winter, Matt Klentak sat back in his chair upon accepting the Phillies’ general manger’s position and surveyed the landscape of the roster. He looked at his rotation on paper with a critical eye and concluded that the youth and inexperience it contained might be not enough to be competitive over a season’s worth of starts. Scouring the free agent market in search of reinforcements, he found nothing to his liking and turned his attention to the trade market. In came Jeremy Hellickson and the rest is (non-competitive) history.
Judging from the latest batch of news filtering out from the Philly beats, the plan heading into 2017 is more of the same: don’t splurge on a big name, front-of-the-rotation starter on the free agent market.