By Sarah Berkowitz
The Phillies have gotten out of the gate this season at 1814, and the rest of the league has surely noticed that they are ahead of schedule in theIr rebuild.
Former Rockies general manager Dan O’Dowd, now an analyst for MLB Network, had experience with this kind of situation, and last week on Comcast SportsNet’s Philly Sports Talk, he preached patience.
“I’m not sure right now it would be good for them to contend,” O’Dowd said. “The hardest part of sports in general is the issue of delayed gratification — waiting until your foundation that you’re attempting to build is solid enough that when you get good, you have a chance to sustain it because of the players that are coming through your system. If you short-circuit that in the short term, you could really do long-term damage to how good you may be able to become if you just stayed patient.
“They are way ahead of schedule as far as their rebuilding process,” O’Dowd said. “I think you’ve got to keep things in perspective. They still have a (minus-27) run differential. But when you look at these three young starters at the top of their rotation right now with (Aaron) Nola, (Vince) Velasquez and (Jerad) Eickhoff, it puts them in a position moving forward where I do believe their rebuilding window is going to be a lot shorter than most people anticipated.”
