By Sam Bush
Dave Dombrowski better have a big plate as the Phillies new boss.
Because there’s a lot to put on it:
Improving the bullpen, finding something meaningful for failed GM Matt Klentak to do, buying a new house in the area.
But his highest-profile issue is signing catcher JT Realmuto.
“I think you always worry about how players are going to handle things when things maybe don’t go exactly the way they want or they think they should go, or the way it is,” manager Joe Girardi said when asked about Harper’s potential reaction if Realmuto leaves.
“But obviously, I’ll sit down and have discussions about him with him, and I’m sure Dave will probably have discussions with Bryce about, ‘Look, we want to win just as bad as you do. Trust us. And we’re going to do everything we can to bring a championship to Philadelphia.’ Sometimes, things don’t go exactly the way you want, but you’ve got to trust us. You’ve got to trust Dave and what Dave’s going to do.”
But again, even if the Phillies re-sign Realmuto, they still have immense work to do.
“We’ve talked about the areas we feel we need to address,” Girardi said about his conversations with Dombrowski. “Obviously, we lost our shortstop [Didi Gregorius] and we lost our catcher. We still have Jean [Segura] that can play shortstop. We’ve had struggles in our bullpen, and he’s well aware of that. A lot of that will come down to what our payroll is going to be. You just don’t have endless amounts of money to spend is a lot of that. I know he has talked about a lot of different ideas and I’m sure he has a ton of ideas. He has been doing this a long, long time. He wants to win, but he also wants to build a consistent winner and not just a one-year fix. So I’m not really sure how that is going to manifest itself.”
