Do Phils have biggest offseason move so far?

As of today, the biggest and most prominent free agents are still on the market. Trevor Bauer, the 2020 National League Cy Young Award winner, is still available. So is DJ LeMahieu, the batting champ from the American League, so is George Springer, the 2017 World Series MVP Award winner, and so is J.T. Realmuto, the best catcher in the game.

This means that for now, the biggest and most prominent free-agent signing involves a 64-year old front-office man named Dave Dombrowski, whom the Phillies have hired to run their baseball operations. This is a very big deal for a guy who has made big deals for a long time, all the way back to when the Montreal Expos hired him at the age of 31 to be their general manager.

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Since then, Dombrowski has watched three of his teams -- the Marlins, Tigers and Red Sox -- make it to the World Series. Two of them, the 1997 Marlins and the 2018 Red Sox, went on to win it all. Brian Cashman’s Yankees have played and won in more Series, but Cashman has been in one place. So was Brian Sabean, who won three Series with the Giants. Dombrowski has been all over the place, and has won wherever he’s been, and he'll now try to do that with the Phillies. This goes back to the old line from Bill Russell about his dear Oakland friend Joe Morgan: “Isn’t it funny how good teams seem to follow him around?”

No one knew that Dombrowski -- who was let go by John Henry in Boston 10 months after the Red Sox beat the Dodgers in the 2018 World Series -- was really in play. Dombrowski was working with a group in Nashville, trying to get a Major League team for that city, and had said that he wasn’t going anywhere. Then the Phillies came calling and changed his mind, spending on Dombrowski the way he has often spent on baseball players, with a reported four-year, $20 million deal.

If Dombrowski does with the Phillies what he has done everywhere else -- since he was learning his job working for a great old baseball man named Roland Hemond with the White Sox -- then he will be worth the money. There is no baseball executive currently working who has done what Dombrowski has done with as many different teams. He knows plenty about free agents, because he has been one a few times in his career.

Again: A very big deal in Philadelphia, with a guy known for making very big deals.

I asked one of the younger general managers in the game if he expects Dombrowski to make an immediate splash (or two) in Philly. The preamble from this executive was that the reports about the Phillies shopping Zack Wheeler (and the four years remaining on his original $118 million contract) were true, even though owner John Middleton denied them, Middleton saying he wouldn’t trade Wheeler for Babe Ruth.

“But now they’re spending $20 million on a front-office executive,” he said. “So I assumed they will now spend. But these are all guesses.”

Dombrowski has spent money to win before. He traded away some of Boston’s future (most notably Yoán Moncada) to bring Chris Sale to Boston. The Red Sox wouldn’t have won in 2018 without Sale. Dombrowski turned around and signed Sale to a $145 million contract, and then the left-hander got hurt, requiring Tommy John surgery. Dombrowski did his win-now thing with the Marlins in 1997, with Jim Leyland as his manager. Dombrowski’s Tigers, also with Leyland managing, swept the AL Championship Series twice ('06 and '12), ended up with a long layoff between the ALCS and the World Series, and won a total of one game between those two Fall Classics.

Dombrowski had worked for Henry with the Marlins before Henry hired him in Boston. The 2018 Red Sox won 119 games, including the postseason. By the following September, Henry decided Dombrowski had spent too much and given away too much to get the Red Sox to another Duck Boat Parade and Dombrowski was gone.

Now he is back. I asked Dombrowski on Monday if, even given a late start, he expects to be active.

This was his response:

“Presently getting up to date with a great deal of information and talking to our personnel. Have some flexibility, but, don't consider us a player away. So [I] will have to digest and see what happens.”

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This time the Phillies didn’t go for a star player like Bryce Harper. They went for Dombrowski, who ends up in the NL East, a division in which everybody from the Braves to the Mets thinks it can make the 2021 postseason. The Nationals won the ’19 World Series, and the Braves came as close as they could last October before they were unable to finish off the Dodgers in the NLCS after taking a 3-1 lead. The Marlins made the '20 postseason. The Mets are going to get better, and fast, with Sandy Alderson running their baseball operations, and now with Jared Porter as his right-hand man. The Phillies? They haven’t had a winning record since they won 102 games in '11. In the shortened 2020 season, they were 28-32.

Now they put Dombrowski in charge. They make the first serious move of this offseason, one nobody saw coming. They hire a different kind of player in Philly.