He is currently advising the Phillies as he stepped down from day-to-day operations, but he’s anything but retired. If Chuckie and Howard stepped aside and gave Pat full control of the organization then I bet he’d come. My guess though is that he wouldn’t trust the two stooges to not meddle. It would need to be a contractual agreement that he has FULL control without any interference from them on any baseball related/payroll matters aside from setting a budget. As long as he worked within that framework then he’d have carte blanche.

Gillick may enjoy the opportunity to come back and do it all over again, but with additional control beyond what he had last time. There is no better man for the job, nor is there a better man to take over and handpick his own successor to keep going what he builds. He wasn’t given that opportunity last time and we ended up with Buzzy Bavasi’s incompetent jackhole of a son.

Remember back in our winning days, we had pitchers that trusted their offense, trusted their fielders, and would just make sure to keep the other team honest. Moyer allowed runs. But the team scored more than he allowed the majority of the time. He could relax and throw his game. Not go out there with the idea that he had to throw a no-hitter every game to even have a shot at winning.

The Z-Man hasn’t done much to build a decent offense unfortunately. As a matter of fact it’s downright embarrassing.

Other than that, WHY is the pitching all of a sudden completely tanking?

Hire Gillick. Do it now. Give him complete organizational control. It should have happened before they let him walk last time. But Howard had to do a typical Howard Power Play and lost the two best men to ever lead this team in Pat and Lou. Look where we’ve been since then. One middling season, and the rest were absolute crap. Time to move forward and stop scapegoating managers.