PHILADELPHIA — One advantage the Phillies have with Dave Dombrowski calling the shots is that they won’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. It would be an easy offseason to do it, not least because a lot of fans are calling for it.

The Phillies have reached a point in their competitive cycle where people start talking themselves into change for the sake of change. That’s one of the more dangerous ideas within the realm of organizational decision-making. The cliché says that the grass is always greener on the other side. My personal philosophy is similar: Things can always get worse, and they often do.

The fact is, the Phillies won 96 games in the regular season. They won the division going away. Their four-game NLDS loss to the Dodgers was decided by the sort of things that exist within the margin of error. There is only so much certainty that you can build into a roster. There is a reason you play the games. The Phillies would be wise to keep that in mind when the MLB offseason begins in earnest four days from now.

I have no doubt that they will. For a couple of reasons. First, Dombrowski did it last season. He took a lot of heat for it, and plenty of it was deserved. If Dombrowski watched the World Series, he had to feel a pang of regret every time he watched Seranthony Domínguez and Jeff Hoffman warming up in a big spot (and maybe a little schadenfreude in Game 7, when Hoffman blew the save).

The Phillies’ decision to sign Jordan Romano to a one-year, $8.5 million deal was curious from the outset. It was a lot of money to pay a guy on a prove-it deal, much closer than Hoffman’s average annual value on his three-year, $33 million contract with the Blue Jays than to a veteran minimum plus incentives type deal. In the end, they would have been wiser to hang onto Domínguez rather than trading him at the 2024 deadline. Dominguez bounced back. Romano did not.

Like any personnel exec, Dombrowski would bristle at what-ifs like the ones you can draw from last year’s offseason. The Dodgers spent a lot more money on their bullpen last winter, and they ended up with about as much to show for it as the Phillies did. Tanner Scott was one of the more expensive busts in recent free agent history. Along with Blake Treinen and Kirby Yates, the Dodgers spent a whopping $42 million in AAV on a trio of relievers who combined to pitch 5 1/3 postseason innings with a 6.75 ERA (all of it via Treinen). Long story short, the Dodgers didn’t beat the Phillies and win it all because Andrew Friedman outdueled Dombrowski on the bullpen market.

Likewise, at the bottom of the outfield market. As underwhelming as Max Kepler was, the Phillies got more bang for their 10 million bucks than the Dodgers got out of the $17 million they paid Michael Conforto, who finished the regular season with a .637 OPS and was left off the postseason roster. Would they have been better off signing Jurickson Profar to three years and $42 million or Teoscar Hernández to three years and $66 million? Sure. But there were just as many busts mixed in with the top of the outfield market, including the Blue Jays’ signing of Anthony Santander to a five-year, $92.5 million deal.

Context is important whenever we talk about the offseason. The important work is done over a much longer time interval. The Dodgers’ and Blue Jays’ World Series rosters were mostly a product of the building they had done over multiple years.

The players who pushed Toronto over the top were both homegrown: 25-year-old utility man Addison Barger finished the postseason with a 1.025 OPS and three home runs; 22-year-old starter Trey Yesavage, the Pottstown native who held the Dodgers to four runs in 12 1/3 innings in the World Series.

The Dodgers? Well, they will always be first and foremost a function of their payroll. Of their 73 innings pitched in the World Series, 46 1/3 came from four players who combined to make more than $103 million in 2025. But three of them were signed before last offseason.

The Phillies aren’t operating at the same financial level as the Dodgers. If they were, they might have signed Alex Bregman to play third base and Hernández to play right field last offseason. And maybe things would have been different. But there are a lot of teams beneath the Phillies who can look at their resources and think the same things.

“I don’t think we’re going to have a $400 million payroll,” Dombrowski said. “I just don’t think that that’s a practicality, but we will be open-minded to get better and make a move.”

John Middleton has seen the downside of change for the sake of change. The last thing he wants is another decade of irrelevance. The Phillies’ only option right now is to move forward the same way they did last offseason: with the understanding that they cannot remake the identity of this team on the fly, and that they do not need to. It took the Blue Jays five years of their current competitive cycle to make it to the 11th inning of Game 7 of the World Series, with zero playoff wins preceding it. It would be silly for the Phillies to think that now is the time to reinvent the wheel.

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