1B Coach?

The strange turn of events that has led  Ruben Amaro to become the Red Sox first base coach(?!), just adds to the bizarreness of Amaro's legacy (to say nothing of his judgment) as Phillies GM.

Perhaps the best that can be said about Amaro is that he was never as bad as many made him out to be. And while he did preside over a 102 game winning team and a World Series appearance, this best sums up his record:

Most of the credit for the good times went to his predecessor, Pat Gillick, and most of the blame landed on Amaro. 

To his credit, he did get Cliff Lee in the middle of the 2009 season that helped push the Phils to a second consecutive World Series. And Amaro did acquire Roy Halladay and did assemble the Aces wild starting rotation. But the one trade that still haunts is the bizarre (panic?) move to trade Cliff Lee at the end of the 2009 season immediately after landing Halladay, in an ill-fated attempt to "restock" the farm system. That replenishment - in the form of Phillipe Aumont, JC Ramirez, and Tyson Gillies - was an utter failure. And the whole point of getting Halladay was to bolster the existing rotation. Practically speaking, it became a trade of Halladay for Lee.

To be fair, he was put in the unfortunate situation of having to extend and keep many winning and popular players just as they started to decline in much the same way that Lee Thomas and then Ed Wade kept too many players from the wildly popular 1993 pennant winning team too long. Indeed, at this point we should be so lucky if Amaro is a repeat of Ed Wade who wound up drafting the core of the 2008 Championship team: Burrell, Utley, Howard, and Hamels.

Maybe Amaro would still be GM if he had pulled the trigger on the rebuilding trades he made in 2015 a year earlier. In any case, the bounty of prospects Amaro did stockpile on his way out the door may be his greatest legacy of all.