From 2007 through 2011, the Philadelphia Phillies won five division titles. It was the first time in the Phillies’ 129-year history that they finished in first place in five consecutive seasons. In that franchise-historic span, the team played in two successive World Series, winning one. In those five seasons, the Phillies won 89, 92, 93, 97 and 102 games.

In the four seasons since, they have dropped to third place in the National League East, then fourth and fifth and last each of the last two years, compiling records of 81-81, 73-89 twice and finally a major league-worst 63-99 last season.

When Andy MacPhail became the team’s president last Fall, it was obvious that his first move would be to replace Ruben Amaro Jr. as general manager. Amaro had been general manager for seven years, meaning he had overseen the Phillies’ descent into oblivion.

Amaro lived and died for the same reason. He inherited a World Series champion and didn’t do anything to update it and replace its aging parts. In some instances the Phillies hamstrung themselves with outrageously expensive contracts.

Ryan Howard, Chase Utley and Jimmy Rollins provide glaring examples of what the Phillies did to undermine their future. These contracts tell the sad tale:

• Howard:   5 years, $125 million April 2010 for 2012-16
• Utley:        7 years, $85 million January 2007 for 2007-13, $30 million extension for ‘14-’15, options for $15 million a year ’16-’18, becoming guaranteed based on number of plate appearances
• Rollins:     3 years, $33 million for 2012-’14, $11 million option for ’15, becoming guaranteed based on plate appearances

The new general manager opted to avoid making judgments on his predecessor’s decisions.

“I wasn’t here,” Matt Klentak said in a telephone interview last week. “I took the job in October. What I have observed since I’ve been here is questions people have raised, such as why didn’t they trade Rollins sooner.”

The Phillies traded Rollins to the Dodgers in December 2014. He was 36 years old. They traded Utley to the Dodgers last August. He was a few months short of turning 37. If the Phillies tried to trade Howard any time during the life of his contract, they would have found no takers at $25 million a year for a slugger who had become a shadow of his former self.

Klentak, however, stuck to his optimistic view.

“When I was going through the interview process,” he said, “it was apparent to me that this was an organization with a bright future.”

It would be easy to dismiss Klentak’s version of the Phillies’ future by considering the source – a newly hired general manager. Klentak, however, was not involved in drafting these players.

Baseball Prospectus is one of the most widely respected trackers of teams’ minor league systems. This is what the publication said of the Phillies’ system before the season:

“Long a laughingstock for prioritizing athletes who couldn’t hit, the Phillies are now as loaded at the top of the system as any team in baseball. The rebuild started later than it should have, but it might not take long.”

The names may not be familiar to most fans, but various websites that focus on minor league prospects list these players as the Phillies’ top prospects:

Pitchers Jake Thompson, Mark Appel, Franklyn Kilome, Andy Knapp and Ben Lively, shortstop J. P. Crawford, catcher Jorge Alfaro and outfielders Nick Williams, Cornelius Randolph and Roman Quinn.

As with any list of prospects, the Phillies have no guarantees with their prospects. Some undoubtedly will turn into suspects; some are likely to join the young players on the Phillies’ roster now and if the collection of players is good enough the Phillies could someday be contenders again.

The Royals and the pitching-rich Mets have done it. So have the Astros and the Pirates. The Cubs plan to do it this season and have begun the season as if they are serious about it.

Klentak is only 36, but he’s old enough to know how the Phillies grew into prominence in the previous decade.

“What made Phillies great on that run,” he said, “was they had exceptional success in drafting and developing players.

“The core of this team was built the right way,” he added. “That’s what we’re focused on now, building through the draft and international signings.”

Howard and catcher Carlos Ruiz are the only remaining starting position players from the World Series teams. Cesar Hernandez has replaced Utley at second base, Freddy Galvis is the shortstop in place of Rollins and Maikel Franco is the highly regarded third baseman in place of Pedro Feliz.

The World Series outfield had Jayson Werth in right, Shane Victorino in center and Pat Burrell (2008) and Ben Francisco and Raul Ibanez (2009) in left. This month’s outfield has been Peter Bourjos in right, Odubel Herrera in center and primarily Tyler Goeddel in left.

The Phillies are a long way from their next World Series, but at least they have improved in the early weeks of the season. They won 11 of their first 21 games (through Wednesday) compared with 8 wins in their first 21 games a year ago.

“I felt the direction of the club was positive,” said Klentak, who before taking the Philadelphia job had worked in Baltimore and Anaheim as assistant general manager. “We like the quality young players we have at the major league level, hopefully we have impact players at Double A and Triple A and we have the first pick in the draft.”

And if the listener still wasn’t convinced of Klentak’s position, he added, “I wouldn’t have left Mike Trout in his prime if I didn’t think the Phillies were a promising team.”

A friend, a lawyer, says neither fans nor members of the news media have a right to know the identity of the owners of professional sports team. I say nonsense. A team may be a privately held company, but it relies on revenue generated by the exorbitant prices fans pay to watch their teams play. In addition, the news media give teams millions of dollars worth of free publicity, and they and the fans should know the beneficiaries of their contributions.

And don’t forget the millions of taxpayer dollars that fund the construction of most professional playgrounds.

The Philadelphia Phillies prompt me to raise the issue of ownership. I started out to write about the woeful Phillies and their remarkably rapid decline from the team that not long ago appeared in two consecutive World Series, winning one of them.

Ruben Amaro Jr., the Phillies’ general manager for seven years, paid the steepest price for the team’s descent, losing his job. In another front-office move made for different reasons, Andy MacPhail, was named team president, replacing Pat Gillick, who has retired for about the sixth time in his Hall-of-Fame career.

The new general manager, Matt Klentak epitomizes the modern general manager. An Ivy League product in his 30s – 36 to be exact – Klentak was a shortstop and captain of the Dartmouth baseball team and is steeped in analytics, the formula-generated mathematical approach to 2000’s baseball

Information about MacPhail and Klentak is readily available. Not so about the people they work for. The only mention of owners in the team’s media guide is in a small box at the bottom of a page about the club president:

“The Phillies is a limited partnership formed in 1981. None of the longtime partners owns as much as 50% of the partnership.”

The statement may be accurate, though the guide doesn’t offer evidence by listing partners and their percentages of ownership, but it’s grammatically incorrect. The phrase “the Phillies” is plural so it should say “The Phillies are a limited partnership.”

OK, but who are the limited partners? One partner, I learned, is William Buck, the lone remaining brother of a set of three Philadelphia brothers who were in the 1981 ownership group.

The Phillies, however, don’t acknowledge Buck, or any other owner, for that matter.

“We don’t disclose ownership,” said Bonnie Clark, vice president for communications. “We don’t say anything publicly about the structure of ownership.” Asked about percentages of ownership, Clark said, “We don’t discuss figures.”

A day after this conversation, Clark called me about my telephone call to Buck. I had learned his number, called and left a message asking him to call me.

“He said you reached out to him,” Clark said, “but he doesn’t want to contribute anything more than you already have.”

I didn’t have much.

Most team owners are proud to be known. Most buy teams for the exposure they create. Was it ever remotely possible that George Steinbrenner would have wanted to remain anonymous? By buying the Yankees in 1973, Steinbrenner went from being an unknown Cleveland shipbuilder to being the best known name in sports.

The Phillies’ owners, however, are as anonymous as most of their players, though they are not completely unknown in Philadelphia. For example, James Buck and Peter Buck, sons of the late Buck brothers, are known to be owners, having inherited their fathers’ shares.

The most prominent known partner is John Middleton, who emerged from obscurity 10 months ago when the Phillies announced the hiring of Andy MacPhail, the veteran baseball executive, as the team’s president. Middleton became a billionaire from the pharmaceutical industry.

“I think when you make a decision of this magnitude, the ownership group has to come forward and make sure people understand they are the ones that made the decision,” Middleton told a news conference. “This is not a decision we delegated, much less abdicated. We own this decision. That’s an important part of the accountability we think we have to the fan base to understand that we own this and we intend to win.”

The Philadelphia news media have said that Middleton owns 48 percent of the team, and some reports have said he is trying to acquire more so he can be the majority owner.  Clark confirmed that Middleton is an owner but said the reports of his desire to become the majority owner “are just rumors.”

Despite Clark’s confirmation of Middleton as an owner, his name does not appear as such in the media guide, which lists presidents and general managers in the team’s history but not owners.

Calling on my home baseball library, I checked the Phillies’ 1982 guide and found the Buck brothers of Tri-Player Associates – Alexander (known as Whip), James Mahlon Jr. and William – as one of six group or individual limited partners who bought the team from the long-time-owning Carpenter family.

One of the six was Bill Giles, a long-time Phillies’ executive, who put the group together and became the managing general partner. Giles, now the team’s chairman emeritus, is best remembered in baseball, unfavorably or favorably, depending on one’s point of view, for keeping notes and not destroying them that became the most damaging evidence in the union’s 1985 collusion case against the owners.

So much for the owners. Come back next time to see what has happened with the players.

DINO WROTE HIS OWN STORY BEFORE STORY

By now, Trevor Story has probably heard about Dino Restelli. If he hasn’t, he probably doesn’t want to.

You probably have heard about Story, the Colorado Rockies’ rookie shortstop, who hit six home runs in his first four games and seven in his first six. He also drove in 12 runs and batted .333 in his first six games.

In his next 12 games (through Sunday) the 23-year-old Texan

hit no home runs and batted .209 with 22 strikeouts.

That brings me to Restelli, whom most people have no reason to remember because he wasn’t around long, playing in parts of only two seasons in the majors. The seasons were 1949 and ’51.

Restelli, however, remains vividly in my mind because he came along as I was coming of baseball-fan age and played (right and center fields) in a lineup with Ralph Kiner, Wally Westlake, Danny Murtaugh, Stan Rojek, Johnny Hopp and Pete Castiglione.

A 24-year-old outfielder that first year, Restelli joined the Pittsburgh Pirates in June via a trade with the San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League and immediately set the baseball world ablaze. He slugged 7 home runs in his first 12 games, driving in 14 runs and hitting .333.

Restelli did not come by his home runs cheaply. He smacked his first two against Warren Spahn and another pair against Robin Roberts. Those two pitchers overcame Restelli’s assaults and later went into the Hall of Fame, and Pittsburgh fans were preparing a similar future for Restelli.

Other National League pitchers, however, quickly quenched Restelli’s fire. In 60 games the rest of the season, Restelli hit 5 homers, drove in 26 runs and batted .228.

Restelli spent the next season in the minors and played in 21 games for the Pirates in 1951, hitting one home run and batting .184. With three weeks left in the season, the Pirates sold Restelli to the Washington Senators, who didn’t use him but traded him the following December to Cleveland. The Indians didn’t use him either and traded him to Sacramento of the PCL July 15, 1952, his brief major league career finished.

SHUT UP, SCHILLING; DOES ANYONE CARE WHAT YOU THINK?

It’s called social media, but the way Curt Schilling uses it, call it anti-social media. In response to the nasty messages the former pitcher has sent on social media ESPN, his post-baseball employer, first demoted Schilling, then fired him.

Schilling epitomizes the problem with social media. Websites such as Facebook and Twitter have sadly opened the way for people to say anything they want, be as rude and inflammatory as they want. The verbal thugs of society feel free to be as nasty as they choose. Politeness? It no longer exists.

In the early days of this eight-year-old website, I was the target of the stuff I’m talking about. Some readers – and I’m using that term loosely – pulled out their vilest language to tell me what they thought of me. Fortunately, those curs stopped coming to the site and went elsewhere to satisfy their needs.

But the Schillings of the cyber world go on, spouting the dumbest things that enter their misguided heads. I have not voted for Schilling for the Hall of Fame and don’t intend to because I don’t believe he was a Hall of Fame pitcher.

But those writers who think he belongs may want to think again and consider what the verbal wild man may be capable of saying in an induction speech in Cooperstown. No one would be safe.

Opening Day is synonymous with hope. Before the season’s first pitches are fired toward home plate and the 162 games start slowly slipping away, hope is what sustains fans in need of their first baseball fix in nearly half a year.

Maybe the Cubs will break their ignominious championship drought. Maybe the Phillies, not the Mets, will trot out the best young rotation in baseball. Maybe the Braves won’t be as bad as their roster might have indicated in spring training. (Or, in that last case, maybe not.)

Hope springs eternal, as the saying goes, and that hope carries through March and into the first weeks of the season.

And then, sometimes, it crashes, headlong into the dirt alongside an accompanying plummet in the standings, amid a flurry of batting failures with runners in scoring position. Nothing—save an ACL tear or Tommy John scare for a top young player—can ruin spring hope quicker than a slump induced by a series of un-clutch at-bats.

Such is the case with this season’s New York Yankees, who boast an excellent bullpen and decent starting pitching depth but have been felled in the early going by RISP (runners in scoring position) woes. In the last week of play, spanning a rough stretch of eight games, New York hasn’t been able to turn runners into runs, and the issues have extended into the team’s won-lost record.

At 5-8 before Thursday night’s game, the Yankees sat in last place in the American League East, and they had scored three or fewer runs in each of their losses. Not since 2008 had the Yankees been in last place this far into the season, and they hadn’t won a series since their season-opening series against Houston.

And the RISP numbers were mostly to blame. It had been more than a week since the Yankees had multiple hits with runners in scoring position in the same game; on Tuesday alone, 11 teams accomplished the feat in the same inning.

Yankee batters had collected 83 plate appearances with RISP in their last eight games—and besides accruing 13 walks in those attempts, the results weren’t pretty. New York had just five hits—only one for extra bases—and seven runs batted in in those at-bats; instead of driving in runners, pinstriped batters had struck out 17 times, flied or popped out 16, lined out three times, and grounded out a whopping 27.

That comes to a measly .074 batting average, .217 on-base percentage, and .088 slugging average. Put in another context, Yankees batters with runners in scoring position over the last week had hit worse than pitchers had fared at the plate against Clayton Kershaw in the Cy Young winner’s career.

When I told a friend about the numbers I was investigating, he asked if Alex Rodriguez was the main culprit. And while the Yankees’ controversial designated hitter hadn’t done well in RISP situations (1-10 with one run batted in), he hadn’t wielded the only feeble bat in the lineup.

Starlin Castro was 0-7 with only an RBI groundout to his name. Carlos Beltran was 0-7 with just a sacrifice fly. Didi Gregorius was 0-5 and hadn’t scored a runner. Corner infielders Mark Teixeira and Chase Headley were a combined 0-10, though with nine combined walks with first base open. Brian McCann owned just an infield single in his six at-bats. Outfielders Jacoby Ellsbury and Brett Gardner were a combined 2-15 at the top of the lineup. The team’s four reserves were a combined 1-8 with just an infield single from backup catcher Austin Romine preventing a backup 0-fer.

It’s a problem up and down the lineup, from the batter’s box to the on-deck circle to the rest of the Yankee Stadium home bench.

Having detailed all of that futility, I think New York’s offense will—or at least, should—be fine; a week’s worth of untimely groundouts and harmless pop flies is by no means a death knell for the team’s remaining games. And buried beyond the basic run totals, New York shows a set of promising offensive statistics.

Through Tuesday’s games, the Yankees had the best walk rate and second best strikeout rate in the American League. They ranked third in on-base percentage, and they were even tied at the top of the league in stolen bases after finishing third from the bottom last season.

But for at least a week, those front-end performances hadn’t translated into necessary runs, and all those walks and stolen bases had amounted to nothing in the team’s record. Save a 16-run outburst against Houston in the second game of the season, the Yankees’ offense has lain dormant so far in 2016—take out that one game, and the team has the fewest runs of any team in the majors.

The Yankees have been somewhat unlucky in those higher-leverage situations, too. New York had only a .222 batting average on balls in play with runners in scoring position but a .262 mark with no men on base. League-wide, though, BABIP (batting average on balls in play) numbers in the two situations are indistinguishable, so it’s probable that the Yankees’ disparity will diminish as the season continues.

After all, it takes offensive skills to put men in scoring position in the first place, and the Yankees have managed that first step ably. It’s no small feat to amass 83 plate appearances with runners in scoring position in just eight games.

And it will only take a few Castro doubles or Beltran homers to come with men on base to turn those numbers around. Just last year, the Yankees—with almost the same starting nine that made the aforementioned litany of feeble bats—ranked as a top-three team in a variety of RISP categories. The current sickness isn’t an endemic plague so much as it is a quick, club-wide flu.

And sorry, Derek Jeter fans—there isn’t much evidence to suggest that clutch hitting actually exists, especially on a team-wide level. A few years ago, the Cardinals set records for their batting success with runners in scoring position; last year, with many of the same players, St. Louis was one of the worst-hitting teams in the league with runners on second and third.

Rather than exist as some sort of gene independent of regular hitting ability, “clutch” hitting comes most often from teams and players that hit best in all situations.

Last year, the Blue Jays were the league’s best-hitting team with runners in scoring position, and Toronto was also one of the best-hitting teams with no runners in scoring position. Conversely, the Cincinnati Reds were the worst-hitting squad with RISP, and it’s not like they were an offensive powerhouse the rest of the time.

So it’s not all bad news for the Yankees. The hits will begin to fall and allow runners to score from second and third, and the team might pad the scoreboard with crooked numbers instead of the binary 0s and 1s they’ve managed over the last week. And with the AL East expected to last the duration of the season in a muddle, one through five, odds are the Yankees won’t fall too far behind any one team at the top of the division before those results regress to expectations.

But for now, at least, the Yankees are third from the bottom in a parity-filled American League. The Bronx Bombers have bombed with runners on base, and it’s made the early-season schedule a hopeless slog.