With the Phillies in the midst of their fifth straight losing season, it is easy to look at other high-revenue teams like the Yankees and Red Sox and Cubs and wonder why they've been able to transition between eras without enduring such an extended stretch of failure. But doing so ignores the depths to which the Phillies' talent base plunged before the front office or ownership understood the problem that was confronting them. By the time the Phillies first began to acknowledge the need for a shift in its operational philosophy, it was more of an admission of the obvious than a bold shift in policy. They were about to enter a long rebuilding phase, whether or not they referred to it as such.