Dave Cameron at FanGraphs has a good take on the Phillies dismissal of Ruben Amaro, Jr.

Amaro has been the Phillies GM since November of 2008. The Phillies won the division each of his first three years in charge, including making it to the World Series in 2009, but have struggled as their core aged and the team was unable to restock the talent pool around their former stars. Amaro was also one of the last holdouts against the move towards analytics, and the Phillies fell behind the rest of the league by resisting the trends toward data-inclusive decision making.

One problem was that Amaro inherited his job from Pat Gillick, who often derided Moneyball GMs, despite his running clubs much like Moneyball GMs. Pat had an intrinsic ability to recognize talent without someone showing him a spreadsheet. Amaro didn’t. He should have realized that and embraced stats.