David Murphy: With Jhoan Duran in the fold at a modest price, the Phillies might as well go for broke

PHILADELPHIA — The lights suddenly go dark as the bass line to “El Incomprendido” begins to pump, just as it did at Target Field when Jhoan Duran entered a game. Except, the setting is Citizens Bank Park, and the month is October. The lights go on and Duran is standing on the mound in red pinstripes, glaring in at home plate as he throws his warm-up pitches. Top of the ninth. Tight game. Three outs from Duran are all that separate the Phillies from one last chance at overcoming a 3-0 deficit in a game where their lineup has combined for four hits against five pitchers.

Red October, baby. Mama, get your russet potato and some metal conductors. We’re making electricity.

Relax, I’m joking. Kind of.

My first reaction to the Phillies’ acquisition of Duran in exchange for Mick Abel and young blue-chip catching prospect Eduardo Tait? Keep on firing. There should be more. There needs to be more. There .... will be more?

This is a trade deadline where major league front offices needed to pick one of two paths. Either pay the price and go for it, or read the menu right to left. The Phillies have chosen the path most traveled by Dave Dombrowski at this time of year. They traded an 18-year-old Top 100 prospect at a premium position and a fringe major league pitcher with some upside for one of the best closers in the game. They still have the wherewithal to address the two glaring needs that remain. So they might as well do it.

Duran is great. Or, at least, he’s been great. We’ll expand on that later. But as great as he is, or has been, or will be, he still plays a position that can win you, at most, 11 of the 99 postseason half-innings that stand between a team and a World Series title. That’s the paradox of the modern-day closer. Everybody needs one. But they need a whole lot more for it to matter.

Are you picking up what I’m putting down? If a team decides to trade for an elite closer, it should have already decided to address all of the other areas that could render said closer irrelevant. For the Phillies, that means an upgrade over Max Kepler in left field, and one more high-leverage arm for the bullpen. If Dombrowski can pull that off, and if he can do it without trading Andrew Painter or Aidan Miller, the Phillies will have done the most defensible thing and can watch it play out with a clear conscience.

On the other hand, if Duran is the extent of Dombrowski’s trade deadline maneuvering, he will leave open the possibility that the Phillies’ World Series hopes end up dashed by needs that should have been far easier to address.

That’s just reality. We need to see what happens on Thursday before the 6 p.m. ET deadline before rendering a final judgment on where the Phillies stand.

In isolation, the deal for Duran is an eminently fair one. That’s more than you can hope for at this time of year. The Phillies did not trade any of the six prospects whom they could have most regretted losing within the next two or three years. In return, they get an elite 27-year-old closer with two more seasons of club control beyond 2025. In three-plus years with the Twins, Duran has a 2.47 ERA, with impeccable rate stats of 11.2 strikeouts, 2.9 walks and 0.7 home runs per nine innings. He is unquestionably a massive upgrade.

There are plenty of reasons to think Duran will not someday end up on the Wall of Fame. Closers have a notoriously short and dramatic shelf life. Duran’s strikeout numbers have fallen precipitously this season. He has allowed 12 of his last 31 batters to reach base, with four earned runs in seven innings. During that stretch, he has 30 called/swinging strikes against 43 balls. You have to ask yourself why the Twins have chosen to trade him now, for a return that looks surprisingly reasonable compared to previous years’ markets.

The Phillies are certainly aware of the risks involved. But the package they dealt is equally risky. Tait was one of the most valuable trade chips in the Phillies organization, a catcher who garnered a national profile last year when he posted an .842 OPS with 11 home runs in 360 plate appearances of low-level ball at the age of 17. But he is just 18 years old, at a position that demands defensive excellence and has a long history of prospects who fail to materialize. He is four years from the majors in a best-case scenario. If society as we know it is still standing in four years, we can live with Tait becoming an All-Star.

As for Abel, the Phillies are fortunate that he had any value at all. They were wise to sell when they did. When the Phillies were rebuilding post 2011, they traded for a million different Mick Abels.

Look, the Phillies would be much better off if they weren’t in a position where they felt like they needed to trade for Duran. But they did need him, and they got him, and that’s a giant step in the right direction. Now, they might as well fill in the rest of the blanks, provided the cost is equally as palatable. Dombrowski isn’t getting any younger, and neither is his boss. Nor is the roster that he has assembled.