I'm going to assume that all of you noticed that that the Phillies won the NL East and thought pretty much the same thing I did - "damn, Pat Gillick is a good GM."  Branch Rickey is the deserved gold-standard for front-office men and he only put two teams into the postseason (although the Pirates won the 1960 World Series with a lot of players he signed).  Gillick has doubled that.  That is just amazing.

Gillick is also the only big-time front-office man the Orioles have even thought about since they fired Hank Peters, which does a nice job of explaining why they've mostly sucked for the past 24 years.