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| Bill Giles passed away on Friday. | CREDIT: Coirtesy of the Phillies |
PHILADELPHIA — The easiest way to measure Bill Giles’ impact on the Phillies is to count pennants, trace ownership charts or list the titles he held during more than five decades with the organization.
The better way is to walk into a Phillies game.
The voice that defined generations of summers? Giles brought Harry Kalas to Philadelphia. The green mascot that became one of the most recognizable figures in American sports? Giles helped make the Phillie Phanatic happen. The fireworks, alumni celebrations and belief that a night at the ballpark should be more than nine innings? Those carried his fingerprints, too. And the baseball-only stadium that replaced Veterans Stadium? Giles was an early advocate for it.
That is the larger legacy of Giles, the Phillies’ longtime executive, former president and chairman emeritus, who died Friday afternoon at his home in Gladwyne. He was 92, the club announced.
Giles did not merely help run the Phillies.
He helped define what being a Phillies fan felt like.
He arrived in Philadelphia in 1969 as vice president of business operations, just before the franchise left Connie Mack Stadium for Veterans Stadium. By 1972, he was executive vice president. The move to the Vet gave the Phillies a new building, but Giles understood that filling it required something beyond baseball.
So he sold an experience.
There were fireworks shows, old-timers games and promotions that could seem outrageous even by 1970s standards. Karl Wallenda walked a high wire above Veterans Stadium. Giles helped establish the Phillies Wall of Fame and alumni traditions. In 1978 came the Phanatic, created as the Phillies searched for a mascot that could connect with children and families.
And in 1971, Giles brought Kalas from Houston, where the two had worked together. The move was initially unpopular because Kalas replaced Bill Campbell.
It became one of the most consequential hires in franchise history.
Those decisions mattered because they survived the people who made them.
Players leave. Executives retire. Stadiums disappear.
Kalas became one of the defining voices in Philadelphia sports until his death in 2009. The Phanatic remains inseparable from the Phillies. Alumni Weekend and the Wall of Fame became institutional traditions rather than temporary promotions.
Giles helped turn those ideas into permanent pieces of the franchise.
His influence eventually extended far beyond marketing.
When the Carpenter family decided to sell the Phillies in 1981, one year after the franchise won its first World Series, Giles assembled the group that purchased the club. He served as president until 1997, overseeing teams that won National League pennants in 1983 and 1993.
David Montgomery succeeded him as president, while Giles became chairman and, in 2015, chairman emeritus.
There were lean seasons during those years, too. Giles’ tenure was hardly a straight line of championships.
But his significance to the franchise is larger than a win-loss record.
Consider Citizens Bank Park.
After visiting Camden Yards in 1992, Giles returned convinced Phillies fans deserved an intimate, grass, baseball-only ballpark. Montgomery later led the long process that produced Citizens Bank Park, which opened in 2004, but the idea had an important early advocate in Giles.
“The Phillies family lost an icon today,” managing partner John Middleton said Friday, adding that Giles helped reshape the organization into a more visible entertainment and business operation.
Baseball was also a family inheritance for Giles.
His father, Warren Giles, was president of the National League from 1951 through 1969 and was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Bill Giles was named honorary president of the National League in 2001 and remained an influential figure in the sport beyond Philadelphia.
But Philadelphia is where his legacy is easiest to see.
It is in the idea that Phillies history should be displayed rather than stored away.
It is in a mascot that became bigger than the promotional concept that created it.
It is in the memory of Kalas calling games through the Vet and into Citizens Bank Park.
It is in a ballpark designed specifically for baseball after three decades in a multipurpose stadium.
The Phillies will remember Giles for the executive positions he held, the ownership group he assembled and the pennants won during his stewardship.
Fans may remember him without realizing it.
Because so much of what became familiar about going to a Phillies game — the voice, the mascot, the spectacle, the celebration of history and eventually the ballpark itself — came from an executive who understood something fundamental long before sports franchises talked constantly about “fan experience.”
A baseball team sells games.
A baseball institution creates memories that survive them.
Bill Giles helped build the latter.
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