What are these days for on the Phillies calendar? Countdowns until pitchers and catchers report, the first spring training game, or opening day are all showing pretty high numbers. The Phillies are content to sit and wait before making their moves to replace Craig Kimbrel and add an outfield bat of some kind. Everyone is killing time between updates by watching the Eagles’ death spiral into the playoffs.
But what are we supposed to be doing right now?
Well, fortunately, there are a litany of historic moments that remind us there are worse things than nothing for the Phillies to be doing this time of year.
This could be the day we commemorate scout Hugh Alexander quitting the Phillies in disgust. For 16 years, the 69-year-old scout had negotiated every Phillies trade. By 1987, they were no longer the National League’s sad little trash heap. With Alexander around, they had skyrocketed their number of World Series titles from zero to one in their 104-year existence. Take that, haters!
Alexander had pushed the Phillies to trade for Steve Carlton. Drafted Lonnie Smith, Dick Ruthven, and Alan Bannister. Made deals to acquire Garry Maddox, Bake McBride, and Tug McGraw. I mean, they weren’t the Golden Era Yankees or anything, so you may not recognize every one of those names, but they all had varying levels of importance. And Alexander’s work earned him the nickname “Uncle Hughie.”
Regardless of his success and respect across the industry, owner Bill Giles just wasn’t listening to Alexander anymore, and the scout was starting to get a different vibe: After a career of rooms growing silent when he spoke, Alexander was starting to feel ignored.
He was starting to feel alone, too. Both of his proteges–Moose Johnson, his chosen successor, and Doug Gassaway, his “surrogate son,” as one columnist put it–had left to find new scouting and development opportunities with other teams. Giles was asserting himself more and more into the deal-making part of the job and without his trusted acolytes, Alexander was finding himself without much of a job left to do.
“I don’t have to take this,” he told former Phillies GM and minor league scout Paul Owens.
The Phillies sent him a three-year offer. He sent back a letter of resignation. Giles waved the whole thing away.
“Hughie was an important part of the Phillies for the last 16 years,” Giles said. “We hope to go on for the next 16 years with other people doing his job. We’ll survive this one, as we have survived others.”
The Phillies, who in 1987 had missed the postseason for the last three years, would only reach them again once in the next twenty. But, in accordance with Giles’ prophecy, the Phillies did remain alive the entire time.
As far as player acquisitions go, there are some with which you’d rather not see your team getting cozy. Did any player in particular come to mind when I said that? That’s right, I’m sure we all immediately thought of soft-throwing hurler Dutch Ruether in the winter of 1922.
History had a way of finding Dutch Reuther, and Reuther had a way of watching it go by. He played in the 1919 World Series, but not on the more famous side that cheated; he played for the 1927 Yankees, but didn’t see a peep of playing time in the World Series. He was there for the 1925 and 1926 World Series’ as well, playing collectively in a single game, in which he gave up a two-run home run to the other team’s pitcher.
Ruether was traded from Cincinnati to the Yankees in 1921, and found that the pay he’d agreed to in Ohio would simply not do in Brooklyn, where he said it cost $2 more a day just to get by. Ruehter was willing to work it out with the Yankees, however, as long as they sent him a round-trip ticket to New Orleans, where he could meet team officials at their training facility and hash it out.
Being the stubborn soul he was, Ruether often found his name in trade rumors as teams that thought they could use him or at least fix him were always willing to consider adding the lefty to their roster–and teams for which he currently played were always open to letting him go. In the winter of 1922, the Phillies–in need of more than a cantankerous southpaw to solve their troubles, but as usual, were just doing whatever–were apparently in the mix.
In an attempt to build his personal brand, Ruether said that he had his head on straight now, having just gotten married. He was ready to finally be a responsible team player instead of taking on all kinds of strange behavior like “being single” and “wanting enough money to live.”
Even so, the Phillies should stay away, advised columnist Gordon Mackay in the Inquirer.
“William F. Baker and the Phillies have enough to answer for,” Mackay wote, “without having story-tellers who recite more or less funny and truthful tales put Dutch Ruether on the ball club. We’ve suffered enough, as the fans know, but we haven’t suffered Ruether yet.”
Honestly, the 1922 Phillies probably could have used a guy who made 35 starts and kept his ERA under 4.00 that year. But Ruether stayed in Brooklyn, where he hopefully was making enough money to keep a roof over he and his wife’s heads.
There are more damning things in baseball than a reputation, however, and one of those things is “expectations.” By January of 2013, Andy Reid had been lured outside by the Eagles after a 4-12 season and heard the door lock behind him, making Charlie Manuel the longest tenured coach or manager in the city.
But things weren’t going great for Manuel, either, whose days as the skipper of the league’s hottest, funnest team were over. The Phillies missed the playoffs in 2012 for the first time since 2006, resetting a standard in a city that was now demanding excellence. Manuel was far from the only source of blame for their downfall, but when ball clubs want to create the image of big change without actually making it, the manager is the first one out the door.
This put some weight on the 2013 season. Sure, the Phillies had achieved their highest single-season win total in franchise history in 2011. But in 2012, they sunk down to .500, and some negative thinking was being thought within the organization.
“But,” Bob Brookover wrote in the Inquirer, “it’s possible that a significant run at another World Series title could change that thinking.”
To address the issue of their aging core, the Phillies would acquire 36-year-old Michael Young to play third base, 27-year-old Delmon Young who was famous for throwing his bat at an umpire, and trade Vance Worley to Minnesota for young outfielder Ben Revere, who made up for his lack of fly ball-tracking skills with a willingness to hurl his body in any direction.
But before all that, it was Manuel whose job was officially in question according to media narratives. He did have that 2008 World Series to hold up, and he was beloved by just about everyone in town. So when word is that a guy with that many friends and accomplishments is on the hot seat, you can be pretty sure things are going downhill.
“The perfect ending would be for Manuel to win another World Series title and then retire into a Pat Gillick-type role with the Phillies,” Brookover concluded.
We’ll just skip over the rest of this story–the entire 2013 Phillies season, the fact that they did not, and were never close, to winning another title that year, and that Manuel was ultimately fired, culminating in one of the most heartbreaking Philadelphia sports images of all time.
Instead, we’ll jump to the present, where Manuel is still very much a part of the Phillies family, and is in the middle of crushing his recovery from a stroke, in hopes that he will be able to make it down to Clearwater when all of his “winter” business is over.
The post-holiday, pre-baseball winter is always a harsh one, especially when there is nothing going on. But, as we wait for the next news alert to buzz in our pockets, we can consider that there are some things that are worse than nothing, and the Phillies’ history is full of them.
