Scott Kingery hit a home run on Friday, his second of the Grapefruit League. It tied him with Cristian Pache and David Dahl for the Phillies’ team lead, because it is spring training.
But who knows? Kingery may keep putting the bat on the ball for the next few weeks. He’s done it before.
It may be springtime, but Kingery is in the winter of his Phillies contract. He seems distant from both major-league playing time and the juicier narratives of the pre-season. He is simply Scott Kingery now, PhilliesDFA’d training camp-attendee, playing out the stretch of his current deal.
It wasn’t always this way. He used to be Scott Kingery, electrifying phenom. Scott Kingery, future Ben Zobrist. Scott Kingery, positional question mark. Scott Kingery, damaged labrum sufferer. Scott Kingery, former phenom.
Like the birds and the bees and the ball games, Kingery keeps coming back every spring. But every time he does, he’s a little different.
2017
The Phillies’ 22-year-old “presumptive second baseman of the future,” had just won Pac-12 Player of the Year, using his natural skill and a lie about how much experience he had in center field to play multiple positions. That October, he played alongside–and better than–Tim Tebow in the Arizona Fall League.
Now, it was time to get serious. Kingery had crushed it in Clearwater and struggled in Reading during the 2016 minor league season, but he showed up to big-league training camp with a head full of bees. The Phillies gave him and Rhys Hoskins 21 at-bats each to do something interesting. They both logged six hits and a 1.000+ OPS.
In his first appearance, Kingery made a diving backhand stop and hit a home run. Emerging as the main character of the spring, he spent two weeks doing stuff like that as manager Pete Mackanin gushed over his second-base stud and first baseman Tommy Joseph worked with Kingery on a cool new handshake. Then Kingery and Hoskins both woke up at minor league camp. Had it all been a dream? No. Their futures as Phillies stars were locked in.
But the warnings were out there. Mackanin told the press not to start asking Kingery about the majors. The press told the fans to manage their expectations. The fans said no, and also, pointed out that the press had already called him “the presumptive second baseman of the future.”
But the lesson was there: Don’t fall in love. People are only going to get hurt.
Nobody listened.
2018
Every top prospect’s journey to the majors has that magical moment when the team shows him how much they care by manipulating his service time. For Kingery, that time was 2018, when he was in Clearwater chatting with veteran players about their path to the majors.
They’d give him a pat on the shoulder and a nostalgic smirk as they thought back to years before, when a team had kept them down in the minors juuuust long enough to delay their eligibility for free agency. Kingery had come into Phillies camp as one of the team’s most promising players, but there was nothing he could do in spring training that would keep him from getting on the bus to Lehigh Valley.
Nothing except for what he did.
Kingery adjusted his swing after some early pre-season whiffs. He went onto crush five homers and hit .411. GM Matt Klentak said he’d “forced our hand” with his incredible play and, at one of their daily gabfests over some locally sourced pour-over coffee, Gabe Kapler had agreed. The result was a six-year contract extension for Kingery, one month before his first major-league at-bat.
Managing expectations was for suckers now. The people of Philadelphia were bracing for a second wave of flu infections and dodging an epidemic of delivery trucks parked in bike lanes. They had a lot of frustrations to channel into sports, and now there was a cherub-faced 23-year-old second baseman onto whom they were eager to pile the crushing weight of their wildest fantasies.
“Phillies fans are going to love this guy,” Klentak told reporters on one of the rare occasions he wasn’t rolling his eyes at them. “I think they already do and he hasn’t even played a day in the big leagues.”
2019
It only took 13 years and $330 million for Kingery to drop out of the headlines. When Bryce Harper got to Clearwater, nothing else mattered.
Of course, this was not true. Many other things mattered. Aaron Nola had to make all of his starts. The playing time had to make a little more sense. Gabe Kapler had to learn from his awkward freshman year. Someone from the cluster of other young pitchers had to find the strike zone, or at least throw at it a little harder.
But as far as giving people attention, all that mattered was Bryce Harper. “Lucky for us, he’s with us,” Kingery said of his new superstar teammate, who once went 0-for-3 with three strikeouts in a spring training game in which Kingery had two hits.
There, way down at the bottom of the list or priorities, was something else that mattered: Kingery. His success would fill in the sliver of space outside of Harper’s shadow, but still be very, very necessary. The Phillies were definitely on their way to the postseason, and definitely not still three years away from it. They just needed Kingery to become the “25-year-old Gold Glove second-baseman-in-training-turned-utility-player” (as one paper called him) with an ill-defined role and inconsistent playing time he was destined to be.
They’d stuck him at seven positions and every spot in the batting order last year. They even let him pitch once in an embarrassing blow-out. The human body isn’t made to play a different position on the diamond every day, but Kingery showed up to camp in 20019 with a bunch of muscle to keep from being ground into the dust–and to do what the new analytic-minded Phillies wanted him to do: hit homers.
The good will of year one would be replaced by the less patient will of year two. Kingery had been used at shortstop and then third base as the Phillies moved him further and further away from his natural position at second.
His positional diversity and undiscovered potential made him the type of guy every team wanted, in theory. Baseball was trending away from sluggers the size of Transformers and toward fast, versatile players who stole bases and played multiple positions while hitting .270. If that just sounds like “doing everything perfectly,” yes, that’s pretty much what it was. It was unrealistic, as we learned from Scott Kingery, especially if you’re also trying to fundamentally change his hitting approach.
He and Bryce Harper both had two home runs that spring. Only one of them is currently trying to get an extension with the Phillies.
2020
Rumor had it that Kingery was getting the unthinkable in 2020: a long-term position. No more packing his bags and walking across the infield. He would have second base, all to himself. His salvation had arrived. Kingery probably looked out there and saw a beam of heavenly light between first and second.
The Phillies were willing to try it, finally, even if it meant moving veteran Jean Segura over to third. Kingery had had a quiet little league-average year in 2019, but this time, without all that confusion about which letters would be next to his name on the lineup card night to night, he was going to be the very good contributor he’d been said to be.
Then Kingery hit .194 in 2020 spring training.
That was… partially why, on opening day, he was on his couch, cheering on Rhys Hoskins for hitting a home run in MLB: The Show.
2021
The Phillies had entered the period in which they didn’t care about defense, but each defensive position Kingery had played for them in 2020 had a top-ten ranking on FanGraphs. This was a fun thing for fans to know as they watched Kingery strike out 19 times in 44 spring training at-bats.
It was all coming apart. Kingery hit .159 in 2021 spring training, an offensive disaster overseen by Klentak and Kapler as they’d tried to inject some sports science into his swing and make him a power hitter. Now the difference between them and Kingery was that Kingery still had his job.
Or at least, he had the opportunity to have a job. Center field was a problem the Phillies felt they could solve with somebody in training camp–Roman Quinn, Adam Haseley, maybe even Kingery. He’d played out there before. It was one of his seven positions.
He’d also had arm and shoulder problems as well as COVID, for which his recovery was long and laborious. It made for a brutal spring and all the Phillies felt they could do at this point was try to level all the lowness out of his swing and get him back to hitting line drives; the kind he used to hit more often to the gaps for extra bases.
The Tragedy of Scott Kingery was too juicy to ignore and the writers were unleashed late in spring training across the city. Kingery had struggled, Kingery had been experimented on, Kingery had changed too much about his approach, Kingery never did get that permanent defensive position. They dug up an old coach’s name just to see if Kingery wanted to give him a share of the blame. (He did not.) But regardless of where the fingers were pointing, one of them, at the end of March, was pointing Kingery back to the minors.
2022
The Phillies didn’t get Kingery into a spring training game in 2022. He’d been designated for assignment in 2021 and was recovering from shoulder surgery. His regimen was more about taking BP and gradually throwing at greater and greater distances. He was reassigned to minor league camp in late March.
“We’ve just got to get him right,” Joe Girardi told reporters.
Meanwhile, a young second baseman named Bryson Stott lined two singles up the middle and the Phillies beat the Yankees, 6-5. As far as we know, nobody pulled Stott aside and said, “Sure, liners are great. But have you ever tried… getting under the ball?”
The Phillies did give Kingery some playing time at second in the big leagues during the regular season. For one game. In the ninth inning. Of a 10-0 win. Two days later, they outrighted him to the minors.
2023
“The only thing Scott Kingery has going for him nowadays is that he’s endlessly DFA-able,” read the 2023 Baseball Prospectus Annual. “Thus, he could get a major-league call-up even if his Triple-A performance hardly warrants one.”
There were two bench spots available in Rob Thomson’s dugout, and Kingery was one of the five guys in camp playing like he wanted one. By late March, he was hitting .433 after 12 spring training games (he’d finished hitting .340). Bryce Harper was going to be moved to the Injured List, opening a spot for Kingery on the 40-man roster.
He was 28 now. Kingery admitted that the shift from playing second base for three years in the minors to playing wherever/whenever had been tough, but now he was more used to the utility role than ever. He had lowered the goal for success from “super utility wonderboy” to “healthy enough to be on the field,” and he had thus far more than achieved it.
But the almost-30-year-old wasn’t the story anymore. The Phillies were a playoff team again–the defending National League champs. Spring training wasn’t about figuring out what to do with Kingery, it was about phrases like “unfinished business” and “meat on the bone.”
A theory was floated that the Phillies may not have signed Josh Harrison if they had believed Kingery would do so well in Clearwater that spring. He’d surprised them–again. So there they were with a lively Kingery on their hands and no place to put him. The front office that had authored his six-year extension was long gone. Soon, it seemed, he would be, too.
2024
In November 2023, the Phillies declined their option on Kingery, giving him a $1 million buyout. But he wasn’t done. Kingery’s six-year extension may have been over, but he still had the original minor-league deal that he’d gotten from the Phillies upon being drafted.
Somebody dusted it off and sent Kingery an invite to spring training, and he packed his bags for another trip to Clearwater, in all likelihood his last.
Scott Kingery hit a home run on Friday, his second of the spring. In April, he’ll be 30 years old. The Phillies have a second baseman and a shortstop and a third baseman, but they are still working things out in center field. And you never know. With enough home runs, somebody could force their hand.
