Lay down the chalk lines, pat down the mound; chase the seagulls out of the outfield and scare the possums out of the tarp—pre-season baseball is here. The Florida sun rose on baseball facilities with actual players in them this week, indicating the first phase of the Phillies season is underway.
Baseball eases you in, like a new job, or a drug dealer. All you want at first is the sound of gloves popping. You get that in mid-February. But then that’s not enough. You need baseball being played, so they give us shots of scrimmages on the back fields and eventually–gasp!–live broadcasts of exhibition games. It’s a couple of weeks before you start seeing lineups with multiple starters in them getting more than one at-bat, and by then you’re so impatient for real games that you might stop watching them take practice swings and spend Easter with your family. Booooo!
But for now, we’ll all watch footage of Zack Wheeler warming up and act like it’s enough. Speaking of Wheeler, the chances of him signing an extension with the Phillies seem to be in a friendly place. He talked to reporters a lot about “happiness” and how much of it he feels with the Phillies organization. It’s a tough place to get to as an adult in the middle of a career, and it’s clear that it’s something, yes, even ballplayers value.
Wheeler talked about how his view of the Phillies had changed—positively, mind you—since he had first been signed by Matt Klentak’s front office in the winter of 2019 (That is true for more than just Zack Wheeler, one would suspect). Among the compliments he handed out, Wheeler credited owner John Middleton with giving the players whatever they needed.
You look across baseball and see plenty of franchises that are just dysfunctional messes, the kind the Phillies were just five or six years ago, and you have to think: Isn’t it nice to have a team owner who’s worst sin is his haircut (at least for now)? Angels owner Arte Moreno just went on the record the other day, admitting—perhaps without realizing that he was admitting—that he hadn’t traded impending free agent and the planet’s best ball player Shohei Ohtani last year because he’d been afraid of lagging ticket sales in the season’s second half. The Angels continued not being good and lost Ohtani in free agency. But at least they had those ticket sales.
The Phillies don’t look back on those bad old years with total regret, however. They can’t, because in the past few days, they’ve brought back two pitchers from that very era.
First, there was David Buchanan, who got a minor-league deal on Valentine’s Day. After his first Phillies days had ended in 2015, Buchanan pitched in Japan and Korea, becoming a KBO All-Star in 2022 and 2023. Last year, he made 30 starts for the Samsung Lions and logged a 2.54 ERA over 188 IP—the third lowest ERA in the league. Even before he had arrived in Korea, Buchanan had started getting love from Lions fans. So it’s probably a rude awakening of sorts for the now 34-year-old Buchanan to arrive back in Clearwater, where Howard Eskin is already heckling Trea Turner.
The other arm the Phillies signed from their last forgettable era of baseball was Ricardo Pinto, a 30-year-old righty from Venezuela who finished his career in Philadelphia with a 7.89 ERA. His final appearance with the team saw him get the loss in a game against the Dodgers in which Pinto came in and gave up a game-losing home run to late-stage Andre Ethier in one of the last games of Ethier’s career. That game had been started by Mark Leiter, Jr. and finished by Edubray Ramos. Those used to be the names in the box scores around here. Two weeks ago, Pinto got the win in games one and five of the Venezuelan Professional Baseball League championship, as his La Guaira Sharks won their first title since 1986.
Buchanan and Pinto will be filling out a pitching staff spread from the majors to the minors that to most onlookers still feels a bit thin. No major pitching moves are planned—or at least, reportedly planned—to soothe the masses who are still displeased as the Phillies watched every top free agent board a plane to another city. An outfield bat seems likely, since the news was hurled at us like a tomato last week that center fielder Brandon Marsh had undergone arthroscopic knee surgery but would be ready by opening day. In the meantime, Marsh’s buddy and platoon partner Johan Rojas will have one of the more scrutinized springs as he looks to show off a new offensive approach and at least pass for a nine-hole hitter in the big leagues.
Depth is the word you’ll hear a lot in the coming days, both in the outfield and the pitching staff, as the Phillies look to add more players through the pre-season. Scott Lauber informs us that the 65-man group you see in Clearwater is small on purpose, so that the number can gradually increase to 75 as the Grapefruit League goes on (This is in contrast to, say, 1995, when the Phillies opened camp with 92 players). The Phillies are looking to see what they see from who they’ve got around, and they’ll have a bunch of guys to choose from. Just none of the ones you wanted.
But a few you know have arrived. Trea Turner showed up, as did Edmundo Sosa, Jake Cave, and even Scott Kingery, in the final year of the six-year extension he got before playing an inning of big league ball. Every camp opens with questions, some having lingered all winter long, some having suddenly been revealed in a press conference: Who’s healthy? Who’s recovering on time? Who’s winning what job? How’s the new guy adjusting? Why isn’t everything fixed yet? Who let Howard Eskin bring in a bullhorn?
This is the first year since the Phillies started making the playoffs again that they didn’t show up with an exciting new signing to show off, and that’s made people uneasy. The truth is, they only have small-to-medium-at-most moves left to make, and they are fortunate for that to be the case. All most teams are thinking right now is, “At least we’re not the Orioles,” who seem to have experienced a full spring training’s worth of injuries to their pitching staff within the first two days of players showing up.
But success, too, is like a drug. It’s nice to be able to open camp by complimenting the owner and knowing that the organization is in a good spot, but it’s also clear that everyone wants more. For the players and the fans, just making the playoffs, just getting to the World Series, just singing along to “Dancing On My Own,” isn’t all it takes to get a thrill anymore.
In a recent interview, Rob Thomson said that he has five major pillars for his players: “Respect the game, prepare, compete, be selfless, and have fun.” After two straight NLCS appearances, it’s clear that philosophy has worked for this group and taken them far—just not far enough.
For two seasons, the Phillies have been a fun team to watch right up until the end, and with the good will of just making the postseason all dried up, the pressure is on to get more than a moral victory out of 2024. As depth issues linger, extension talks go on, and knees go on the mend, the biggest question on anyone’s mind as training camp opens is one this team won’t answer until October.
