This Substack is about baseball, but I enjoy multiple team sports, so as a New Englander I’m celebrating Boston’s NBA Championship today. I know our cities are rivals, but surely you Philadelphia fans can allow me the… you already hate me, don’t you?
Come on, give me this one! You’ll always have the time you beat Tom Brady in the Super Bowl.1 Maybe we should declare a truce and move on to the rankings…2
HONORABLE MENTIONS:
Tommy Joseph 2016
Tim Corcoran 1984
Tom Hutton 1972
Pancho Herrera 1961
Carlos Santana 2018
Darin Ruf 2013
Joseph hit 43 homers in 810 big league at-bats, but he didn't do much else: .297 OBP, struck out a quarter of the time. The early 80’s Phillies saw several great partial seasons: Corcoran and Jeff Stone in '84, Joe Lefebvre in '83. Corcoran hit .341 in 208 at-bats. Conversely, the 70's team featured multiple long-term players who were pretty average: Hutton at first, Terry Harmon in the middle infield, Mike Anderson in the outfield. Nearly forgotten now, but in their time... sort of okay? Herrera would make the main list if we could use his 1960: .803 OPS, 17 homers, 71 RBI. The next year he dropped 100 at-bats and 44 points of OPS. Santana stopped by Philly for a single year, and not one of his best. But he hit 24 homers and drove in 86, and his .766 OPS was alright, I guess. Ruf, like Joseph, sported okay power but middling on-base skills: Hit 67 homers in about three full seasons, posted two decent half-years in Philly.
Lee never really lived up to his second pick in the draft, first Diamondbacks phenom hype, so he ended up the centerpiece of the Curt Schilling trade. The Phils also snagged Vicente Padilla and a decent year of Omar Daal, so the return could have been worse. But Lee kept doing in Philly what he'd done in Arizona: not quite enough. He managed a .775 OPS in 2001 and drove in 90 runs. The next year he was worse, and then he was gone. He was hitting .273-.355-.468 through the end of July 2001, but a .227 average with 5 homers the rest of the way sunk his season.
A star in the 50's, to the extent the Washington Senators had stars after Walter Johnson. His career feels like something out of a bygone era, a memory of a lost epoch and a franchise long gone, but he hung in long enough to see expansion teams. Acquired from the White Sox for Charley Smith and John Buzhardt, names which would mean something if you had fond memories of gathering with your TV dinners to watch I Love Lucy, Sievers hit 40 homers and drove in 162 runs in his last two seasons as a regular. The Phillies flipped him to the new Washington team in ‘64, winning him the dubious honor of having played for both versions of the Senators.
Brogna's '97 season looks respectable by the stars that steered us a generation ago: 36 doubles, 20 homers, 81 RBI. Such notables as Lee May and Steve Garvey once posted similar stats, albeit in down years. But Brogna's .293 OBP was poor, his .433 slugging unimpressive, and B-R's WAR doesn't like his defense. He improved over the next two years, driving in 206 runs and hiking his OBP to .319, then .336. That only made him kind of acceptable at first, not an asset. Brogna had been acquired from the Mets for Ricardo Jordan and Toby Borland, relief pitchers who achieved little, so the question is whether he won the trade by doing anything at all, or lost it by soaking up at-bats that could have gone to a better player.
Arrived on the scene with a solid half season in '88, hitting .308-.324-.491. The next year he drove in 75 runs in a full season of at-bats, but his OPS dropped to .722. After that, he became the platonic ideal of a part-time first baseman, batting between 159 and 324 times five years in a row and usually performing well. Hit .304 one year, slugged .473 another. Got some playing time for the '93 division winners, and a couple of hits in the World Series. Career line against lefties was .310-.345-.473, so he had value as a platoon player. His .264-.283-.393 against righties warns that he struggled with the full job. Returning to our theme of basketball, he might have been the second most famous athlete named Jordan during the NBA's Jordan Era.
A minor star of the 70's as a third baseman on the other side of Pennsylvania, Hebner crossed to Philly as an early free agent and played first base on two Phillies division champion teams. Strong percentage-wise, as he always had been : .865 OPS in '77, .833 in '78. Batted just 106 times against lefties in those years, as aging versions of Dave Johnson and Jose Cardenal took up at-bats on the other side. And oh, heck, I have to do this today: Hebner was born in the city of Boston, probably the second-best Bostonian position player of the Expansion Era after Jeff Bagwell—who is a less happy story in this region, but you can't have everything.
Came over from the division rival Cards in a swap including guys (White, Groat, Mahaffey) who were near the end of the line, backup catchers Pat Corrales and (I never get tired of referencing) Bob Uecker, and Alex Johnson, who had a turbulent big league career in front of him. White had been a model of consistency in St. Louis, but only had one more vintage season in him before fading pretty quickly in '67-68 and returning to the Cardinals in '69. Still, '66 saw him generate an .803 OPS, with 22 homers and 103 RBI. You could do a lot worse on offense in the mid-1960's, and many players did.
Primarily memorable for driving in 130 runs for Cincinnati in the 60's. Secondarily memorable as the designated hitter on the World Series winners in 1973, the first year of the American League DH. But if we had to pick a tertiary thing for which to remember Deron Johnson's big league career, sure, it can be his 34 homers and 95 RBI for Philly in '71. OPS of .839; he struck out a lot and was a .244 career hitter, but in his better years he walked enough to provide at least some on-base value. Red hot in the middle of summer: 13 homers in July 1971, over the course of June and July he hit .295 with 20 homers and 52 RBI. He'd hit .176 in May, and oh boy did he rally.
You don't know what you got 'till it misses a year to injury, then returns to have a middling 2024 with the Brewers, which I think we can agree was probably Joni Mitchell's original lyric, rejected because it's awfully hard to rhyme. From a distance, Hoskins never seemed like that big a star: never made an All-Star team, hit in the .240's. But he finished his Phillies tenure with 6 home runs in the 2022 playoffs, including four to dominate the NLCS, and in retrospect you can use a guy who hits 148 homers over six years (just over four full seasons of AB's). Also led the league in walks in 2019. But they've got Harper at first this year, so why weep over the metaphorical taxi?
Retrosheet lists him at 6'3, 190 pounds, but in my memory this future Hall of Famer was roughly the size of the Hulk3, smashing baseballs without remorse in Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Chicago. 89 homers over his first two years with the Phillies, 236 RBI, 208 runes, 215 walks, so the home crowds liked his bat when it was angry. Dealt to the White Sox for Aaron Rowand and a prospect who turned out to be Gio Gonzalez. (In fairness, he was probably always Gio Gonzalez, we just didn't know what that meant.) Thome hit double-digit homers in August and September of '03, plus 15 more in June of '04. Puny pitchers.
If you're reading baseball articles on Substack, you probably know all about Pete Rose, and I doubt I have much to contribute to your understanding. So I'd just like to zoom in on a season level and note that Rose, an extremely consistent (if slightly overrated) performer with Cincinnati, had reached the hit-and-miss portion of his career in Philadelphia: 1979 and 1981 were vintage Rose performances. (208 hits, .325 average, led the league in OBP in '79, .325 average, .391 OBP, led the league in hits in the strike year.) 1980, despite the World Series win, was just okay, featuring a .706 OPS. 1982 was a little worse, and by their return to the Series in '83 Rose was hitting .245. Never really had a bad playoff series for the Phillies: Five hits or more in five different series, .326 overall.
This might sound weird, but that time Kruk bailed out in the All-Star Game against Randy Johnson is unironically one of my favorite baseball memories. I had a moment like that in Little League: We had to play our league's scariest fastball pitcher in a playoff game and my brain just said NOPE. It was one of the few times I've found a big league ballplayer truly relatable. Unlike me, Kruk was a heck of a hitter in the games that counted, raising his OPS from .817 to .850 to .881 to 905 between '90 and '93. Eight hits and seven walks in the 1993 World Series. Born in West Virginia, which can put together an All Star post-'61 infield: Kruk at first, Mazeroski at second, Toby Harrah at short, Brett at third. They're weak in the outfield, so Kruk could also play left, with Gene Freese or John Wockenfuss taking his place.
Replaced Thome at first base, taking up the mantle of Great Big Guy Who Hits Bombs, much like General Ross became the Red Hulk after... this joke isn't that funny, is it? Howard hit a superheroic 198 homers over four years between 2006 and 2009, three more in the '08 World Series, and even made the cover of MLB '08: The Show. Walked over 100 times in '06-07, initially hit for a decent average: .313 in 2006, .279 in 2009. Those were budding Hall of Famer numbers. But the shift, or the era of low-average baseball generally, combined with a couple of injury years to drop his OBP to an unacceptable level: It never reached .320 from 2012 on. He faded away as a semi-useful power hitter, despite 382 career homers banked.
Kruk and Howard were both large humans, but otherwise about as different as two hitters could be. This is first base, so I'll take the power guy 18 times out of 18. And yes, that was absolutely another banner joke.
On Thursday: Expos and Nationals first basemen.
Which never would have happened if Malcolm Butler hadn’t been benched.
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Links are likewise to Retrosheet, and the research for writing these articles would be impossible without the Stathead service from https://www.baseball-reference.com/
Whose name was Banner, by the way. Like championship banners? Get it? Sorry.