Philadelphia Phillies: The Rise and Fall of Ryan Howard

If you are a fan of baseball, you can’t help but be drawn to the story of Ryan Howard. Once, he was was bound for Cooperstown with five successive MVP-like seasons. Now, it appears that he has played his final season in a Philadelphia Phillies uniform, limping to a less than impressive finish to a career that has been noteworthy at the very least as a story of a life in baseball.

Ryan Howard received one piece of advice at the beginning of his career that he carries with him even to this day. It came from Jim Thome, Howard’s former teammate and recent inductee to the Philadelphia Phillies Wall of Fame. His advice was simply, “Don’t get too up. Don’t get too down.”

In a game surrounded by failure where the ones who wind up in Cooperstown walk back to the dugout seven out every ten at bats, you have to learn to live with failure if you are going to survive the game mentally. Enjoy the highs while they last and survive the lows. It doesn’t get much simpler than that.

Glory Years for the Phillies and Howard

Ryan Howard’s highs were thunderously high. And I can recall a time in 2006 that I traveled to Citizens Bank Park to watch the Phillies and Howard play. On that day, everything was Ryan Howard. They had the Rookie of the Year award he had won the previous season on display. They had a silent auction going on for a local charity with an assortment of “game used” Ryan Howard items. And you couldn’t get anywhere near the entrance to the Phillies store, so they were selling his shirts on the concourse. It was wild and it was exciting.

Howard and the city of Philadelphia would ride that wave for five glorious seasons. And in between, there would be a world championship in 2008 and a near miss in 2009. And there would be developing lifelong friendships with teammates like Jimmy Rollins, who left to join the Dodgers and White Sox for the past two seasons and is now a free agent. And with Chase Utley, who was also picked up by the Dodgers. Ryan Howard was the last man standing from those teams.

The Tumble Down and Then Back Up

Then of course there’s the elephant in the room, the contract that Howard signed as an extension that would be valued at $125 million. A contract that Ryan Howard would never come close to fulfilling in terms of his production.

It was a contract that Michael Bamberger would write more about for Sports Illustrated, saying:

“It’s kind of ridiculous. He was an elite slugger with no signs of slowing down, a durable body. The fact is it … just didn’t work out. Life intervened in unpredictable ways. Baseball teams are hard business to run.”

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Yes, life did intervene as Bamberger goes on to add, “Surgery (left Achilles tendon, left meniscus); an intra-family lawsuit over money-management fees; the development of the Ryan Shift” all contributed to the next five years of misery for both the Phillies and Howard.

The numbers are painful. There’s the .229 batting average that was the highest Howard has attained over the last three seasons. And the 25 home runs that are also the highest total of the past three years. And there’s the minuscule .257 on-base percentage of last season. And you can go deeper than that if you really want to soil your hands.

But through it all, Ryan Howard has remained upbeat. A cynic would say that he should be upbeat making $125 million. And for some players in the same situation, it would be true that they just go through the motions collecting the money. But that’s not the case here. Instead, as Howard told Bamberger:

“… in 2008 when the park was stuffed with World Series celebrants, on the field and in the stands, and Chase Utley took the microphone and said, ‘World f—— champions!’ ‘I was sitting behind him and I just popped,’ Howard said. That is, cracked up laughing. Good times—no, the moment of a baseball lifetime, really.”

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The moment of a lifetime. Still just a big kid. And still sticking to the same advice his teammate had given him what seems like a lifetime ago.

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