Paul Owens Awards indict Philadelphia Phillies judgement

Youth Is Not Served

Obviously, this isn’t terribly fair to the recent awardees since they’re still working through the minor leagues, but – well, too bad – youth is not served in this article. Aaron Nola got to the major leagues pretty quickly, so quickly he didn’t even win a Paul Owens Award, but that miss is a related story for another day.

Many of the players who won the awards here in the beginning of the decade reached two out of three of the liberal parameters for hitters, usually for MLB games played and OPS, and at least one of these players, Freddy Galvis, has been snubbed for the Gold Glove award unfairly.

Galvis leads all these players with nearly a thousand MLB games played, and he’s likely to get another thousand. Since the time I saw him in Williamsport, PA as a teen, he has become a player with a seven-figure salary.

However, the only batter who meets what might be called the parameters of mediocrity, Maikel Franco, just barely meets them, scraping in with a lifetime batting average of .250 before play Sept. 14, when the Phillies will next play. Along with that average, Franco has played in 644 MLB games and posted a .735 OPS.

These figures and the player’s resistance to coaching have all but guaranteed that his tenure with the Phillies will end when this season does.

The players most likely to eventually reach all three batting parameters here are Hoskins and Kingery, who are seven and six points short of the batting average goal, respectively. Both are good young hitters; both have some power (in Hoskins’ case, considerable power). Hoskins also walks quite a bit, and so his not hitting .250 yet is not such a big deal.

But that two of the Phillies foundational building blocks are not hitting .250 in over 600 games between them is actually not a very good thing.