Turning back time in picking the Phillies All-Decade Team
By Rick Soisson
The Outfield
The next several paragraphs will be an adventure in silliness and memory loss.
Left Field: There is perhaps no greater indicator of the circus that was the Philadelphia Phillies in the second decade of this century than Baseball-Reference’s list of their starting left fielders between ’10 and ’19 – seven different people, including a fan favorite who hit 20 home runs and drove in 84 but was 39 years old, a very expensive guy who only played 59 games before tearing his ACL, and an All-Star who became one of the most maligned Philadelphia players in recent memory. In any sport.
These were, respectively, Raul Ibanez in ’11, Andrew McCutchen in ’19, and the infamous Domonic Brown in ’13. No one is listed as the starter for more than two years in a row, which means that no one, really, was the team’s left fielder of the decade.
Also, anyone who would have listed Juan Pierre and Aaron Altherr as starting Phillies left fielders this decade, yell out, “Yo!”
Shocker: I hear crickets.
So, we’ll name No One, Raul Ibanez, and Juan Pierre the Phillies co-left fielders of the decade because we’re definitely not picking Brown and can’t pick a guy who played fewer than 60 games. Also, in his singular season in Philadelphia, Pierre hit .307 and led the league with 17 sacrifice bunts. And you likely can’t give the year that happened even with those clues.
Center Field: The middle outfield position, at first glance, looks like a model of stability compared to the Phillies left field situation since 2010, but scratch it, and it doesn’t look so good, really. Of the four nominal starters, Shane Victorino, Ben Revere, Odubel Herrera, and Scott Kingery, little can be said besides this: Aside from flashes of brilliance from Herrera, this position was also a mess for most of the decade.
In the most recent season, for example, Kingery wasn’t actually the starter. The starts were divided up among him, Herrera, and Adam Haseley. Victorino was in decline for his three seasons (2010-12), and Revere might have been kept and been something if there were more power hitters in the lineup for his two years (2013 and ’14). Odubel Herrera wins because no one else does, the fact he was selected as an All-Star in 2016, and the rough four and a quarter years he started at the position. Too bad the Phillies are trying to figure out a way to dump him following his run-in with the law this spring and the suspension resulting from that.
Right Field: OK, send in the clowns again. In right field the Phillies employed no fewer than eight starters in the decade, running the alphabetic gamut from Bourjos (Peter) to Werth (Jason). It’s never a good sign when a team covers most of the alphabet with so many players in only 10 years, and especially so when one of them is the second most expensive player in the game and he doesn’t even get the nod as the decade’s star.
Bryce Harper has only occupied the position for a year, and he barely saved the team from a losing season. Therefore, the Phillies right fielder “of the decade” is Hunter Pence, who is currently two teams removed from Philadelphia.
Pence slashed .324/.394/.560 in half a Phillies season in ’11 and mysteriously came in 32nd in the MVP voting the following year for hitting 17 home runs and driving in 59 in another half-season before being shipped to San Francisco. That’s as good as it got in right field before Harper.