A year into his job, Philadelphia Phillies team president Dave Dombrowski is now signaling that he is no longer the newbie boss he was last year, when he was hired a mere 69 days before spring training opened. It’s not as though Dombrowski was an inexperienced executive, but a major league baseball team is, after all, a multi-million-dollar business, and even a respected new boss doesn’t usually show up at the front door and immediately start throwing dishes out of the cupboard and books out of the library.
Dombrowski now has a better feel for what he has in the Phillies, and unfortunately, this seems to be bad news for two recent Phillies high draft choices. At a break in the GM meetings in Carlsbad, California recently, the Phillies’ operational chief made it plain that this off-season he will no longer be only re-arranging deck chairs on a leaky ship.
Apparently, this means that Mickey Moniak and Adam Haseley have been moved from the developing player pool into the Triple-A throw-in pile for trades. The first and eighth overall picks in the 2016 and ’17 drafts, respectively, neither player has developed as expected.
Philadelphia Phillies ready to move on from former top draft picks
In Dombrowski’s view, real starters for the positions these two outfielders usually play – left and center field – are considered by the team now to be “complete necessities.”
This sort of remark led Inquirer.com writer Scott Lauber to conclude the team president ranks filling those two slots appropriately even higher priorities than fixing the left-side defense in the infield.
Dombrowski did allow that neither Moniak nor Haseley has been definitively ruled out as a possible starter in the outfield, but his encouragement wasn’t even lukewarm: “I’m not, per se, counting on either one of them to be on our club next year to start off. If they do, great. Who knows?”
This was an evaluation perhaps a bit overdue for Moniak and not that wildly off the mark for Haseley at this point.
Moniak is now six years into his professional career after being drafted out of high school. For a great part of that time, however, he appeared to be an overmatched kid among men. In the minors, his best numbers have been middling at best, particularly for a first overall pick – 15 home runs at Triple-A, 67 RBI at Double-A, and a .284 batting average all the way back in his age-18 season at Single-A.
In the past year or so, the still young player has added some muscle, and now looks more like an MLB outfielder. But he has only booked 55 big league at-bats and gathered six hits, including one home run.
Haseley’s case is more baffling. After gathering praise from no less that Phillies legend Mike Schmidt for his batting approach and bat path, he has mysteriously disappeared into Leave-of-Absence Land, and that has never been explained.
Technically, the outfielder did return from his leave of absence last spring after 30 days, but he never returned to the ’21 MLB Phillies after his appearance on Apr. 13. Once a citizen of LOA Land, always a citizen…?
Dombrowski undoubtedly knows why Haseley was absent from his club after somewhat promising 2019 and ’20 showings with the Phillies (.269, five homers, 39 RBI in 301 AB), but whatever the reason, the team president clearly isn’t confident the player will bounce back from it or develop sufficiently despite it.
On top of that is the fact that Haseley was drafted out of college and is not as young as Moniak, not that this seems to matter much at this point.
Both players are just the latest examples of Phillies high-level draft picks who didn’t work out.