After months of going non-committal on the future of first baseman Ryan Howard, manager Pete Mackanin gave a clue about the near future for the Philadelphia Phillies declining first baseman in one of those winter caravans the team makes to drum up support.
Mackanin, who won his way from an interim to a full-time job on the team, is going to demand no less from Howard, and that’s really the way it should be. Mackanin said that his inclination is to platoon Howard with Darin Ruf, and it is about time. Howard has been an albatross in the middle of the Phillies’ lineup since he limped to first base for the final out of the 2011 season. That’s when Howard injured his Achilles tendon and he has not been the same player since.
For the last three years, the Phillies have been kidding themselves about Howard. Baseball has a way of determining whether jokes are funny, and the method is hard numbers. In the years since his injury, he’s hit, in order, .219, .266, .223 and .229. The .266 figure is somewhat of an anomaly because he played in only 80 games that season (2013). In his next season, he played 153 games and hit .223 with a league-high 190 strikeouts. Last year, in 129 games, he hit .229 and struck out 128 times.
In all of those seasons, Howard was paid $25 million a year and that’s just not a good return on the investment. Just because former GM Ruben Amaro Jr. made the mistake of doling out those millions to Howard does not mean they should play the man.
Now that Mackanin has figured that out, the Phillies can formulate a reasonable exit strategy for what has been an impossible situation.
