Iron Horse Galvis a galvanizing presence in the clubhouse
PHILADELPHIA » The clubhouse leader posture Freddy Galvis has adopted this season? It isn’t anything the Phillies shortstop seems to have done intentionally.
“I just look at myself like another regular player on this team,” Galvis said Wednesday. “But also, I look at myself like a guy who is going to play hard every single night, and I’m going to give everything to win a game. Maybe if you have one guy like that, (others) are going to follow that guy.”
The pied piper of a secondhalf turnaround then? Galvis could only hope so.
“But it’s not on my mind, like I want to be a leader,” he said. “I just want to play hard every day and I want to win and that’s it.”
He has been prone to long stretches of sub-par plate production, and has still shone as one of the best glove men on the circuit at short. Heading into this third series game against the Pirates, Galvis’ fielding percentage was .983, ninth among major league shortstops. But there’s a caveat — nobody in the top 10 of that list of shortstop fielding leaders has played as many games as Galvis.
One of the busiest positions on the field, it’s not uncommon to give a starting shortstop a much needed blow every now and then. Not Galvis, who against the Bucs Wednesday made his 83rd start in the Phils’ 83rd game of the season.
That’s noteworthy, especially considering what happened earlier in the week, as Galvis’ wife Ana gave birth to their second daughter, Nicole, at nearly 6 a.m. after an allnight labor.
That didn’t deter Dad from being in the lineup that night as usual, this after he’d played every day on a West Coast road trip, with his wife home and overdue.
“He said his family was home (with her),” manager Pete Mackanin said. “But he wasn’t even going to come home for it, which tells you his commitment . ... If his family wasn’t here I’m sure he wouldn’t have done that. But he just loves to play.”
Mackanin, of course, already knew about Galvis’ inner drive. He said a month or so ago he figured it was time to give Galvis a bit of a rest. So he said something about that to him.
“He said, ‘No, I don’t want any days off,’” Mackanin said of Galvis. “He said, ‘I’m going to play 162. That’s my goal.’
“I said, ‘Really?’ He said yeah and I said, ‘Good, as long as you hit.’”
Galvis, of course, laughed off the story as nothing but ordinary.
“I want to be on the field every single day, every single game,” he said. “So 162? Yeah, 162 I want to play.”
At .254 entering Wednesday’s game and having been moved recently to the No. 2 spot in the order, Galvis was hitting 11 points higher than how he ended last season. He also was ahead of his career on-base and slugging percentages, boasting a .723 OPS going into this game.
Of course, his career is still young.
It seems Galvis has been around quite a while, but he’s only 27. Yet he is the Phillies’ longest tenured player.
He became a full-time player in 2015, after an offseason trade of Jimmy Rollins. He had spent shares of the previous three seasons bouncing back and forth between the minors and the Phillies, but he learned much as a middle infield standin to Rollins and Chase Utley, and drew close to a clubhouse leader named Carlos Ruiz.
“I always loved to play baseball. I always played hard and tried to win the game every single night,” Galvis said. “At the time I came into the big leagues, I have these guys with the same mentality, and more of a mentality than me; way more, because they had a different approach to the game. So I learned and I tried to pick up a little bit from everybody and I just have it on my mind.
“When you put your mentality to win every single day, I think it’s going to be better for us. Like I said before, I always saw those guys, they wanted to win every single night. They went to the field, they worked hard, they went to the video room, they worked hard they did everything. I think that’s really important. I think for me, I try to show that to the other guys.”
In that respect, Galvis has become a galvanizing clubhouse presence, something in short supply on a team of players reputed to be here only until a vein of minor league talent makes its way here for good.
Almost from the time Galvis took over Rollins’ regular role at shortstop, he’s had to hear that he was here on a temporary basis, until top organizational prospect J.P. Crawford was ready to take over. Crawford only recently began to heat up at the plate at Triple-A Lehigh Valley, just as Galvis’ stature grows in Philadelphia.
Those two trends could cross paths at season’s end, considering the Phillies only tendered Galvis a one-year deal (at $4.35 million) to avoid arbitration in the offseason. Do you sign the team leader long-term when he’s at the position at which the long-time coveted prospect is developing? Remains to be seen. For Freddy Galvis, however, it’s a question not worth considering. “I’m here with the Phillies right now, so my mind’s like, ‘Try to help this team win,’ and just go from there,” Galvis said. “I just take it day-by-day and that’s it.
“It’s like, every single day I come here and we have a game I want to play. I want to try and help the team win a game. So that’s my mindset.”