Show Your Love
Former Phillies slugger Howard asks fans to support current team during ceremony
PHILADELPHIA >> They can be uplifting, these ceremonious excursions into the past, when a sports team honors their elder own.
They can be disturbing, too, when said team is going bad, and the honoree essentially symbolizes only better times among the fans’ selective memories.
It was in that positive vibe vein that Ryan Howard was brought back to Citizens Bank Park Sunday afternoon, looking even more fit and trim than he had before his Phillies (and major league) career ended at the conclusion of the 2016 season, that winning smile firmly in place as he eruditely expressed his appreciation to old teammates and coaches, friends and family, the organization and its fans.
Then he had a message for the home crowd about this current group of underachievers.
“And to the current team,” Howard intoned over the CBP sound system before a series-closing, 4-3 walk-off win over the Nationals, “you all support these guys the same way you supported us. It’s not going to be good all the time, but damn it, when it’s good, you know what it feels like.”
As the cheers began to recede, Howard said this Phillies club that since June 9 had gone 10-18 until this day, puts “it on the line, win, lose or draw.
“Damn it, they’re trying,” Howard bellowed. “If they give you hustle and play the game the way it’s supposed to be played, don’t boo these men.”
Howard, 39, knows of which he speaks. He had and left a lifetime of memories during 11 full seasons and parts of two others in a Phillies uniform, a full career played out in two phases: Before the torn Achilles’ tendon that ended their 2011 playoffs, and afterward.
Howard had 33 home runs and 116 RBIs during a 102-win season in 2011, but his hitting (and that of too many teammates) went south in a five-game loss to the Cardinals which ended on an ugly Howard at-bat that dropped him to the ground and essentially shredded his career.
It was his sixth straight season of 30-plus homers and 100plus RBIs. He never achieved such heights again.
“Let me tell you this, if it was going to blow, it was going to blow,” Howard said of his left Achilles, which went as he tried exiting the batter’s box on a twoout, ninth-inning grounder that would complete the Cardinals’ 1-0 series-clinching upset. “My Achilles was probably going to blow regardless. If you want to look into a crystal ball and try to do the bestcase scenario, yeah, if my ankle doesn’t go out, hopefully we get the opportunity, where instead of David Freese hitting the double (to win a World Series), maybe it’s me hitting the double and we go on and win. But we can’t go back. You can’t change the past.
“I think we all felt we should have won more than just one (title),” Howard added. “But there’s nothing guaranteed in this game. You take what you can get. There’s a lot of guys that have played numerous years and haven’t won a championship . ... Look at Jamie (Moyer), he was in his 22nd year in the league (in 2008) and it was the first time being in a World Series. You take those kinds of situations and you don’t really take them for granted.
“If you’re lucky enough to get one, you’ve got to cherish it.”
Howard cherished his time in the spotlight, and now raising two young daughters with wife Krystle, along with son Darian, who will start junior college in the fall and play baseball there, he’s gained perspective on family time lost during his career.
Yet when the Phillies cut ties with him in 2016, after Howard batted .196 but still hit 25 home runs, he tried to rebuild his career in the minor leagues the next season in the Atlanta and Colorado organizations. It didn’t take long to find out it was time to truly call it a day.
Asked if he was surprised that he never got a chance to play in the majors again after leaving Philadelphia, Howard said, “Yeah, it did. But the game’s definitely changed because everybody is like, 20. It got a little younger. That’s just how it is.”
That’s what led to this Ryan Howard Retirement Day in South Philly.
Now a professionally paid spectator for ESPN, Howard will acknowledge that the game he loved has changed, even if his feeling for it has not. Not completely, anyway.
“It’s different, you learn to adapt,” Howard said. “When I came in, I was more in line with old school guys that came before me. But you learn, you understand analytics is part of the game. It’s part of everything. Doesn’t matter what it is, from the field to the basketball courts. Whatever, I get it.
“But me, personally, I don’t think it should rule everything. I think you should still have the oldschool eye test. There’s got to be a happy marriage between how you use the analytics and what you see taking place.”
It hasn’t been long since he left, but a Ryan Howard happy and comfortable with his station in life now calls the game of baseball, “a completely different animal.
“It is what it is,” he says. “Can’t go back, can’t go change it.”
He can only leave it a little better than it was before him.