A LITTLE PHILADELPHIA FREEDOM
Canadian moves on after bittersweet stint in Toronto
It is 10:30 on a warm, sunny Thursday morning and the Philadelphia Phillies are taking batting practice. Michael Saunders steps into the cage as John Fogerty’s Centerfield blares over the sound system at Spectrum Field. He cracks a shot off the wall in right-centre, then another one that drifts to the opposite field. It settles in the glove of a Phillies player, with one of baseball’s greatest inventions, the outfield tiki bar, providing the backdrop.
All in all, it’s a fairly perfect baseball scene. Saunders, the 30-year-old from Victoria with a Maple Leaf tattooed on his forearm, is here because the Phillies very much wanted him. He’s expected to be the everyday right-fielder and bat cleanup for a major league team. It is nice work and he’s got it. But, for what could have been. Saunders has been on one of the strangest trajectories in baseball for the past two-plus years. He arrived in Toronto before the 2015 season thrilled to be playing in Canada, excited to be on the team he supported as a kid, and then saw the whole thing go poof when he blew out his knee while shagging fly balls during spring training. Saunders opted for a risky surgery that February that was supposed to accelerate his return to the lineup and instead he missed most of the season, collecting six hits in nine games. So that could have gone better.
Then last season began and suddenly Saunders was the player the Blue Jays had hoped he would become. Lurking in the bottom of Toronto’s punishing lineup, Saunders hit .298 with 16 home runs in the first half, sporting a daunting .923 OPS, which was better than anyone else on the team other than Josh Donaldson, who was only the reigning AL MVP. Saunders deservedly made the all-star team.
And then it all went poof again. Saunders spent the second half hitting like a pitcher, with a .178 average and a .638 OPS. Although he bounced back with a strong post-season (. 381 average), it wasn’t enough for the Blue Jays to offer him a contract in 2017. Though he didn’t sign anywhere else immediately and was in midJanuary still hoping to return to Toronto, that possibility ended when the Jays worked Jose Bautista down to a number they could live with. The Saunders homecoming was over, with a half-season of glory sandwiched in between a whole bunch of disappointment.
“You need to take stuff from every year and try to get better,” Saunders said Thursday about the black hole his 2016 fell into.
He said he thinks the secondhalf struggles can be attributed to fatigue after coming into the season without having completed his usual training regimen while recovering from the fluke knee injury. So something that happened in one of those routine baseball moments, with outfielders lazily chasing down fly balls during batting practice like they do every day, effectively torpedoed both of his Toronto seasons.
Once the downward spiral began last year, he was trying to do too much to overcompensate, which rarely helps one break out of a slump. Baseball coaches will insist that it is, in fact, impossible to hit four home runs in one at bat.
Despite the post-season bounce, Toronto management was apparently not swayed enough by that eight-game sample to undo what it had seen over the whole second half, and so the Blue Jays let their everyday left-fielder walk and will replace him with a combination of whoever happens to be around: Melvin Upton Jr., Ezequiel Carrera, Steve Pearce, maybe some younger players who make themselves indispensable over the next few weeks.
And Saunders ends up on the Phillies, a 71-91 team last season that will pay him US$9 million in 2017, about triple what the Jays paid him last year.
“I’m happy for him,” Toronto manager John Gibbons said on Thursday. “He got a nice deal, he really did. Mike, he’s one of my all-time favourites. He played good for us. Hell, he made the allstar team last year.” And then, well, you know. “He took his lumps over here the first year when we brought him over with that freak knee injury, but last year he bounced back,” Gibbons said.
“He’s one of those guys you always root for. I hope he has a hell of a year.”
The Phillies could use that. Even with his long drought at the plate last summer and fall, Saunders still finished with offensive numbers that compare favourably to those of any of his new teammates, which helps explain why Philadelphia is a 150-1 bet to win the World Series this season.
Saunders, though, said he came to the Phillies to win games. “Everyone’s in first place on opening day,” he said.
It is good for the Canadian that he can retain such optimism, given how he has seen things go sideways, and so fast, before.