Phillies ‘Wall of Shame’ would be built on solid foundation of draft busts
By Tony Zonca — MikeDragoSports.com senior contributor
The Philadelphia Phillies hold the distinction of being the team with the most losses in Major League Baseball history.
All you have to do is look up their list of embarrassing picks in the first round of the amateur draft to know why.
It didn’t matter who was scouting, who sat in the general manager’s seat, whether the owner was Bill Giles or Bob or Ruly Carpenter, the Phillies managed to turn their selections into a kid’s game — pin the tail on the donkey.
And they did make some ass-inine picks.
Moreover, just 48 of 636 players drafted by the Phillies between 2004-2017 made it to the big leagues, a paltry 7.5%.
In addition, the Phillies went through a couple of periods of overall ineptness among the men running the minor league system. The first thing Ed Wade did when he succeeded Lee Thomas as GM in 1998 was clean house in the club’s minor league structure.
When Jim Fregosi replaced Nick Leyva as manager of the big club in 1991, he said to me privately, “Everybody blames the scouting staff for the team’s struggles, but what about the development people?”
Fregosi had spent more than a year working for his good friend Thomas as an adviser, roaming the club’s minor league levels, so he saw for himself how bad things had become.
How many times over the years have the Phillies given up on a player, traded him and watched him flourish with his new ballclub?
The Phillies are proud of their Wall of Fame in the outfield at Citizens Bank Park, and who can blame them? All the obvious player plaques are out there — Robin Roberts, Richie Ashburn, Steve Carlton, Mike Schmidt, Jim Bunning and Roy Halladay.
But not the two bad boys, Pete Rose or Lenny Dykstra, but that’s another story.
The Phillies could also erect a Wall of Shame for the long list of failed No. 1 draft picks. Remember Brad Brink, Trey McCall, Greg Golson, Rip Rollins, Wayne Gomes, Joe Savery and Carlton Loewer, to name a few?
Most of the picks wound up as career minor leaguers.
The poster boy for this long-standing era of futility shall always be outfielder Jeff Jackson, taken out of high school with the fourth pick in the 1989 draft. It has been chronicled elsewhere; the Phillies could have taken Frank Thomas, Mo Vaughn or Chuck Knoblauch, but they opted for Jackson, a five-tool player that others had sought, to be fair.
After Von Hayes — Mr. Five-for-One — went quietly into that good night, everybody thought Jackson would be the next big thing. He wound up spending nine years in the minors, six with the Phillies.
Over the coming weeks I’ll examine three other tragic busts — pitchers Pat Combs and Tyler Green, along with free agent signee outfielder Jeff Stone.
They too hit that wall.
