Remembering the ‘Phil-ins’ as a new baseball season dawns

It was the spring of 1995, when ballyards in Arizona and Florida usually were bustling with big league players and worshipping fans, both eager for the start of a new baseball season.

Not this year.  At least not yet.  Continuing the players strike that canceled the 1994 World Series — a work stoppage that would last 232 days — the players stayed home, working out on high school fields and filling out their NCAA brackets.

The team owners, more familiar with IRAs than ERAs, showed how determined, frustrated or shortsighted they were when they decided — except for the Baltimore Orioles — to start the season with so-called “replacement players.”

Just like that, butchers, bakers and candlestick makers were wearing big league uniforms and playing spring training games. One of the Phil-ins had a part-time job with a local bakery in Clearwater, Fla., and each morning treated his new teammates with donuts.

The Phillies RPs weren’t bad; they finished with an 11-14 record. But they weren’t big leaguers. Games were reminiscent of an American Legion all-star game.

Oddly, the fans showed up. Nothing like Florida sunshine in March. After a while they actually embraced the Phil-ins, who obliged them with autographs, posed for pictures and treated them with the respect often denied by the cleated millionaires.

After both sides finally came to their senses, Phillies manager Jim Fregosi broke his vow of silence about the Philly folly.

“This has been my most difficult spring,” said Fregosi, who died in 2014 at the age of 71. “I’m also proud of my coaching staff as far as the job they did and the work they put in. We all had a job to do, and we did it to the best of our abilities.”

As the baseball beat writer for the Reading Eagle/Times, I covered the replacement guys as well as the regulars when they returned. The games are a blur to me 27 years later and following the latest lockout, which lasted 99 days.

I do remember the coaches — John Vukovich, Larry Bowa, Mike Ryan and Johnny Podres — rushing off the field at Jack Russell Stadium when the last out was made. The way I saw it, it was their way of distancing themselves from what this proud foursome saw as an effrontery to the game they had dedicated much of their lives to.

Only once did I see a coach lose his cool. Bowa, hitting ground balls during batting practice, became irritated when one of the RPs couldn’t hit a ball out of the cage.

“Get him the bleep out of there!” Bowa screamed.

Some of the players the Phillies assembled weren’t bad.  A few had big league experience — Jeff Stone, 39-year-old shortstop Todd Cruz, 1980 World Series hero Marty Bystrom and 38-year-old relief pitcher George Riley, who was living in Oley at the time.

That bothered Bowa.

“Most of these (replacement) guys are good guys when you talk to them,” Bowa said, “but the bottom line is they are trying to do something that the elite do.  Those guys don’t make me angry, but I wonder why the guys who have been pretty successful in the big leagues are here.  They’re getting a pension; they’ve got the benefits.”

The replacement players were given a $5,000 bonus, $110-a-day meal money and a chance to make a lump sum of $20,000 if they were still in uniform when the “real” games began. After that they would be paid the major league minimum of $109,000 on a pro-rata basis.

“For it to go this far and for it to be over is heartbreaking,” said Riley, who was 1-1 with a 3.86 ERA in seven outings.  “But I’m not done.  I’ll keep playing back home.  There are not too many guys who can say they’ve been playing for 22 years.”

The outfield was the strength of the team.  Dave Albrecht (.289). Jason Alstead (.295) and Stone (.347) were solid.  Dan Barbara, a first baseman from the Delaware Valley, homered from both sides of the plate in a game.

Stoney?  Well, Stoney was a little wiser but just as comical.  Asked what he was doing before showing up, he said he had been working as a deputy sheriff in his hometown of Portageville, Mo.

“If this doesn’t work I don’t have a job,” said the former Reading Phillie and 1983 Eastern League MVP.

“When did you know that job wasn’t for you?” I remember asking him.

“The first time I got shot at,” he said.

One player summed it up for the rest: “We got our signing bonus, we got to keep our jerseys, everybody got an autographed baseball and a plane ticket home,” said outfielder Jim Freeman.  “It was awesome.”

It was a collection of Peter Pans playacting in a 45-day Fantasy Camp that was destined to fail upon its inception.