Ryan Howard: A Farewell
“I want to write a kind of post-mortem for Ryan Howard’s career as a Phillie before his final game,” I said to Kyle on Friday. “My dad keeps asking me if we’re going to do anything on Howard,” Kyle responded. “And I keep telling him he’s not Chase.”
Chase Utley is the romantic ideal of Philadelphia: Chiseled jaw, great head of hair, soft-spoken but with a tough guy attitude, forgiven for bad facial hair, hard-working, plays a little dirty, loved by most but hated by the right people, with a smile that makes women blush and men weak in the knees.
Ryan Howard is the realistic vision: A little bigger than we’d like, bald, simultaneously over-hyped and underappreciated, a bit slow, got a bum leg, rubs some people the wrong way but won’t change for anyone, and he has a family full of idiots. But he showed up for you when it mattered.
I texted a Mets fan friend of mine asking for short reactions to two names. In response to Chase Utley’s Phillies tenure, he sent “Me and my dad always said Utley was a guy we wish the Mets had. Could never knock him.” In response to Ryan Howard: “Eat fresh.”
Utley played in a way that hurt his opponent but demanded their respect. Howard gets ridicule. They rubbed people the wrong way in different ways, but the root is that same emotion: Dislike. “He’s more difficult to categorize,” my friend continued. Chase Utley was an un-feeling baseball machine. Ryan Howard is human. And when do we Philadelphians feel most in our element: When someone respects us? Or when someone snarks at us and we’re able to get righteously defensive? We hate the Snowballs at Santa talk, the Rocky clichés, the battery tossing, but we live for shit-talking back at it. We need to defend Ryan.
That’s not to say that Ryan Howard is some delicate flower who needs our protection. He isn’t. But the history books written over beers on Saturday afternoons for the autumns to come will remember Howard and Utley very differently. Utley will be a gamer, a guy who played the right way, a man who did nothing wrong. Howard will be overpaid, overhyped, an underachiever. But we can control that, and we should.
Forget “the team to beat.” Forget “World Fucking Champions.” Let’s talk “just get me to the plate, boys.” Rollins declared the Phillies the kings of the division when the season was on the horizon, and Utley triumphantly crowned us the profane kings of the world when the trophy was in hand. But in 2009, when the Phillies were going for a World Series repeat with an arguably better team that the WFCs of 2008, they needed a Bunyan-esque figure swinging a bat as big as a redwood. They needed to get Ryan Howard to the plate.
It was game four of the NLDS. The Phils were down two in the top of the 9th. Ryan Howard looked at his teammates – not the media, not the gathered and giddy fans in CBP – and simply told them “get me to the plate, boys.” When Howard got to the plate, they were still down two, with two on, and two outs. He watched a pitch, fouled one off, and watched another to take the count to 2-1. Then Huston Street missed his spot:
It was, up to that point, the biggest hit of Howard’s career. The Bleacher Report story written soon after called it “another riveting chapter in a storybook that has only begun to be written for Ryan Howard.” Unfortunately, an Achilles injury in 2011 framed it as more the end of Act II; the final proud and primed peak moment before the descent.
Ryan Howard is the thing of baseball legend. He was made to hit home runs and do little else. The titular Casey, he was a force of nature. And just like Casey, he’s going down swinging.
Much of Howard’s post-prime has been tainted by a signature on a stack of paper. Howard signed a contract that was offered to him foolishly by a first base coach. Yet the shadow of the expectations from all of those zeros clouded the rest of his career. He’s had his moments, but even when he did, the team didn’t. When Ryan Howard is leading your team to the division title, he’s a “home run hitter.” When your team is floundering, he “strikes out too much.”
I’m sure he’ll sign some contract for pennies this off-season – enough for a box of doorknobs at his legendary and never-ending central Florida construction project – and he may even come back here as an opponent. If he does, I hope he’s treated the way Utley was. I hope he hits one onto Ashburn Alley, and I hope we stand until he comes out and doffs his cap.
He may never be Chase Utley. Chase was the frontman. He was The <an all the time. But when you needed him, when you really needed him, Howard was there with a well-placed swing of the bat. Just at the right time. The Clarence Clemons to Utley’s Springsteen, and together they busted the city in half.