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Bryce Harper Says Phillies Players “Didn’t Really” Talk About Rhys Hoskins Return this Offseason
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Bryce Harper spoke to the WIP morning show in Clearwooder and the topic of Devan Kaney’s recent report came up.
DK posted on Twitter last week that Bryce Harper asked Dave Dombrowski to bring back Rhys Hoskins as a right-handed power bat, which Dombo ALLEGEDLY did not do. DK was then crushed by Burger King Howard Eskin, and a lot of people, quite honestly, because they said it would make no sense to bring Hoskins back with Harper already at first and Kyle Schwarber as the DH.
Here’s the full transcription:
Jon Ritchie: How well protected do you feel in the lineup?
Harper: “Yeah that was one thing I thought definitely we were gonna do this offseason is go out and get a right-handed bat and we were able to go get (Adolis) Garcia. Obviously I don’t know where he’s going to hit, or who’s going to hit in that four spot or three spot or two spot, lineup wise I don’t know what we’re gonna do yet. I don’t know what Topper has in mind and we haven’t really talked about it yet. We’ll probably have that conversation with Trea and me and Schwarbs and all of us sitting down to talk about it. We’ll see.”
Ritchie: Was that something the guys in the locker room were like, ‘hey Rhys is out there, we could use a right handed power hitter, Rhy is available,’ – was that discussed at any point?
Harper: “Yeah we didn’t really talk about Rhys. We talked about Rhys maybe last year at (the trade) deadline at a certain point. But we never talked about Rhys this offseason, team-wise we didn’t, maybe internally they did. But for us we never talked about it in camp or anything like that. Obviously you’d always love to have Rhys back in any fashion. It kind of doesn’t fit for us as a team right now. I don’t know what the DH spot, 1st base, outfield, that kind of stuff so it didn’t really make sense. Obviously we’d love to have him back at any point but it just didn’t make sense.”
OH BABY! I can’t wait to see what Eskin tweets out next. He needs to come out with a great response. BK vs. DK just ratcheted up a notch. It could be a burgeoning Philly rivalry, one of the better ones moving forward. It could reach the same level as John Bolaris vs. every other meteorologist or Alycia Lane vs. Larry Mendte (or a New York cop).
If you recall on Friday, when Kaney put that tweet out, there was a lot of pushback initially because people didn’t think Rhys Hoskins made sense as anything other than a bench bat in Philadelphia. To be fair, Harper HAS said in the past that he would go back to the outfield to make way for a 1st baseman who improves the team, but the whole reason he moved to first to begin with is because he had Tommy John surgery and he couldn’t physically make the required throws from the outfield. Then you add the elbow injury and wrist injury into the mix, and if you put Harper back in right field you’re taking a risk.
Otherwise, Hoskins would DH and Kyle Schwarber would go back to left field, which also is not ideal. Hoskins ended up signing a minor league deal with the Guardians with a non-roster camp invite.
This is great drama though. I wonder if WIP will clip it and post it. We should remember that Howard is THE KING for a reason. He’s an expert on misinformation:
UPDATE – Kaney says people are missing the point and need to read the first sentence of the initial tweet:
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com