Ad Disclosure
It’s the Anniversary of Phillies Fans Chucking Batteries at J.D. Drew
Published:
Good pull here. It’s the 27th anniversary of J.D. Drew getting batteries tossed at him by the mongrels at Veterans Stadium:
Ron Gant: “When the umpire came into the dugout, he brought two D-sized batteries with him. Those batteries come from the upper deck and hit one of those guys out there, it could definitely put him in the hospital and hurt him pretty seriously. So I don’t blame them for stopping the game and bringing their team inside… that’s dangerous, you don’t want people throwing things like that at your kids or your family…”
This is a good piece of lore but pretty shameful to recall. Throwing batteries at a player? Not Philadelphia’s finest sporting moment. We’ve grown up a lot since then. Most of the truly bad stuff now happens in California and Texas, where 49ers and Raiders fans stab each other at In-N-Out Burger and Cowboys fans fight each other in the stands. Philadelphia has matured over the past 40 years while other cities and their fanbases have gone backwards.
J.D. Drew didn’t deserve projectiles being thrown at him, since no one does, but did deserve hearty booooooooooos for being a snake and associating with fellow snake Scott Boras.
The 2nd overall pick in 1997, he refused to sign here, as explained by Todd Zolecki in a 2018 look-back:
Reports at the time said Drew demanded an $11 million signing bonus, about $9 million more than Kris Benson received as the No. 1 overall pick in 1996. The Phillies offered around $3 million with a jump to at least $5 million or $6 million once he made the Majors. But Drew’s agent, Scott Boras, said Thursday that the Phillies never offered more than $3 million, and he never demanded more than $7.5 million.
…
“I don’t think he was ever going to settle for the money that was being asked,” Ed Wade recalled recently. “I think it was always going to be a moving target. That’s just my personal opinion.”
Drew showed his commitment to the cause, playing baseball in the summers of 1997 and ’98 with the independent St. Paul Saints before re-entering the ’98 Draft. The Cardinals selected him with the fifth overall pick, and he signed for a reported $7 million.
That’s the CliffsNotes. It’s a little bit more complicated than that if you want to dig in, but the Phils drafted Pat Burrell #1 overall in that 1998 draft, and Pat the Bat went on to win a World Series here at age 31. Drew won a ring with Boston the year prior and had a solid, 14-year career himself, though maybe it wasn’t as spectacular as it could have been relative to how hyped he was coming out of college. He finished with a career .384 on-base percentage and had a couple of monster seasons in which he topped 1.000 OPS, but he only went to one All-Star Game and had this calm and relaxed demeanor in the field. I recall some people took that to mean he wasn’t passionate about the game, which, I don’t know. The Phillies and Drew won World Series in back-to-back years, so it probably came out as a wash ultimately, even if the late 90s with Terry Francona and Scott Rolen and Mike Lieberthal were disappointing initially, before the Phillies turned the corner.
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