Sielski: Nick Williams' time has come; is he ready?
This was mid-January, a freezing day in a freezing month, but already Nick Williams was thinking warm thoughts. The Phillies had brought him to Citizens Bank Park, with several other young players and prospects, for a tour of the place, and in walking the
This was mid-January, a freezing day in a freezing month, but already Nick Williams was thinking warm thoughts. The Phillies had brought him to Citizens Bank Park, with several other young players and prospects, for a tour of the place, and in walking the concourse Williams began eyeballing the right-field wall and its alluring distance from home plate. Just 329 feet down the line. Just 369 to right-center. September, he said. He wanted to be in the Phillies lineup by the end of September, to take some shots at that short porch.
"That's my birthday month," he said then. "The ultimate is, I want to be in the big leagues as soon as possible."
Williams turns 23 on Sept. 8, and he is likely to have his wish come true. At some point during the month - even if it's not on Sept. 1, when major-league teams can expand their rosters from 25 to 40 - the Phillies could and probably will summon him from triple-A Lehigh Valley. When they do, it will mark a subtle shift in their attempts to prepare Williams to have a long, productive career as one of their regular outfielders and a power bat in their everyday lineup. The onus on his future, really, goes from them to him.
This is a subtle shift, but not an inconsequential one. Acquired last July from the Texas Rangers in the Cole Hamels trade, Williams has drawn attention to himself all season with the Iron Pigs, for reasons good and not so good. He has 46 extra-base hits, including 12 home runs, in 440 at-bats, continuing to show the bat speed and pop that the Rangers saw when they selected him in the second round of the 2012 draft. (He had fallen to the second round only because he had taken a small step backward during his senior season at Ball High School in Galveston, batting just .351, a relatively low figure for a prospective first-round pick.)
At Lehigh Valley, Williams has been pretty much the same hitter that he was over his three-and-a-half years in the Rangers farm system. He doesn't walk much (just 19 times this season), and his strikeout rate ticked up this season after ticking down last season. He has made no great leaps as a hitter, not yet anyway, and given his talent, he may not have had to. But his progress as a pure hitter would seem less concerning than this: Much of the attention paid to Williams at Lehigh Valley was because his manager, Dave Brundage, benched him three times - twice for not running hard out of the batter's box, once for sliding into home plate after hitting a game-winning home run.
Those incidents and all the possible reactions to them can start things spinning into the kind of old-school/new-era debate endemic to pro sports, baseball in particular. So to keep from getting sidetracked, let's acknowledge that Williams' unwillingness to run out a ground ball or two doesn't in and of itself mean that he's bound to be a bust with the Phillies because he doesn't, in that trite phrase, "play the game the right way." But those incidents are relevant for another reason: They're not necessarily isolated.
Even while in the Rangers system, according to a person familiar with his background, Williams was the sort of player who often had to have a manager or coach "dangle a carrot" in front of him. What Brundage and the Phillies dealt with from Williams, even the venial sin of trotting to first base on a certain out, the Rangers dealt with, too. It's a common part of helping a young player along in his maturation, learning how best to motivate him, but it doesn't mean that a measure of structure and discipline isn't necessary.
Here is your next goal, Nick, and you have to do X, Y, and Z to reach it. You can't just hit your way to the majors. There's more to it than that.
In essence, the Phillies organization did the same thing with Williams. They could have called him up in July. They didn't. They could have played off his lack of hustle or tendency toward showmanship as a kid being a kid. They didn't. The goal was the big leagues, and there it was, just out of reach all season. Once they call him up, though, Nick Williams will get his wish, and that carrot will be gone. The Phillies, in effect, will have said: We have done all we can.
The rest will be up to him.
@MikeSielski