Hollands and Buchanan no longer newbies with Phillies

CLEARWATER, Fla. - Few moments unfold as you have dreamt them. Life is too complex. It is not a zero sum endeavor. In any given moment, there are other moments, little things that end up sticking in your mind at the expense of more prominent details, things that must be observed, experienced, things that cannot be anticipated.

Take the morning Mario Hollands got the call he'd been anticipating his entire life. He can't immediately recall who was in the office with Ryne Sandberg, and he can't immediately recall what he said when they told him to pack a bag for Texas because he'd made the big-league club. But he remembers the quiet in the clubhouse after it all played out.

He walked back to his locker and felt the curious eyes of teammates waiting to hear their fates. He realized that his good news was somebody else's bad news, that to celebrate his own success was to celebrate one of his teammates' demise, that for every unheralded 25-year-old lefty who comes from out of nowhere to make the Opening Day roster, there was a big-league veteran such as Shawn Camp who finds out that he's headed to the minors.

"I really didn't say anything when I got back to the clubhouse from the office," Hollands said. "I knew there were other guys that were going in there that weren't getting as good of news as I was. So I stayed quiet. Then guys started coming up to me and asking how it went. I almost whispered it. I really didn't say it too loud, because I was still in shock. I didn't really celebrate. I didn't feel like it was my place."

The majors taste different to everybody. Look around the Phillies' clubhouse and you see guys such as Domonic Brown and Cole Hamels and Ben Revere, for whom the big leagues always existed as an inevitability. They had the signing bonuses, the ceilings, the accolades. The question was always "When?" For fringe prospects such as Hollands and fellow 2010 draftee David Buchanan, the question has always been "if." Which is why it was interesting to spend a few minutes talking with each of them yesterday in the wake of their breakout 2014 seasons.

At this time last year, you needed a mug shot to know who either one of them was. When pitchers and catchers arrived for their first workout of the 2014 spring, Buchanan and Hollands might have been the last two names on the depth chart. If they weren't at the very bottom, they were somewhere close to it.

Heck, Buchanan wasn't even invited until a month or so before the start of camp. A couple of months earlier, the Phillies hadn't even bothered to use a 40-man roster spot to protect the righthander from the Rule 5 draft. For $50,000, any team could have had him.

"I was a nobody, nobody knew who I was; I was invited, because they had one more spot, I wasn't protected, I had no hype, I was never on Baseball America's Top 10 prospect list," Buchanan said. "But I always had that belief in my heart that I could make it. And I wasn't going to stop until I did."

Managers like to preach competition in spring training. Every spot is up for grabs, they say. Show us something. Our minds are open. Yet a certain amount of benefit of the doubt is in play, and prospects with the pedigree of a Buchanan or Hollands tend to get less of it. Confirmation bias is a natural phenomenon in the human mind. We search for proof of our desired conclusions. Players projected to have less potential offer less of a reason for someone to take a chance on that potential.

Hollands was a 10th-round pick out of UC Santa Barbara. Buchanan was a seventh-round pick out of Georgia State. Neither is a cornerstone-type player. Neither has Jesse Biddle's stuff or Phillippe Aumont's size or Aaron Nola's room to grow. Neither has a scout or executive who has huge investment in him.

So maybe it shouldn't come as a surprise that Hollands spent much of the early part of the season waiting for the other shoe to drop. When the Phillies brought him north to Philadelphia for their two-game exhibition series at Citizens Bank Park, he assumed that his next stop would be a hotel in Allentown. Suddenly, he was packing a bag for Arlington, Texas, and Chicago. In 2 days, he'd be facing Shin-Soo Choo.

"It took a while to get comfortable, because I always had a thought in the back of my head that I might get sent back down," Hollands said. "I don't want to say I was nervous, but I was quiet for a long time. I made sure that I was seen and not heard throughout the year."

Hollands had good reason to feel his spot was tenuous, especially after walking two of the three batters he faced and picking up the loss in his big-league debut. After Texas came Chicago before the Phillies finally went back home. Except it wasn't really home to Hollands. He spent that first month in a hotel, trying to balance the daily grind of life at the ballpark with the need to find a more permanent living arrangement, while also realizing he could write a check for a security deposit one day, then be sent to Lehigh Valley the next. With the help of a family friend of Biddle, a West Mount Airy native, he eventually settled into a place near Rittenhouse Square. Every day, he took the subway to the ballpark, listening to music and watching the stops on the Broad Street Line flash by the window.

"I really didn't feel comfortable until at least the All-Star Break," he said. "The first month was a long time. It felt a lot longer than I thought it was going to take."

The enormity of it all didn't really sink in until the offseason, when he realized how much his season had meant to the family and friends who followed it back home in San Francisco. A big-time Giants fan, he spent part of the offseason following their postseason run. When they faced the Royals in the World Series, he was in the stands. Four years earlier, he'd sat in the stands for Game 5 of the Giants' eventual NLCS victory over the Phillies. It goes without saying that his perspective had changed.

On Twitter: @ByDavidMurphy