Zach Miller

zmiller@GameTimePA.com

As a kid, Mark Phillips always had the same answer when people asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up.

"I want to be a baseball player," he would say.

From elementary school to middle school to high school, his goal never changed. Peers would sometimes roll their eyes and scoff at the idea that someone from Hanover could become a Major League Baseball player.

Despite the discouragement, Phillips never bothered to come up with a backup plan if a career in professional baseball didn't pan out. He planned to play baseball, and the thought that he might need to make a living some other way never crossed his mind.

That's what made the spring of 2005 so difficult for the 2000 Hanover High School graduate. The New York Yankees released him after five years in the minor leagues, and for the first time in his life, getting to the major leagues no longer seemed possible.

He sat stunned in his car in the parking lot of the Yankees training complex, not knowing what to do, who to call or where to go. He had no backup plan, no secondary vocation to fall back on.

Ten years later, Phillips is back in Hanover. And for the first time in a decade, his life is starting to make sense again.

***

Longtime Hanover baseball coach Terry Conover never saw a scene quite like the one Mark Phillips brought to town.

As word of a 6-foot-3, 195-pound left-handed pitcher throwing 95 mph spread, 20 to 30 Major League Baseball scouts flocked to Hanover, radar guns and notepads in hand, for each game Phillips pitched during his junior year.

By his senior year in 2000, that number doubled as college coaches, MLB managers, general managers and former players joined the horde. A preseason scrimmage in early March — a game that didn't even count — brought 34 scouts to Hanover.

"He would get ready to throw the baseball, and all of a sudden there'd be 30 radar guns lifting up behind me to check the speed of it," said A.J. Phillips, Mark's younger brother and high school catcher. "You'd see people walking around Hanover High School with World Series rings on from the teams they're apart of, it was just amazing."

Conover, a physical education teacher during the school day, constantly left class to field calls from scouts and college coaches wanting to talk about Phillips. The calls flowed in all day, sometimes even as late as 11 o'clock at night.

Conover even helped Phillips line up a full-ride scholarship to play at LSU, for five-time national champion coach Skip Bertman.

But his future hinged on the outcome of the 2000 MLB Draft, and when the phone rang early on the afternoon of June 5, that decision became a no-brainer. The San Diego Padres selected him with the No. 9 pick and offered him a $2.2 million signing bonus to join the team.

More than any other emotion, relief washed over Phillips that afternoon. For the past three years, he constantly discussed his baseball future with scouts, coaches and potential agents. He avoided many social situations with his friends and skipped senior week, all for fear that it would affect his draft status.

Phillips signed with the Padres, celebrating with a week in the Bahamas before he reported to end-of-year training camp in San Diego. He joined the Idaho Falls Padres — San Diego's Rookie-league team — a few days later.

"(Draft) day was exactly how I wanted it to be, but it went by too fast," Phillips said. "A week later you're put in a position where you're not playing in a fun kind of way anymore. You're playing on a professional level, and you had to grow up pretty fast."

***

The MLB Draft isn't like the draft in basketball and football, where players report straight to their teams and many first-round draft picks quickly begin playing important roles.

Most baseball prospects need at least three years to reach the highest level of the game, and high school draftees often need at least five. In the end, many top draft picks never even make it to the major leagues.

The 2000 draft was no different. Of the eight players selected before Phillips, only four made it to the major leagues. Of those four, only two — No. 1 pick Adrian Gonzalez and No. 6 pick Rocco Baldelli — played more than 26 games in the majors. And of those two, only Gonzalez became an all-star.

"You look at all the names that didn't make it, and it's nothing that's necessarily negative," said Darren Balsley, who coached Phillips on the Lake Elsinore Storm in 2001 and has been the Padres' major league pitching coach since 2003. "A lot of it's injuries, a lot of it's adaptability, youth is a big part of it. There's all kinds of bumps in the road on the journey to the big leagues, and there's nothing to be ashamed of if you're a high pick and don't make it. The effort was there, and it just happens."

***

The Idaho Falls Padres won the Pioneer League title in 2000, and Phillips pitched in the title-clinching game on the final day of the season.

"The team (the Padres) put together that year was very special," Phillips said. "From a talent aspect, we had one of the better teams you could've asked for. The guys that were on that team were just very welcoming and very key on winning but also having fun."

As Phillips moved up through three levels of Single-A baseball in the San Diego farm system in 2001, he did so with the same core group of players at every step. Oliver Perez, a 13-year major leaguer who currently pitches for the Arizona Diamondbacks, kept pace with Phillips at every stage. Jack Cassel, who played two major league seasons for San Diego and the Houston Astros, was another member of the group that advanced together through the Padres' system.

"Everything was going exactly how I wanted it to be," Phillips said. "From the teammates that I had, the pitching coordinators that I had, the coaches I was coming up and getting ready to be around, everything was great."

When Phillips reached Lake Elsinore, San Diego's High-A affiliate, by the end of the 2001 season, he pitched in five games as the Storm split the California League title with the San Jose Giants when the league championship series was cut short by the 9/11 attacks.

"That year in Lake Elsinore, we were minor league team of the year, we had a lot of talented pitchers that were getting moved up quickly," Balsley said. "Mark stepped in (late in the season), and as I recall, he didn't miss a beat. As I recall, he was well on his way."

***

Phillips went through his usual warm-up routine at spring training before the 2003 season in Phoenix, starting the day with stretching exercises along the first-base line in the outfield of the team's AA training field. It was March 19, and in a few weeks, he'd start his first year of Double-A baseball for the Padres' Southern League affiliate, the Mobile BayBears.

As Phillips finished stretching and prepared to head back into the clubhouse before batting practice, Kevin Towers, the Padres general manager at the time, rode a golf cart out to where Phillips stood and asked him to hop in.

When they got inside, Towers told Phillips he'd been traded to the Yankees as part of a deal swapping two major league outfielders: Rondell White to the Padres and Bubba Trammell to the Yankees.

No discussion, no questions, just business. Pack your bags.

As Phillips left the training complex, his head spinning from the shock of the sudden trade, pitching coach Tom Brown approached him and told him he did, "everything I possibly could, but I had nothing to do with this."

"That's when I realized, on top of the feeling of going to another team, that it's a business," Phillips said. "It wasn't a fun game anymore, it was a business.

"I had no idea how to deal with that feeling, I had no idea what to expect. I kept thinking about the teammates that I lost, the teammates that I wasn't going to be able to start that spring training with in Mobile. That was my biggest disappointment in the last 20 years that I could possibly ever imagine."

***

The high schooler who once earned national All-America honors from USA Today and The Associated Press and signed autographs for Hanover little leaguers suddenly found himself facing criticism and failure him for the first time in the Yankees organization.

The Yankees demanded excellence every single day, and the timing of the trade forced the 21-year-old Phillips to confront these new feelings in an environment where he felt alone. He had moved across the country to Tampa, home of the Yankees training complex, to join a new group of players and coaches just as spring training concluded.

"It's difficult. It would be like if you're in high school and all of a sudden your parents move to a new town and you have to fit in with a whole new group of kids," Balsley said. "Only this is your livelihood, it's how you're gonna make your living. That's why baseball's so tough in general, there are trades, there are different things happening, you just need to persevere. It's not always easy. Everybody has a little bit of difficulty, no matter who they are when this happens."

Phillips particularly struggled to deal with leaving that core group of players with whom he'd graduated through the Padres system.

"I remember talking to him on the phone and him saying he missed the guys from San Diego," A.J. Phillips said. "It wasn't that anybody was a jerk or anything like that, but a lot of those guys he started with from day one."

The only person Mark Phillips knew when he arrived at the Yankees training complex in Tampa was outfielder Kevin Reese, a fellow Padres draft pick in 2000 who played two years in the San Diego organization before being sent to the Yankees in a separate trade. Phillips and Reese, who eventually played 12 games for the Yankees in the mid-2000s, roomed together for two spring trainings with the Yankees.

"He was always kind of quiet," Reese said of Phillips. "He would go about his business and was always trying to do what was asked of him. By that point he was pretty frustrated that he wasn't performing the way he expected to. He had some issues throwing strikes, and I think there were times that it wasn't just mechanical; it was mental, too."

***

As Phillips threw warm-up pitches before a minor-league start for the Tampa Yankees against the Dunedin Blue Jays late in the 2003 season, he felt a tingling sensation near his left elbow.

He ignored it, not saying a word to anyone, as he pitched the first few innings.

But by the third inning, it became too much too ignore. He motioned for the trainers, who took him out of the game. He never pitched another game for the Yankees organization.

An arthrogram and MRI revealed no tears, just a little bit of fraying in Phillips' rotator cuff, likely a result of throwing more innings in four years than he'd ever thrown before.

Doctors diagnosed Phillips with bicep tendonitis, a condition that can't be resolved with surgery, so he stopped pitching for the final month of the season and began rehabbing.

When he arrived early to spring training in 2004, he still felt stiffness and some pain. He felt like he couldn't throw his hardest without hurting himself further.

"It got me in a slump, I didn't know how to cope with it, I didn't talk to enough people about it," Phillips said. "It was the first time that I had to deal with failure and not be the guy that I was brought in in 2000 to San Diego to be, and it all started to trickle down."

After rehabbing his bicep through the 2004 season, he finally felt his strength was back when he arrived at spring training in 2005.

But that spring, the Yankees had a big decision to make about Phillips. Teams need to either offer a new contract to any player drafted out of high school after five seasons or let them go.

The Yankees chose the latter, abruptly ending Phillips' stint with the Yankees after three years and just 16 game appearances.

"It definitely took the first year to get used to not only being in a different state for spring training, but to be with a different team," Phillips said. "The second year I basically rehabbed because I just wasn't healthy, and the third year I was with them, the release happened, and everything took a big slide."

***

Aside from seven appearances for the independent Newark Bears in 2007 — and an Atlantic League title — Phillips' professional baseball story ends with his release from the Yankees. He could still throw more than 90 mph in Newark, but his arm never felt as healthy as it had before joining the Yankees.

The 10 years since his release saw Phillips work five years at Snyder's of Hanover and spend three living in Arizona.

In the past year, he's started a business providing services for business owners who don't have benefits and vacation time. He learns their delivery routes and fills in for them for periods of time so they can take time off.

He started by picking up Snyder's routes, which came easily after his time with the company, and he's added Little Debbie routes to his repertoire. He's also in discussions to add Pepperidge Farm routes, among others.

"It's taking my time up for now, in a good way, but there's a 50-50 chance of it being something that could be serious," he said. "Or it could be something I've just done to pass the time in the last few months."

Away from work, he's continuing to play the game he loves in town for the Hanover Raiders of the South Penn League. He pitches occasionally, but mostly he plays first base and bats in the middle of the Raiders lineup. And he gets to take the field with A.J., who's been with the Raiders since 2003, and other old friends.

"Being out here gives me every last little bit of this feeling," Phillips said. "I'm getting older by the day, and it's something that's really tough to deal with. But it's definitely something that, no matter what happens, I'm happy to be here where I grew up, around my friends and around my family, and it's definitely something that I wouldn't have any other way."

Fifteen years ago, the thought that he might need to make a living doing something other than playing baseball never crossed Phillips' mind. Even for years after his release from the Yankees, he clung to the idea that he was meant to play baseball.

Professional baseball is just a fond memory now, a collection of stories he can tell and an experience he says he wouldn't trade for the world. But he's finally starting on a new path, enjoying the game he loves with the Raiders while embarking on a venture outside of the sport.

And he realizes Hanover is where he was supposed to be all along.

"Everything finally feels right. After spending that time away, I finally realized at least where I was meant to be."