Scott Kingery’s Contract Is Dead. Long Live Kingery!

It was the perfect exemplar of a Friday news dump, a quiet transaction between frequent trading partners. The Phillies and Angels swap players so often it’s sometimes hard to remember whether Brandon Marsh got traded for Logan O’Hoppe or George Klassen or Ron Gant. And while the Angels also made a splashy swap with the Braves the day before to acquire Jorge Soler, Philadelphia slipped another move in while nobody was looking: minor league infielder Scott Kingery to Los Angeles for cash considerations.

With all the fanfare of your buddy paying you back for buying Taco Bell on the way home the other night, an era is over.

Kingery could be a useful player for the Angels. He hit .268/.316/.488 in Triple-A last season, with 25 home runs and 25 stolen bases, playing mostly at shortstop with appearances at second, third, and in center field. The Phillies are pretty well set on the infield, but Kingery hasn’t appeared in the majors since June 8, 2022, when he went out to second base for a single defensive inning in a 10-0 blowout in Milwaukee. He hasn’t taken a major league at-bat since May 16, 2021, which is the last time he had anything like a regular roster role.

Kingery fell behind Rodolfo Castro, Dalton Guthrie, Buddy Kennedy, and Snookums the Juggling Bear on the Phillies’ depth chart because of his contract. Barring a stunning late-career turnaround in Southern California, that will come to define his career.

A second-round pick out of Arizona in 2015, Kingery was one of the few reasons for optimism in the darkest days of a decade-long Phillies rebuild — an arduous series of disappointments and false starts that produced precious few homegrown big leaguers of any quality, and only barely bore fruit before the last survivors of those dark days, Rhys Hoskins and Aaron Nola, hit free agency.

The best way I can describe Kingery’s career is that he had the misfortune of coming up when the Phillies — and I say this with all the kindness and generosity I can muster in my cold heart — looked like they had absolutely no clue what they were doing. I don’t know if there’s an alternate universe in which Kingery is a three-time All-Star by now, but he was not helped by the situation into which he emerged.

The Phillies dominated the NL East in the late 2000s and into the early 2010s despite not exactly being at the bleeding edge of baseball’s empirical revolution. But they got away with it and won the division every year for three reasons: First, they had the best and deepest starting rotation between the late 1990s Atlanta Braves and… probably the end of human civilization. I don’t know if we’ll ever see anything like Roy Oswalt, no. 4 starter, again. Second, they ran big payrolls that helped paper over the cracks. Third, a middle infield of Chase Utley and Jimmy Rollins solves a lot of problems.

Once those guys got old, however, and the bill came due for a decade’s worth of the farm system either being ransacked in trades or left to wither, things got bleak — fast. By the time the Phillies hit rock bottom, smart teams had found a new series of solutions.

First, the swing plane revolution was well underway, especially for middle infielders who had hit tool to spare and could afford to swing from the heels. Around this time, the Mets and Braves were turning Daniel Murphy and Ozzie Albies into stars. So the Phillies did the same with Kingery. A garden variety Pac-12 speedster in college, Kingery hit eight home runs in his first two professional seasons put together. In 2017, Kingery started putting the ball in the air more and hit 18 dingers in just 69 games at Double-A Reading, then eight more homers in Triple-A.

So the Phillies copied innovation no. 2: the long-term arbitration buyout for a first-year big leaguer. Before the 2018 season, Philadelphia signed Kingery to a six-year, $24 million contract with three option years — all before he’d appeared in a major league game.

Innovation no. 3: defensive positioning shenanigans. Between Kingery and future Gold Glove shortstop J.P. Crawford, it looked like the Phillies had found their Utley and Rollins for the 2020s. But Kingery started 101 games at shortstop as a rookie, despite having put in a grand total of 18 innings at that position in the minors to that point. Crawford, inexplicably, was forced over to third base.

And everything fell apart. Kingery was 19th in defensive WAR as a rookie, out of 26 shortstops with at least 800 innings at the position. Which would’ve been fine — apparently he was better defensively than Xander Bogaerts that year, for instance — if he hadn’t hit .226/.267/.338.

The thing about Kingery’s swing plane breakout is that FirstEnergy Field in Reading makes Coors Field look like Yellowstone, and no matter how many times that park convinces people that Darin Ruf is better than Ryan Howard — which was a fairly common opinion in the Delaware Valley once upon a time — this lesson keeps going unlearned.

The Phillies made an unprecedented commitment to Kingery, whose breakout might not have been real to begin with, and then moved him all over the field and up and down the lineup in search of a home. In his writeup of the Kingery trade, MLB.com’s Todd Zolecki recalled an incident I’d forgotten: In 2018, Phillies manager Gabe Kapler even pinch-hit for Kingery in the second inning of a game, before his second baseman (or shortstop or center fielder) of the future had even come to the plate.

Despite all this, Kingery was actually pretty solid in 2019, when he posted a 100 wRC+ and 2.1 WAR, with 19 home runs even without the aid of favorable park conditions. But he started 2020 on the COVID list, which cost him a third of the season, and then missed more time with a back injury in early September. The day after his last major league at-bat, Kingery went on the 7-day concussion IL, and apart from that one inning in 2022, hasn’t been back to the majors since. The Phillies outrighted him to Triple-A and took him off the 40-man roster in mid-2022, which basically closed the door on his time with the team that drafted him.

Kingery’s pre-debut contract will go down as a debacle for the Phillies, and probably for the player as well. Sure, he pocketed $24 million for three years and change of replacement-level major league performance and two and a half seasons as a Triple-A glue guy. That’s more than most people in his position make, and that financial windfall is no small consideration.

But when things went south for Kingery as a rookie, he got hung out to dry. There was no do-over in Triple-A, like Jackson Holliday got when he struggled in his first stint in the major leagues. Kingery just went out there and struggled without relief for six months, and it’s hard to escape the conclusion that his sink-or-swim introduction to the major leagues did him far more harm than good in the long run.

Had Kingery been brought along in a more traditional fashion, he might’ve turned into a big league regular for more than one season. At least he might’ve been able to contribute for Phillies teams that made the playoffs the past three seasons, and have at times cried out for a little right-handed pop off the bench. As it is, he’s been marooned in Allentown while his former teammates got to have all the fun.

My hope for this trade specifically is that Kingery, severed from the millstone that was the origin of his big league career, can manage to become a useful major league utilityman after all. Or at least, that he’ll get to Moonlight Graham his way back into the majors for at least one more cameo.

More generally, putting a bow on Kingery’s contract affords an opportunity to examine one of those trends I mentioned before: The long-term extension for a rookie.

Absent some kind of Baseball Savant for contract data, I worked off a list, compiled by Matt Kelly of MLB.com this past April, of players who signed long-term extensions with less than a year’s worth of big league service time. Here’s that list in convenient table form:

The games played and WAR figures for this table include the player’s contributions for all teams, since a few of these players got traded midstream.

On this list, you’ll see a mixture of successes and failures, of players who shaped the direction of their franchises and others who are best forgotten. I don’t know if you can say that these contracts are successes or failures as a bloc, not least because a bunch of them have several seasons left on the deal.

Nevertheless, think about what Evan Longoria did for the Rays, or Ronald Acuña Jr. for the Braves, or Corbin Carroll for the Diamondbacks. Even Colt Keith, who was merely decent in the first year of his pretty unremarkable contract, might’ve been the difference between a playoff berth and another early trip home for a Tigers team that got to October by the hair of its chinny-chin-chin.

You can see hits and misses on this list, but I’ll end on the following note. The teams that signed these contracts have made the playoffs before they expired—whether the player in question was still on the roster or not—on 19 of 20 occasions. (Julio Rodríguez signed his contract in mid-2022, and the Mariners made the playoffs that fall, even though the deal didn’t actually start until the following season. I told you this situation was an inscrutable mess.) The lone exception, Ceddanne Rafaela, has plenty of time to lead Boston to the postseason.

During the term of 13 of the 20 contracts (counting Rodríguez), the signing team had a season that was better than anything the franchise had accomplished in the five years before signing the player in question to an extension. (In four of the remaining eight cases, the previous five-year period had included at least one trip to the World Series.)

That list of 13 teams includes most of the contracts one would describe as unmitigated disasters. Kingery’s Phillies, for one, but also the 2017 Astros (Singleton) and the 2022 Mariners (White).

The point is this: We talk about pre-arbitration extensions in terms of risk. The team takes on risk by guaranteeing tens of millions of dollars to a player with little or no major league track record. But it sure seems like Kingery’s extension with the Phillies did more harm to the player than the team. At worst, whiffing on a contract like this is an annoyance for a club that’s willing to shell out for a contending roster. Or even the Rays or Mariners, for that matter.

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