From perennial prospect to perpetual disappointment, Domonic Brown endured the full cycle of baseball life in Philadelphia the last few years. Now he’ll get a fresh start somewhere else at age 28.
The Phillies announced Monday they have outrighted the outfielder off their 40-man roster, cutting ties with a player who was once named the top prospect in all of baseball and later made an All-Star Game but never quite seemed able to live up to expectations.
MORE: Worst MLB players in 2015
Brown just posted his second consecutive season with a .634 OPS in the majors, and the Phillies apparently didn’t believe he would be able to find an answer. Or, they weren’t willing to pay the $4 million or so the arbitration-eligible player might have commanded in 2016 to let him try to figure things out on their dime.
It’s a stunning decline from two years ago, when Brown seemed finally to have arrived. Then three years removed from ranking No. 1 (Mike Trout was No. 2) on Baseball America’s midseason top prospects list, Brown was an All-Star in his first full season in the majors. He hit .272/.324/.494 with 27 home runs in 2013 but his production plummeted the following year and he ended up spending a good chunk of 2015 back in Triple-A.
The Phillies lured Brown away from a football scholarship to Miami nine years ago, paying him a hefty $200,000 signing bonus after drafting him in the 20th round out of an Atlanta-area high school. At 6-5 and 225 pounds, with plenty of left-handed power and a strong throwing arm, he still has all the tools to succeed and undoubtedly will have plenty of offers now that he’s on the open market.
That ability could come back to haunt the Phillies if Brown can find a way to consistently harness it elsewhere, but they clearly felt it was time to move on.
