Phillies Center Fielder Odubel Herrera Is Best MLB Player You Don’t Know About

A year ago, Odubel Herrera was just another faceless player on a bad Philadelphia Phillies team, a nice Rule 5 pickup but still a guy known for little but having an unusual first name.

Did you know he’s the only Odubel ever to play major league baseball? There’s been an Odie (Porter), and Odalis (Perez) and an Oddibe (McDowell), but never another Odubel.

Anyway, the Phillies still aren’t all that good, with a run differential (minus-43) and a roster (mostly uninspiring) suggesting their above-.500 record won’t last. But if Odubel Herrera is still a faceless Phillie to you, well, he shouldn’t be.

On a team that was supposed to be about Maikel Franco and waiting for J.P. Crawford, the 24-year-old kid named Odubel has emerged as the best and most exciting player. He’s gone from nice pickup to a part of the future, a guy Phillies manager Pete Mackanin described to CSNPhilly.com’s Corey Seidman as “a perennial .300” hitter.

What’s most impressive is how he did it.

In an era when plate discipline is valued more than ever, Herrera didn’t have it. He didn’t have it last year, which might be excused because it was his first year in the majors, but he didn’t have it in the minor leagues, either.

And now he does. By May 15, he had already walked more times (29) than he did in 537 plate appearances in 2015. His strikeout-to-walk ratio has dropped from 4.61 last year to 1.18 through Sunday.

“It’s been like night and day,” Phillies third base coach Juan Samuel said Monday.

Scouts who have watched the Phillies agree, and say it’s amazing Herrera made the change so quickly and seemingly without giving up any aggressiveness at the plate.

“He’s willing to work a count and take a walk,” one American League scout said. “But he’s still pretty aggressive.”

That shows in the numbers, too. Herrera isn’t going to be a power hitter, but he already has five home runs, compared to eight all of last year. He’s not giving up power just to put the ball in play.

He’s kept his batting average high (.320), so his on-base percentage (.427) ranked third in the major leagues entering play Monday, behind only Ben Zobrist (.454) and Dexter Fowler (.433) of the Chicago Cubs.

The Phillies like what they see but believe there’s even more to come.

“He hasn’t tried it much, but he’s a good bunter, too,” Samuel said.

He’s even made himself into a decent center fielder, one scouts say has good range but still needs work on his reads and routes. That’s hardly surprising, given that Herrera played mostly at second base before the Texas Rangers left him unprotected and the Phillies grabbed him as a Rule 5 draft pick in December 2014.

With Samuel’s help, they made him a full-time center fielder (a position he played for just two Class A games with the Rangers). This year, they’ve made him a leadoff hitter after he made himself into a player who fits that spot.

In various interviews, Herrera has credited his father, Odubel Sr., who told him last winter that 129 strikeouts weren’t acceptable.

“I feel like when I’m having my at-bat, it’s my dad, actually, having my at-bat, because I always have him in my head,” Herrera told Tyler Kepner of the New York Times. “One thing that he told me, and he was very specific about it, was that I needed to drop down my strikeouts. I struck out too many times last year.”

It’s easy to say that; not usually so easy to do it. So far this year, Herrera has done it.

The season hasn’t been completely smooth for him. Just last week, Mackanin pulled him from a game in Detroit for not running out a ground ball. But in that same series, Herrera had a home run and a bat flip that made its way around the Internet.

Todd Zolecki of MLB.com enjoyed it so much he put it on Twitter:

The Phillies have enjoyed watching Herrera, from the bat flips (sometimes after walks) to the horns sign (his nickname is El Torito).

“He’s an energy source on this team,” first baseman Ryan Howard told Matt Breen of the Philadelphia Inquirer. “He goes, we go.”

Many of the current Phillies, including Howard, will be going as the rebuilding process continues. Herrera, who never made any of the top prospect lists, could easily have been one of those who went.

Not now. Now he’s not just a guy with an unusual name. He’s a guy with a name you should get to know.

He’s Odubel Herrera.

 

Danny Knobler covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report.

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