How the Phillies’ Alec Bohm learned to overcome the ‘valleys’ to prove he belongs

Bohm hit his low point early in the season. Since then he has improved like no other player his manager has seen.

Alec Bohm, working out Monday in Atlanta, has turned himself from a sieve into a passable third baseman.Read moreYong Kim / Staff Photographer

Published Oct. 11, 2022, 5:00 a.m. ET

ATLANTA — Six months ago, on April 11, Alec Bohm made three throwing errors in the span of three innings, got booed by the home crowd, and was caught on camera telling a teammate how much he hates playing in Philadelphia.

Yet somehow that wasn’t his low point.

Looking back, Bohm figures the next few days were worse. He got benched by Joe Girardi, even though the Phillies manager at the time never actually used that word. Bohm didn’t get back in the lineup for five games, and when he did, it was as the designated hitter. He didn’t start again at third base for a week.

And it sent his mind racing.

“There’s that little bit in the back of your head going, ‘Well, last time I didn’t play for a while, I got sent down,’” Bohm said Monday after the Phillies worked out on the eve of Game 1 of the National League Division Series. “For me, it was just, every day I was coming to the field and basically fighting to stay here and be on the team.”

Bohm, 26, did more than that. He kept working. He turned himself from a sieve into a passable third baseman, one who can be trusted to make routine plays and, every so often, a spectacular one. He will never be confused with Mike Schmidt or Scott Rolen, but he has become a fixture in the Phillies’ lineup, just as they imagined when they drafted him third overall in 2018.

“He’s a guy,” manager Rob Thomson said, “that has improved more within a year than [any player] I’ve ever had in my career.”

The credit for Bohm’s development can be spread around. Some of it goes to infield coach Bobby Dickerson, whose tough-love approach helped to put Bohm at ease. Some goes to hitting coach Kevin Long, who went to work on Bohm’s approach at the plate. Surely, some goes to Thomson, who provided a more nurturing environment for the Phillies’ young players after he took over as manager on June 3.

But there’s an irony in all of this, especially with the Phillies bracing for the best-of-five divisional round against the Atlanta Braves. Even as Girardi’s patience with Bohm waned (the Phillies were even willing to trade Bohm in spring training), he made comparisons to Austin Riley’s career trajectory before he became a star third baseman and franchise cornerstone for the Braves.

Riley made his major league debut in 2019 and hit nine homers in his first 71 at-bats. He regressed in the shortened 2020 season, posting a .716 on-base plus slugging percentage. But over the last two years, he has improved his defense, closed some holes in his swing, and bashed a total of 71 homers with an .887 OPS.

“Playing against [Bohm] the last couple years, I feel like we went through kind of the same little struggles, whether it’s at the plate or in the field,” Riley said Monday. “I feel like there’s so much pressure on us guys for all clubs. For me, personally, going through the struggles was the best thing for me. I bet if you asked him the same thing, he’d probably say so.”

Sure, maybe now. And the Phillies play the Braves often enough that Bohm says he considered Riley’s path and thought, “Why can’t I do that? There’s no reason I can’t.”

But in April, when Bohm was wondering when Girardi might put him back in the lineup, he thought mostly about those long days on the back fields in spring training, where Dickerson drilled him with ground balls. He handled the tough hops, ranged for balls in the hole, and made accurate throws to first base. If he could do it in practice, why couldn’t he do it in a game?

Finally, Dickerson leveled with Bohm.

“I tried like hell to be a big-leaguer. I couldn’t be,” said Dickerson, whose seven-year career stopped in triple A. “It wasn’t for lack of trying. Sometimes things are just not going to work. At some point you’ve got to go out and you’ve got to perform. Because this is the ‘do’ level; this is not the ‘practice’ level. This is the level where you’re expected to do a job.

“Sooner or later, it’ll translate into a game. Or it won’t.”

Strangely, Bohm said, those words, spit through the roux of Dickerson’s Mississippi drawl, made him relax.

Bohm went from eight outs below average in April and May, according to Statcast, to one out above average in June, July, and August.

“It just kind of freed me up a little bit,” Bohm said of Dickerson’s message. “It let me not be working out there. I’m just playing. It made me say, ‘I can go make this play any time I want in practice. Why would I make it harder in a game because I’m thinking, I’m scared, I’m tense, whatever it may be? You know what you can do. Just go play. And if it’s not good enough, then fine, you can go home knowing that you did what you could and that was it.’”

So, there was Bohm on Saturday in St. Louis, leaping, lunging to his right, and snatching Nolan Arenado’s drive down the third-base line. It was the kind of play that Arenado, a nine-time Gold Glove third baseman, makes all the time for the Cardinals.

Bohm rolled over, sat on the grass, and slammed his glove on the ground twice. It was a show of emotion that typically comes out in Bohm during the bad times, like when he strikes out or makes an error or gets booed and blows off steam.

“To see him grow and figure out how to get on the other side of some of those valleys that we encounter often in this game is something that he never had to do before and had to learn kind of on the fly,” Rhys Hoskins said. “He had to do it under the brightest lights and in a market that we play in, which is honest. It’s an honest market. I’m proud of him for that.”

Across the field Tuesday, the Braves third baseman will surely relate.

“He just looks loose over there. He looks confident,” Riley said. “He’s very free flow. Everything’s moving smoothly. Props to him. He had to put in the work, and he’s done that. What he’s done this year has been incredible.”