Ryan Howard Is Not a Creep, a Cheat, a Liar or a Fraud

HE'S THE FUTURE of the Phillies. Scratch that — he’s the future not just of the Phillies, but of baseball, a 265-pound jolt of power and innocence that our national game seems in perpetual need of, a great player and a wonderful guy, everyone says so, risen up not a moment too soon. 

On a late-February morning, however, Ryan Howard is sitting in a corner of the spring-training clubhouse in Clearwater kidding around about ... well, you don’t want to know. Let’s just say he’s having a very big laugh with his teammates. He’s in his element, he’s relaxed, he’s happy, let’s cut him a little slack after the ride he gave us last year. Don’t care what they’re cutting up over, Ryan and Shane and the others. They’re kids. Let’s let them be.

Well, they’re not kids. They’re Phillies. They’re ours. And this one shocked us, coming out of a minor-league purgatory as the affable reincarnation of Babe Ruth himself, although black and missing the Bambino’s bull-in-a-china-shop style. He’s free also of the body-sculpting drugs that the recent bevy of home-run record bashers ingested — in fact, he sports a Ruthian paunch, and furthermore breaks out an electric smile whenever he feels like it, which is often. By God, an actual person, playing the game and having fun. And he is a great hitter, not only a great hitter but a great home-run hitter, the hardest thing to do in all of sport. The question is, is that possible, these two things together … a great player and a nice guy? Is that possible in Philadelphia? In ... anywhere?

This is why we need to know what he’s really like. Find the crack before it finds us. So there they are, checking out a laptop, Ryan and his cronies, studying some graphic on Chris’s computer with the focus of day traders ... giggling day traders.

We could cut him a break. It’s late February, the beginning of a new season, we could actually wait until he starts whaling away at pitches again. But that’s not our way. So here we have Ryan Howard, 27 years old — he really isn’t a kid, in fact he’s got a six-year-old son — commanding his end of the clubhouse, the savior of the game he plays as if his life depends on it and, at the same time, as if it is actually a game, which is not a paradox but the essential answer to why he is so good. We zero in, on the day before the official start of spring training — the laptop’s been put away, but Ryan is still holding court, still making his buddies giggle over …

Panties. They are cracking up over … underwear.