ANAHEIM — There aren’t many trades in sports history that qualified as win-wins once hindsight offered its two cents. On Aug. 2, 2022, the Phillies and Angels completed one of them.
Now, with Brandon Marsh returning to Anaheim for the first time since that trade, and with Marsh and Logan O’Hoppe each established as productive regulars for their respective club, everyone involved would be hard-pressed to say they’d have it any other way.
“It was a good trade, I think, for both sides,” Phillies manager Rob Thomson said Monday. “We get Marsh, they get O’Hoppe … I think it worked out for everybody.”
Those two understood the circumstances in 2022. The Phillies had a hole in center field, J.T. Realmuto under contract for three more full seasons and a prized catcher consequently blocked in the minors. The Angels were rebuilding.
So between the two trade pieces, there’s no vindictiveness, no praying on each other’s downfall to make an ex regret a breakup, if you will. Marsh and O’Hoppe have never played together in the same organization, but they’ve gotten to know each other since they swapped coasts a few hours before the ’22 deadline. They think highly of each other, personally. So they root for each other.
Perhaps there’s a tiny self-serving element to it all, as well.
“Makes me look good when he does good, you know?” Marsh laughed Monday. “But all jokes aside, he’s a great guy, great ballplayer … So yeah, I wish him the best, always.”
“You pull for a guy like that,” O’Hoppe told Phillies Nation Monday. “And you want him to do well, especially with people over there that you care about.” He said that Realmuto, one of the best catchers in baseball for the better part of a decade, has helped him the past couple offseasons, and that he still keeps in touch with Bryson Stott, his closest friend in the Phillies organization. He laments that baseball’s human element is often overlooked; he cares about the many Phillies people he’s grown close to and he wants them to succeed.
Marsh included.
“Except for tonight and tomorrow and Wednesday.”
They’ve each come a long way since that day. Marsh is two years (plus change) O’Hoppe’s elder, but he was no seasoned veteran on trade day, beard length be damned.
He said Monday he was “such a baby” when he was still with the Angels. That, he says, is the biggest thing that’s changed since he was dealt. Nevermind the 169-point OPS jump, as of Tuesday morning — it’s the experience, the knowledge, the familiarity with a big-league routine that most distinguishes his Phillies stint from his Angels one.
“I feel like I’m the same player,” Marsh said. “I just know a little bit more.”
Selected out West Islip, N.Y.’s St. John the Baptist High School in the 23rd round of the 2018 draft, O’Hoppe’s name had come up in trade rumors since Realmuto signed his five-year, $115.5 million free-agent contract in the 2020-21 offseason. There were discussions — more on that soon — but nothing materialized.
He’d only known one organization as a professional. Suddenly, O’Hoppe had a new destination: Madison, Ala. and the Rocket City Trash Pandas.
“Fear of the unknown, for sure,” O’Hoppe told Phillies Nation when asked his initial reaction to the trade. “It was newness to a whole ‘nother level, you know? But luckily, the team I went down there with in Rocket City was incredible, and the manager down there I loved and is a close friend of mine still today. So, a lot changed, but I really wouldn’t change any of it.”
O’Hoppe, though, was almost forced to adapt to that change of scenery — and face that fear — more than half a year earlier. Phillies president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski told Phillies Nation Monday that Philadelphia had offered the exact same trade, Marsh for O’Hoppe, to Los Angeles the prior winter.
“The Angels wouldn’t make it.”
When they agreed several months later, it was met with some skepticism, particularly out east. O’Hoppe was the club’s highest-ranked position player prospect, hitting to an .889 OPS at Double-A Reading. Marsh was slashing .226/.284/.353 through 93 MLB games that season. His numbers the year prior were better, though marginally and in a smaller sample.
But the Phillies had their intel. Dombrowski had coveted Marsh since his time in the Boston Red Sox front office while the outfielder was in high school, starring also in football. The Phillies’ scouting department liked him, too. Hitting coach Kevin Long reviewed video and saw something to work with. They had heard, Dombrowski said, that Marsh was willing to work.
The Phillies needed a center fielder, and the market at that spot was particularly dry. Eleven years into a postseason drought, it was time to make a move. It still wasn’t easy. Dombrowski said that some in the organization “just didn’t want to trade Logan O’Hoppe.” They liked him too much.
“I said, ‘If we’re gonna trade Logan,’” Dombrowski recalled, “‘we’re gonna have to get a good young positional player in return.’”
That’s what they believed Marsh could be. The rest is history. Dombrowski doesn’t regularly watch much west coast baseball — it’s difficult, for obvious time-zone reasons — but he’s well aware of the talent he gave up.
“He’s a good player, there’s no question about it,” he said. “And I’m sure that they’re thrilled that they have him. I mean, it’s like — me, I wish we had both of them. But it doesn’t work that way.”
Tuesday is Logan O’Hoppe Bobblehead Night at Angel Stadium. “It’s obviously super surreal,” O’Hoppe the human said. He’s happy with how it turned out, especially because the bobblehead has more hair than he thinks is warranted.
There’s no telling when Citizens Bank Park’s first Logan O’Hoppe Bobblehead Night would’ve been, had all of it gone differently. Probably not for a while, and that’s no knock on O’Hoppe. Again: circumstance. But O’Hoppe isn’t driven by bobbleheads, stature or spotlight.
“That’s stuff I don’t pay much mind to,” he said. “Because, I mean, that’s a lot of the outside stuff, and what matters is the product on the field.”
And neither he nor Marsh puts much stock into composing one of the few win-win trades in recent baseball memory. Away from the narratives and trade evaluations and the rarity of a deal that benefits both sides (perhaps equally), O’Hoppe and Marsh aren’t motivated by holding up their end of that bargain. They’re in new places now, and for their own reasons, each is better off because of it.
“It’s cool that both sides got what they needed and what they wanted,” Marsh said. “But, I mean, I’m a Phillie now. That’s really all I’m really worried about.”
But all that above chatter will still exist. It’s the nature of the business. And the difficulty of projecting the future in a sport as unpredictable as baseball makes it easy to appreciate when everyone gets it right.
“We got a good player, we gave up a good player,” Dombrowski said. “And that’s how it’s sometimes supposed to work.”
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