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Backstop Josh Phegley Making Strong Bid for Return to Bigs

July 24, 2014

By Pete Cava
PBR Indiana Correspondent

It’s a given, like egg rolls at a Chinese restaurant, Fourth of July fireworks, or James Patterson novels on bestseller lists:  in baseball, the tough guys wear shin guards, masks and chest protectors.  

“Catchers are the most beat-up, bruised, broken, knurled players on the field,” observed former Major League umpire Ron Luciano in The Ump Strikes Back.  

Josh Phegley of the Charlotte Knights has the scars to prove it. Literally.     

“It comes with the position,” said Charlotte manager Joel Skinner, who caught for the White Sox, Yankees and Indians from 1983 to 1991.   “Josh is a gritty kid.  It’s a joy to have someone like that on your team.” 

Phegley, a 26-year-old Terre Haute native, returned to Indiana for Charlotte’s four-game series with the Indianapolis Indians, July 21-24.  He came to Victory Field with 14 home runs, a .280 average and a 14-game hitting streak. 

It’s no surprise that Joshua Aaron Phegley started playing baseball when he was five years old.  His sister Jennifer played softball at St. Mary-of-the-Woods College.  John, his older brother, was an outfielder at Purdue.  “We’ve all been pretty good athletes,” said Josh.  “My dad played baseball in high school.  My mom, she did some basketball, and she was a pretty good high school volleyball player.” 

At Terre Haute North High School, Josh starred for the baseball and football teams.  “I was a running back, and I played some outside linebacker and corner on defense,” he said.  “I had some good years there.”

A shortstop in Little League, Phegley switched to catching at the request of Terre Haute North baseball coach Shawn Turner.  “I caught as a freshman, and I just didn’t hit that well,” Josh remembered.  “They DHed for me and let the pitcher hit.  Sophomore year, I hit a little better.  And then junior year, I think I hit over .400 and had a pretty good year.  Senior year, I put it all together.”

Phegley hit .592 that season with 13 homers and 50 runs batted in as the Patriots won Class 4A sectional and regional titles.  He finished ahead of Evansville Central shortstop Preston Mattingly (the son of Yankee legend and current Dodgers manager Don Mattingly) in the balloting for Hoosier Diamond magazine’s 2006 Mr. Baseball award.

The day before the annual North-South All-Star Series at Rose-Hulman in Terre Haute, Phegley came down with food poisoning.  “I was vomiting all night long,” Josh remembered.  “The next day my stomach was so sore I could hardly stand.  The coach came up to me and he was like, ‘Can you play?  Because no one’s going to forgive me if I don’t start Mr. Baseball!’  And I told him I was going to try to play, and I ended up hitting a home run in my first at-bat.”

His courageous performance earned Phegley the 2006 All-Star Series MVP award.  Later that summer, he helped Terre Haute’s Wayne Newton Post #346 to the American Legion World Series in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where it finished second to a team from Metairie, La. 

Tracy Smith took over as Indiana University’s baseball coach in 2006 and made Phegley his first recruit.  Josh won the starting catcher’s post as a freshman in 2007, but finished the season with no home runs and a .232 average.  “It was some growing pains,” said Phegley.  “College pitching is a whole lot better than high school pitching, so I tried to make those adjustments and went through a roller coaster ride that year.”

In the summer of 2007, he went to the vaunted Cape Cod League to play for the Wareham, Mass., Gatekeepers.  “We knew he could hit and throw,” Wareham manager Cooper Farris told SouthCoastToday.com.  “But he didn’t hit real well with the aluminum (bat) this spring, so we didn’t know what to expect there.”

At Farris’s urging, Phegley shortened his stroke and wound up making the Cape League All-Star team.  “I went there and got a fresh start,” he said.  “Once I started playing well, I knew I could play with the best in the country and things just really started rolling.” 

A broken hand ended Josh’s season.  “I was scheduled to fly home,” he said, “but the day before the flight, I had appendicitis.  So I had to stay there and have surgery.” 

Back in Bloomington that fall, misfortune struck again while Phegley was taking part in conditioning drills.  “We were running around the indoor facility,” he said, “and I ran into someone.  It jammed my shoulder and frayed my labrum.” 

He underwent shoulder surgery on December 4.  “I started our first game on February 22, 2008,” he said, “so it was a quick turnaround.”

As a sophomore in 2008 Phegley started all of Indiana’s 61 games.  He batted .438 with 15 homers and 80 RBI and was a unanimous pick for first-team All-Big Ten honors.  “Going from no home runs and hitting .230-something my freshman year to the year I had my sophomore year was incredible,” he said.  

Phegley was first-team All-Big Ten again in 2009 with a 17-homer, 66-RBI, .344 season as the Hoosiers won the Big Ten Tournament.  “We rolled through that,” he said.  “To bring home a Big Ten championship to IU hadn’t been done in a long time.  It was a special group.”

In the June 2009 draft, the Chicago White Sox made Phegley a supplemental first round pick (38th overall).  “Just a few years before, you wanted to play college ball somewhere,” he said.  “Then, to have the freshman year that I had, which was horrible.  Then, you’re thinking, ‘You’re going to go in some of the top rounds’ – it was kind of like a roller coaster ride that just kept building.  And then to be selected in the supplemental round was just awesome.”     

Breaking in with Kannapolis (low-A South Atlantic) in 2009, Phegley was assigned to Winston-Salem (high-A Carolina) for 2010.  During spring training, he noticed something unusual.  “From carrying my catcher’s bag over my shoulder, I’d have a stripe of red dots,” he said.  “Then I started seeing them on my back.”

Just after the start of the regular season, Phegley took a foul ball off his thigh.  “As a catcher, that’s a daily thing,” he said.  But this time the bruise was the size of a basketball, and the discoloration continued to grow.  “It was like a fresh bruise every day,” he added. 

The morning after the sixth game of the year, Josh visited a Winston-Salem clinic.  “They ran my bloodwork,” he said, “and before I got home they called.  They said ‘You need to get yourself to the hospital right now.’” 

The diagnosis was idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura – ITP, a platelet disorder resulting in blood clotting issues.  “‘Thrombocytopenia’ deals with the platelets,” explained Phegley.  “‘Purpura’ is the red dots you see from it.  ‘Idiopathic’ means there’s no known cause for it.” 

Those red dots were the result of ruptured capillaries due to thin blood.  “My platelet count was dangerously low,” he said.  “The normal blood platelet count is between 150,000 and 350,000.  I had the lowest reading you could have, without it being zero.”

Josh was confined to a hospital bed.  “You cut yourself, what stops you from bleeding is your platelets,” he said.  “And I didn’t have any. They told me, ‘Even brushing your teeth, your gums could start to bleed,’  You feel like you’re in top physical condition, and you hear that you could be dying … It was kind of scary.”

The first stage of treatment involved corticosteroids, which boosted Phegley’s platelet production.  The next step was weekly IV treatments that lasted six hours.  “Then they started giving me shots,” he said, “which boosted my platelets really high.”

After six weeks with no workouts, Phegley returned to active duty.  He saw action in 48 games for Winston-Salem, Bristol (rookie Appalachian) and Birmingham (Double-A Southern) and batted a combined .284.  He was scheduled to catch for the Peoria Saguaros of the Arizona Fall League, but those red dots returned before the season got underway.   

The injections Phegley had been taking involved risks.  “They didn’t know the long-term effects,” he said.  “They’d used them on cancer patients and older people, but not on anyone young.   It got to the point where I didn’t want to keep taking them, if there was another option.”

That option was a splenectomy, since doctors believed Josh’s platelets were being destroyed in his spleen – a non-vital organ that acts primarily as a blood filter.  “It was a joint decision,” said Josh.  “I thought if I wanted to be ready for next season, I need to get home, have the operation, and have plenty of time to recover.” 

The surgery took place in Chicago on November 5, 2010, leaving Josh with more scars to go with his souvenirs from the appendix and shoulder operations.  True to catching tradition, he wasn’t out of action for long.  “I was doing baseball stuff within two weeks,” he said. 

Ready by Opening Day of 2011, Phegley appeared in 94 games for Birmingham and 22 more for Charlotte (Triple-A International) and batted .242.   “They said I improved greatly defensively,” he said.  “But to make it through the whole year after what I’d been through was a personal victory.”  

The 2012 season was even better, and Phegley was named to the IL squad for the Triple-A All-Star Game.  “I’d never been an all-star in professional baseball,” he said.  “To make it at this level was really something.” 

Phegley helped Charlotte reach the IL Governors Cup, where the Knights beat Indianapolis in the first round before losing to the Pawtucket Red Sox in the championship round.  He averaged .266 with 22 doubles.  A .996 fielding percentage earned him a Rawlings minor league Golden Glove, and proved he could handle a pitching staff.    Baseball America ranked him eighteenth among White Sox prospects.   

After the Sox decided not to re-sign veteran backstop A.J. Pierzynski for 2013, Tyler Flowers took over catching duties.  While Flowers struggled that summer in Chicago, Phegley was batting .316 with 15 homers in 61 games at Charlotte.

On July 5, 2013, the White Sox summoned Phegley to Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, Fla.  “You get the call, and you're surprised and shocked, and happy and nervous all at the same time,” he said.  “My parents had just driven to Colorado to see my brother.  I'm like, 'No one's gonna be able to make it!'  So everybody scrambled.  Everything worked out and we got everyone's flights in.  I had my mom and dad there, my wife Jessica, my brother and his wife, my sister and her husband.” 

Also on hand was Phegley’s old high school coach, Shawn Turner.  “I didn't expect to see him,” Josh said.  “I think he was down there with his son, who was playing in a tournament.  That was just good timing.  It was a dream come true to be called up to the big leagues and see the support you have – making your debut and having that many people be there for it.”

In his debut that night against Tampa Bay, Phegley went 1-for-3 with a pair of RBI in an 8-3 loss to the Rays.  He finished the year with a .206 average in 65 games.  “I thought I started off pretty well,” he said.  “I wasn't really happy at the end of the year with my performance.  It's such a mental game, the game of baseball.  You can really get in your own head, trying too hard.”

With Tyler Flowers hitting .195 in 84 contests, the Sox sought catching help in the offseason.   During the Rule 5 Draft at baseball’s Winter Meetings, they selected catcher Adrian Nieto from the Washington Nationals organization.  Toward the end of Spring Training, Chicago manager Robin Ventura named Flowers his starting catcher, with Nieto as the backup.  Phegley was optioned to Charlotte. 

“It was disappointing, but you've got to get over it,” he said.  “If you come down to Triple-A, thinking about how you should have been in the big leagues out of camp, you're going to make it harder on yourself.  You just have to play hard and prove to them that you belong up there.”

Phegley was leading the International League in games caught, total chances, putouts and assists, when he was named to the International League team for the Triple-A All-Star Game.  “That’s the third year in a row,” noted Josh, who went 1-for-2 and scored a run in the IL’s 7-3 win over the Pacific Coast League at Durham on July 16.  ”As long as I’m down in Triple-A, I want to play hard and do as well as I can,” he said.

With his wife Jessica enrolled in a nursing program at Marian University, Josh currently lives in Indianapolis – but he’s hopes to return to Chicago before long.  “The main purpose for a catcher, obviously, is handling a pitching staff,” he said, “and I think that’s what they’re looking for.  I’ve been a pretty good hitter the last few years, so I don’t think they’re worried about that.  I know I've got more in the tank than what I showed up there (last year), and I'm waiting for another opportunity.”        

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