CLEARWATER, Fla. — Noah Song was supposed to be deployed to Japan this month.
Instead he’s been deployed to Phillies camp.
Song, a 25-year-old right-handed pitcher, was the Phils’ selection in December’s Rule 5 draft. It was a surprising pick because he had been in the navy since 2019. Not only had he gone three years without playing pro ball, he’d gone three years without throwing off of a mound.
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The Red Sox left him unprotected, not expecting another team to select a pitcher who had appeared only in rookie ball in 2019. But Dave Dombrowski and the Phillies’ front office saw too much upside to pass up. Song went 11-1 with a 1.44 ERA his final season at Navy. He was drafted by Boston in the fourth round but was valued as a first-rounder if not for the military commitment. Dombrowski at that point was leading the Red Sox front office, which saw top-of-the-rotation upside in Song.
The Phillies announced Wednesday that Song would be joining them after having his status changed to selective reserves. Song put in a request “nine or 10 months ago” to change his status to reserves and hadn’t heard much since. He didn’t know if his request would be fulfilled quickly, whether it would take more time or might be flat-out denied.
The status change went through early last week and he arrived at Phillies camp Thursday, all smiles.
It’s a situation nobody expected and suddenly one of the most interesting of camp.
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“As every year passed, a major-league experience was getting further and further from reality, I felt like,” Song said Thursday on a picnic bench at the Phillies’ spring training complex. “Coming back to baseball, it was something I’d always hoped, but I still enjoyed what I did in the navy a lot. The group of people was awesome, the community was great. So I really can’t complain one way or the other.”
Song was a naval flight officer. As recently as January, he and the Phillies thought he was heading across the world for his first deployment.
“I was training on the P8-Poseidon, helping with a mission there. It’s one of the navy’s big wings,” he said. “If you can imagine a Boeing 737, that’s the air frame that it is. They just stripped out all the general aviation components, including seats and everything, and added on mission equipment like sensors and things we need to utilize.”
When a team selects a player in the major-league portion of the Rule 5 draft as the Phillies did with Song in 2022, with Shane Victorino and Dave Hollins years earlier, it costs $100,000. It comes with the stipulation that the selecting team must keep the player (if healthy) on its active roster all season. If he doesn’t make the team or loses his big-league roster spot at any point that first year, he must be offered back to his original team for $50,000.
So, from the Phillies’ perspective, the worst-case scenario is losing 50 grand to the Red Sox.
The best-case scenario is developing Song into a pitcher that helps, a pitcher that flashed first-round upside in the New York-Penn League as recently as three years ago.
“I do wonder about what my new ceiling might be,” Song said. “I try not to think about too many numbers or measurements because I don’t want to set anything where I don’t make it or I push myself to the limits and get hurt. The Phillies want me to be healthy, too.”
The organization will be protective of Song to avoid injury as best as they can after his long layoff. There’s a possibility he appears in Grapefruit League games, manager Rob Thomson said, but that’s still a ways away.
Song threw a bullpen session at a local high school last week, his first mound work in three years.
“It felt rough,” he said, “felt like I was learning how to walk again. I tried to play catch as much as I could, but the navy is a full-time job so I wasn’t going to sacrifice anything that I had as far as being competent or proficient in my job. But tried to throw as much as I could.
“At the end of the day, nothing really is going to get me game-ready because I’m not game-ready, frankly. It feels like it’s been a while, definitely. Throwing today felt like that, too. I try to remember that I played baseball for a long time before this.”
Song would have had six years left of active duty with his aviation contract. Instead, he has 12 years of reserve time. His commitments are one weekend per month and two weeks per year.
Beyond the challenge of getting Song up to speed, the Phillies face the challenge of keeping him on their active roster all season (if healthy). Hard to do with a guy who’s never pitched above rookie ball and hasn’t pitched competitively since Gabe Kapler was managing the Phillies.
But there is some precedent. Dombrowski pointed out that in 1985, Pat Gillick carried two Rule 5 picks on his Blue Jays roster in Manny Lee and Lou Thornton. Neither had appeared above A-ball. Both stayed on Toronto’s active roster all season, playing sparingly. Lee went on to play in the bigs for a decade.
That’s an obvious exception, and it’s much more difficult to do these days with the specialization and importance of bullpens.
“A lot of this has come quickly,” Dombrowski said. “We’ve been interested, we’ve been in contact, but we really had no control over the date he was given.
“He hasn’t pitched in three years and we knew when we drafted him that it was a longshot. The reality is that it’s a gamble. I do not know when he picks up a ball and throws off a mound once his arm’s in good enough shape, whether he’s going to throw 85 or 95 mph. But to me, it was worth the gamble, it was worth the risk.”
Song might someday have one of the most unique stories in major-league history. Some early chapters might take place in Philadelphia.
Or it might not work out for the Phillies and cost them the grand total of $50,000.
“To be honest, I had heard of the Rule 5 draft before but I didn’t know anything about it,” Song admitted. “I didn’t know any of the rules associated with it. I definitely didn’t think I was going to get picked. Nobody expected it.
“I think really the most important thing is recognizing the fact that I really enjoy both (baseball and the navy). I looked at it like I had two Plan A’s. When I got my wings, I was able to accomplish one of those. And now getting here, this is a great organization. I feel really blessed and really lucky.”
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