A New Hope

Can the Phillies' first-rounder overcome his privileged upbringing?

by E. James Beale

Neal Santos THE CHOSEN ONE: Recent (as in last Friday) Germantown Friends School grad and Phillies draftee Jesse Biddle faces reporters at a June 10 press conference in the basement of Citizens Bank Park.

[ grown-ass men ]

Three hectic days after the Philadelphia Phillies selected Germantown Friends School (GFS) left-hander Jesse Biddle in the first round of the Major League Baseball draft June 7,Biddle met Charlie Manuel, the old-school manager of the hometown team. Shortly after the encounter, Manuel sat back and offered his first impression of the newest Phillie: "He's big."

It was a compliment.

Biddle, whose "6-foot-5, 235-pound left-hander" description is used so frequently it might as well be his last name, is in fact big, and has always been so. He claims he was the second largest baby in the history of his hospital — and looking at him, you'd be hard-pressed to doubt him. He has broad shoulders, a filled-out chest and legs built like twin gunpowder kegs, all of which makes scouts drool. When Eric Valent, the Phillies' area evaluator primarily responsible for finding Biddle, introduced him in the media interview room June 10 in the basement of Citizens Bank Park, he used the words "big," "physical" or "size" six times in a 61-second talk. His size was the first thing Jimmy Rollins, whose wife also graduated from GFS, mentioned, too: "They said he was 6-5, 235," the 170-pound Rollins told me before a recent game at Citizens Bank Park, shaking his head in amazement. "That's a grown-ass man."

Big and good: Should the Phillies be equating those two? After all, baseball is more a game of skill than force, and as Moneyball has taught us, scouts have been wrong before. It was a question Biddle asked himself as the draft approached: Sure, his size tantalized Valent, but would it really help him on the field?

For two years, Biddle dragged himself to post-practice workouts, where he packed on 45 pounds of muscle. He wanted to know if it was all worth it. So he found out.

Last month, with the help of a schoolmate, Danny Ceisler, Biddle tried to calculate if the scouts' obsession with size was merit-based. Taking into account the elevation of the major-league mound and historical examples, like Will White of the Cincinnati Red Stockings, the pair looked at pitchers in three weight classes — below 210 pounds, 211-229 pounds and Biddle's 230-plus — and charted their velocity, durability and success. Ceisler wrote up the project for their statistics class, and Biddle did the math. They got an A-minus.

"Honestly, the draft had a lot to do with it," Biddle explains, taking a moment away from chatting with Chase Utley and Marlins All-Star right-hander Josh Johnson during a pre-game batting practice to break down the school project. "I noticed that when scouts would hear '6-5, 235,' they'd pay attention."

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Ceisler, standing beside Biddle on the field this afternoon, chimes in: "We wanted to know if there was any basis for that."

There was, sort of. The two determined that the extra weight correlated strongly enough with velocity for the 18-year-old lefty to stay in the weight room, but not enough with success for it to dominate his thoughts. It helped get his fastball to 96 mph — Biddle also throws a nasty slider, a developing changeup and a get-me-by curve — but as he has been plagued by control issues, the extra bulk never helped him place it.

This process — questioning conventional wisdom, applying academic know-how to figure it out and drawing your own conclusions — is quintessentially GFS.

The school — which I, like Biddle and Ceisler, attended from kindergarten through graduation, though years ahead of the class of 2010 — demands that students think critically and apply academic learning to real-world problems. I've seen it produce smart, articulate, well-rounded individuals.

When Biddle charmed a room full of reporters with one-liners and earnest talk about studying the media relations of stars before him, the press box was impressed that such a young kid could seem so mature. That surprised me. Of course he could speak in public, I thought. GFS kids are supposed to be that way.

What they're not supposed to be are professional baseball players.

In the 165-year history of GFS, a consistent feeder for the Ivy League, Biddle will be the school's first major pro athlete. When Biddle enrolled in kindergarten, it was more likely that by his graduation last Friday he could read Homer in Greek than that he would be a first-round draft pick.

"[GFS] is known for cutting off the rough-and-tumble boy in the third and fourth grade and snuffing the super-jock self-image," says David Biddle, Jesse's father.

By stifling alpha-male attitudes in class, refusing to bend its academic standards for athletes or simply not fielding teams competitive enough to keep its stars, GFS sees most of its elite athletes leave. Athletes are singled out by teachers who feel that their priorities are skewed, and a night game on Wednesday is never an acceptable excuse for a late paper due on Thursday.

In fact, amid the celebration over Biddle's success, there is a twinge of regret that, once he goes pro, the school won't be able to boast a 100 percent college attendance rate for the class of 2010. "I had one woman who told me that if he were her son, she'd make sure he went to college," says Della Micah, the school's director of college guidance.

He won't, but he nonetheless thinks his educational background will be a plus. "I think mentally I'm going to be head and shoulders above most [other draftees]," Biddle says matter-of-factly. "I go to these big workouts or showcases, and I look at what the best guys are doing and what they have up top. I think that is something I have on them."

He's not the only one. Adam Karon, Biddle's agent, says he made a point of sending Jesse to workouts without handlers so teams could see his maturity. The Phillies did. Marti Wolever, who as the Phillies' director of scouting has seen plenty of high school seniors, addresses this directly: "When you listen to him speak, you understand he's a little bit ahead of where most high school seniors are."

But at the end of the day, professional baseball teams don't care what you got on your SATs. And being perceived as a brain can be a disadvantage. Ask Doug Glanville, the former Phillies center fielder who went from Penn to the majors and recently authored a book, The Game from Where I Stand, about his journey from academia to the show.

"Immediately I got the label of being uncommitted and too smart for my own good," he says from his home in Chicago. "Teams prefer that you have limited options. An organization wants a player where baseball is their only real path."

For Biddle, baseball isn't the only path. He could have gone to any college in the nation with a baseball program. He's also a Biddle, which in and of itself is something of a big deal. The Biddles came to the area in the 1600s and have been prominent figures in the city ever since. His lineage includes diplomats, congressmen, a U.S. attorney general, a bassist for The Roots — and now a professional baseball player. If Biddle wanted to pursue a path that doesn't end at Broad and Pattison, he most certainly could. But he doesn't.

Neal Santos

After the draft, Biddle made no ploys for more money; he told anyone who would listen that he planned to sign, and to sign quickly. "The best way to get to the major leagues is to play as soon as you can right out of high school," he said in his first public statement in a Phillies jersey, "and while the signing bonus money is very helpful, that only means so much."

Where he's headed next, he won't have choices. Minor-league baseball is a regimented, competitive, goal-oriented process. Its "do this, do that" boot-camp nature may help ball clubs figure out which players are ready for the majors, but it's not altogether intellectually stimulating. Biddle spent his childhood in a world where the fact that he's smart and interested counted in his favor. Now, and for the first time in his life, his new coaches won't want to hear, "Why?" He'll be surrounded by guys who have been singularly focused on baseball their entire lives. Guys who don't have Biddle's options.

"I was crying that he wasn't going to go [to college] this morning," David Biddle says a few hours after his son was drafted — which, not for nothing, guaranteed his son a reported $1.16 million payday. "He'll make great friends in the pros, but it won't be the same." We're standing in the atrium outside of GFS's fieldhouse as Biddle's college-bound classmates to-and-fro around us.

He pauses, crossing his arms and raising his eyes to watch his son greet well-wishers and autograph-seekers, ranging from nursery-school students to Dick Wade, the school's headmaster. Then, quietly, he continues: "I actually stood here with those guys, the seniors he was on stage with, and I told them, 'He's not going to make the friends you make, he's not going to get to go out partying, and he's not going to be able to get laid the way you guys get laid.' You need to recognize that you're his boys, and you can't let him slip away."

It was the reaction of a GFS parent, not the parent of a first-round pick.

Biddle, who readily admits that he's "never really been anywhere else," will soon be out of his comfort zone. Still, it probably won't be the end of the world, as he does have a couple of things going for him: Biddle averaged 2.4 strikeouts per inning in high school. He's been compared to stars like Clayton Kershaw, Andy Pettitte and Cliff Lee. Though he's known for his pitching, longtime GFS coach Chris Coxe cites him as the best hitter GFS has ever produced.

And, of course, he's big, and he's going to get bigger. "I want to max out at 245 [pounds]," he says with the confidence of a man who knows what he's saying, because he has the data to back him up.

(e.james.beale@citypaper.net)