Vance Worley, 2011 Phillies breakout rookie, still dreams of a big-league return

On a rainy day in San Diego, Vance Worley is like every other professional baseball player right now. He’s searching for a way to stay in shape.

The COVID-19 pandemic has closed most businesses, including the gym in the condo building where the former Phillies pitcher resides with his wife and 11-month-old son. All of his training equipment is back home in New Jersey; a week before non-essential travel was shut down and local governments began implementing stay-at-home mandates, the family flew out to California, where his wife works.

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“It’s a ghost town out there,” Worley said Tuesday during a phone conversation. “We’re right across the street from the shopping center. Wendy’s is like the only thing that has any life.”

So, Worley is getting creative. He managed to get access to a mound behind closed doors, and he’s been throwing into a screen. Well, he was, until he broke it the other day.

“It’s like, great, now what do I do? I have nothing to throw into,” Worley said, laughing. “It’s frustrating, but I know I’m not the only one. Everybody’s in the same boat.”

Worley’s career has taken him all over the country. The 32-year-old right-hander has pitched for eight MLB organizations since debuting with the Phillies in 2010. Philadelphia is where he experienced his greatest success. A third-round pick in 2008, Worley’s first extended opportunity came in 2011 on what would become the winningest team in franchise history.

“We knew we were gonna go out there and just roll guys,” Worley said. “And it was fun showing up to the park. It wasn’t like a job, you know?”

In 25 appearances (21 starts) during the 2011 season, Worley posted a 3.01 ERA, 1.230 WHIP, 8.1 strikeouts per nine innings and a 127 ERA+ in 131 2/3 innings. Worley, then 23, placed third in the National League Rookie of the Year voting behind the Braves’ Craig Kimbrel and Freddie Freeman; he finished the season with a higher WAR (3.5) than both players. His look and “Vanimal” nickname, first given to Worley by a strength coach his freshman year at Cal State-Long Beach, added another dimension to his game.

“He was a joy to have around,” Rich Dubee, the Phillies’ former pitching coach, said Wednesday from Florida. “He had the big smile. He had the ‘Vanimal’ on his glove, the goggles he pitched with.” (Worley recalled Shane Victorino passing around his glove after he got called up so all the Phillies knew his nickname.) “He was somewhat of a miniature Turk Wendell as far as his quirks. … I mean, he was a treat. He came to the big leagues and he fit right in.”

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Dubee appreciated how Worley kept his ears open and soaked up the experience. He learned from a talented pitching staff that featured Roy Halladay, Cliff Lee, Cole Hamels and Roy Oswalt.

“He had a good presence on the mound. He worked fairly quickly. He’s competitive,” Dubee said. “A fairly good strike thrower, not tremendous. I mean, he walked a few too many, too many deep counts that probably drove his pitch counts up, but for a rookie, he pitched phenomenally well for us and was on a hot streak. Our guys enjoyed playing behind him.”

“@Cindy610: @VANIMAL_49 look what I found in my office! 😄 pic.twitter.com/dEapKP0yEo” surprised u still have a copy laying around

— Vance Worley (@VANIMAL_46) June 4, 2014

Worley was putting together a solid follow-up year in 2012 — 23 starts, 4.20 ERA, 0.8 WAR, 96 ERA+ — when bone chips in his right elbow ended his season at the end of August. He had surgery and rehabbed in Philadelphia. Worley was expected to be ready for the 2013 season and had positioned himself to be part of the rotation. Instead, his Phillies career abruptly ended that December when he was traded to the Twins for Ben Revere.

The trade began a whirlwind stretch in Worley’s career. Between 2013-17, he pitched for four big-league teams and bounced back and forth from the majors to the minors, and the rotation to the bullpen. In 110 big-league appearances during that stretch, more than half (59) were out of the ‘pen. Mechanical adjustments helped Worley deliver his best post-Phillies season in his first year with the Pirates in 2014, as he recorded a 2.85 ERA and 1.5 WAR in 18 games (17 starts). But his consistency wavered after the Pirates moved him into a swing-man role the next year, a job he would later fill with the Orioles (2016) and Marlins (2017).

“I mean, you look at my career, I’m in the rotation, out of the rotation, back in, and as it went on, it got harder,” Worley said. “And the game was changing, and who knows with all these teams and all the scandals that are going on right now, who knows if I was getting picked. I don’t know. The ball was different in ’17, and that was really the last opportunity I had in the big leagues.”

Worley’s winding, 11-year professional career has mentally tested him. He had to learn how to deal with the unpredictable.

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“You just think, ‘Oh, you have your job and you do it,'” Worley said. “Well, you don’t expect to do every single role whenever they expect it because, I mean, it’s just kind of a roll of dice. It’s like, the starter is gonna last two hitters today, ‘Worley, get up.’ So basically from 2015 on, when I wasn’t starting, I had to be ready from the first pitch of the game to the last pitch of the game. And I could go two days, I could go two weeks and not touch the mound, and I had to be ready (laughs).

“As a player and a pitcher, I became tougher, and mentally had to grind to continue to compete.”

Worley sees the game changing and getting younger. As he reflected on his career, he said he had only one “what-if.” With the Mets organization in 2018, Worley had another surgery to remove bone chips from his elbow, cutting his season short after four Triple-A starts. Worley said the organization told him to head home to begin his rehab, and it would fly him back in a few weeks. With his rehab underway, he received a call from the club. Worley informed them he thought he’d return sooner than expected. The Mets weren’t calling for an update, however. They released him. After completing his rehab, Worley was healthy heading into the 2019 season. He kept in touch with his then-agent, asking when he could throw for teams to prove his elbow was good to go.

“Ultimately, I wind up firing him last year during the World Series because I got tired of him beating around the bush,” Worley said of the agent. “But I didn’t get any calls for (2019) spring (training). And he was like, ‘Oh, you know, teams just aren’t interested.’ It’s this, it’s that, you’re not that exciting, guys want to see the gun light up. … I learned that I don’t have to throw 100 mph to have success. I showed it, I did it. And he just goes, ‘Well, teams aren’t interested in that anymore.'”

Worley thought about taking the independent league route and trying to figure it out from there. But his first focus was on his family. Worley’s wife gave birth to their son on April 30 last year. At that point, he still hadn’t received any calls to play for an affiliated team. Then, on May 5, the Rockies called. They were interested. Worley considered the opportunity, but chose to stay home for the 2019 season. His wife was recovering from a C-section and his son was struggling to keep weight.

“So do I go or do I stay? And I think, ultimately, I made the right decision to stay home to be with my wife and kid and make sure they’re healthy and good, and they are now,” said Worley, who also has a 5-year-old son who lives in the Philadelphia area with his former wife. “Hopefully, that wasn’t the dagger for me. But I think that’s really my only ‘what-if,’ because I had an opportunity to get a job and I didn’t get any calls this year, and here I am still training.

“I think I’m closer to what they’re looking for now,” he said, “but baseball’s on hold.”

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Worley hasn’t abandoned his goal to get back to the big leagues. That quest is set to resume in independent ball with the Somerset Patriots, whom he signed with two weeks ago, though the coronavirus could disrupt those plans.

“I’m not going to go out like that,” Worley said. “I want to go out on my terms, and hopefully I get to. I might not. I might just play indy ball and nothing happens, or I play and I get another opportunity in Triple A and ultimately another shot in the big leagues. … I can only go out and do what I do and if somebody likes it, great. If they don’t, I had my opportunity. I came back.”

(Top photo of Vance Worley in 2011: Morry Gash / Associated Press) 

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