The Phillies’ brass have a Johan Rojas question, but they’ve faced a similar dilemma before

NASHVILLE — Eight years ago, as Dave Dombrowski put together the roster for his first Red Sox team, he inherited a lineup with big-name veterans (David Ortiz, Dustin Pedroia, Hanley Ramírez), young future stars (Mookie Betts, Xander Bogaerts), and one major question.

Who would play center field?

The leading candidate: Jackie Bradley Jr., a defensive whiz but a .213 hitter with a .639 OPS through 785 major-league plate appearances. Dombrowski could have sought outside help. Instead, the Sox chose Bradley — and wound up making the playoffs three years in a row and winning the World Series in 2018.

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“Jackie was elite in center field,” Diamondbacks general manager Mike Hazen, Dombrowski’s top lieutenant in 2016, said Tuesday during a break at the winter meetings. “I don’t know how many runs he saved, but it seemed like he saved runs every single night. It’s a real thing.”

It’s also similar to what the Phillies, with Dombrowski running baseball operations, are wrestling with now. They have a star-studded roster, World Series aspirations, and a dilemma in center field, where Johan Rojas’ defensive gifts are weighed against his limitations as a hitter.

Rojas, 23, is a few years younger than Bradley then (26). He also has a fraction of the experience (164 plate appearances after getting called up in July from double A). And Bradley got sent back to the minors multiple times in 2013, 2014, and 2015 before finally sticking in 2016.

But two Bradley-esque numbers stick out from Rojas’ rookie season:

So, Dombrowski has said the Phillies won’t hand center field back to Rojas without him winning the job in spring training. But that also begs the question of what they will do if he doesn’t, and on Day 2 of these meetings at the Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center, they weren’t closer to an answer.

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“During the regular season, his at-bats were really good,” manager Rob Thomson said, noting that Rojas batted .302. “But it wasn’t just that. It was how he worked the count, how he used the field. I know in the postseason the numbers weren’t very good. But if you look at the at-bats, they were better than the numbers.

“So, I think this kid’s got some upside.”

Thomson has experience with this sort of thing, too. He coached third base for contending Yankees teams that put Brett Gardner at the bottom of the order early in his career and asked him mostly to catch everything in center field while a collection of big-name boppers slugged all around him.

Could the Phillies take that approach with Rojas next season? Possibly, Thomson said. They do have big bats throughout the lineup, from Bryce Harper and Kyle Schwarber to Trea Turner and Nick Castellanos. And they did score nearly 800 runs last season.

Thomson said there are similarities between Gardner’s early years and Rojas.

“When Gardy first came up, we moved Johnny Damon to left field and Gardy took over center field, which, at that point in Johnny’s career, Gardy was a better defender,” Thomson said. “We hit him ninth and just let him go.”

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But Thomson also cited the Phillies’ internal alternatives. Brandon Marsh could go back to center field after sliding to left last summer. Thomson said he has “full confidence” in Marsh’s ability to play every day, even though he struggles against left-handed pitching. Thomson mentioned Cristian Pache and Jake Cave, but they profile as reserve outfielders.

The Phillies will attempt to thread the needle between acquiring an outfielder who can handle center or left but also wouldn’t block Rojas’ path to a job. It’s a difficult balance, and it may not come to fruition until later in the offseason after an outfielder with designs on an everyday job loses a game of free-agent musical chairs.

Or maybe the Phillies come around to the notion that Rojas’ defense makes them better regardless of what he does at the plate, like the Dombrowski-led Red Sox did with Bradley in 2016.

Never mind that Bradley had his best season, with career-highs in homers (26) and OPS (.836), or that it was an outlier. He batted .218/.296/.367 with 69 homers over the next seven years. In hindsight, Hazen said the Red Sox had a lower bar for Bradley’s offense because of how much he helped with his glove.

“There’s a threshold, for sure, and it can be lower,” Hazen said. “I don’t think trading off offense for defense is necessarily something we’d all set out to do from an ideal scenario. But the amount of runs that you shut down in center field, pitches that you save your pitching staff to throw, late-game plays that shut down rallies for relievers, I don’t know how many games Jackie won for them over the years playing center field, but it was a lot.

“You can see what we do in Arizona. We follow that same model.”

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Indeed, the Diamondbacks tolerated a .230/.273/.374 batting line from young center fielder Alek Thomas last season because he had five defensive runs saved above average. Like Rojas, Thomas has upside at the plate, but he’s helping Arizona to win now.

If Rojas can hit, say, .250 with a .650 OPS, would that be enough? How about .230 and .600?

“I don’t have a number in my head, but a lot of it has to do with what’s best for him, what it looks like,” Thomson said. “Is he frustrated? Is he getting in his own way and trying to do too much? We want to do the best thing, the right thing for Johan. If that is going to triple A and getting however many at-bats he needs, then that’s what we’ll do.”

Or maybe Rojas is an updated version of Bradley, in which case Dombrowski knows firsthand that it could work out.