Phillies: MLB Hasn’t Seen This Since 1898

The Philadelphia Phillies have been playing ball since 1883.

Being one of the oldest franchises in Major League Baseball often means your players did something before everyone else. It also means that for the rarest of stats, it can be a while before it happens again.

This was the case on Thursday night, when Padres rookie reliever Daniel Camarena stepped up to the plate in his second career major-league game and hit a grand slam off of Max Scherzer.

Yes, you read that correctly. No, you’re not dreaming.

Instant icon.

Baseball Twitter was a wonderful cocktail of absolute shock and pure joy. This is the kind of moment that makes baseball the best thing in the world.

Camarena is the first reliever to hit a slam since Don Robinson in 1985, and the first Padres player in franchise history to hit a grand slam for his first hit. It’s also only the fourth grand slam Max Scherzer, an undisputed future Hall of Famer, has allowed in his entire career.

So what does this have to do with the Phillies?

Well, Camarena’s grand slam was his first big-league hit. That’s only happened once before in MLB pitcher history.

Phillies pitcher Bill Duggleby was the first reliever in MLB history to hit a grand slam for his first career hit.

You guessed it, a Philadelphia Phillies pitcher.

Rewind the clock all the way to April 21,1898, and Bill Duggleby, nicknamed Frosty Bill (ballplayer nicknames were so much better back then), was making his debut. He came up to bat against Cy Seymour in the second inning with the bases juiced, and smacked one out of the park.

Seymour was no slouch, by the way. Like Babe Ruth, he made his bones as a pitcher before transitioning primarily to the outfield. In 1897 and 1897, he led MLB in strikeouts. In 1905, he again led all of MLB, this time in hits (219), triples (21?!), RBI (121), AVG (.377), SLG (.559), OPS (.988), OPS+ (181), and total bases (325).

Anyway, like Scherzer on Thursday night, Frosty Bill wasn’t facing some random arm. And it wouldn’t be until 2005 that another MLB player would hit a grand slam in their first career at-bat: Jeremy Hermida, who would also go on to play for Padres later in his career.

Duggleby ended up playing parts of eight seasons in the majors, all of it for the Phillies (aside from a two-game stint with the then-Philadelphia Athletics) until they traded him to the Pittsburgh Pirates in the final season of his career. He retired with a career 3.18 ERA and 453 strikeouts, and went on to manage a minor league team called the Albany Babies. He passed away in 1944, nearly half a century before Camarena would even be born.

Historical connections like this are one of the coolest things about baseball. Just two of the over 20,000 MLB players, from completely different eras – different millenniums, even – who might have absolutely nothing else in common, are now linked by one single moment in their careers.