Growing up in Galveston, Texas, Nick Williams spent a lot of time in his backyard hitting golf balls without a golf club.
He was a kid who loved baseball, and kids who love baseball often love hitting home runs, and Williams savored the chance to track how far a baseball would go once his bat struck it. His father might throw him 200 pitches during a batting-practice session, Williams said, and he'd swing from his heels at every one. But he particularly relished being alone in the yard with his bat, tossing golf balls up to himself so he could smack them greater distances, as if he were a combination of Tiger Woods and Barry Bonds.
"Took out a few windows," he said.
Williams is 22 and an outfielder, one of the six players and prospects the Phillies received from the Texas Rangers in July in exchange for Cole Hamels and Jake Diekman.
He stood in the home clubhouse at Citizens Bank Park recently as he told those stories about his childhood, and they fit perfectly with the message that the Phillies are trying to send as they commence with their rebuilding plan, as the start of spring training nears: "We are young, and we have hope that better days are ahead.
Over 100 plate appearances for Reading last year after the trade, Williams hit .320 with four home runs and an .876 on-base-plus-slugging percentage, continuing a season that already had marked an encouraging measure of growth for him as a hitter. In 2014, Williams had 486 plate appearances in the Rangers organization -- rookie ball, single A, and double A -- and showed precious little plate discipline. He struck out 140 times and walked just 22 times. Last year, though, he cut his strikeouts to 97 and raised his walks to 35 over 515 plate appearances. More important, his full-season OPS increased to .845 from .794.
"Our reports since he came into pro ball basically saw an athletic player who was just trying to learn the game," said Phillies director of player development Joe Jordan, who first scouted Williams when he was at Ball High School in Galveston and Jordan was the Baltimore Orioles' director of scouting. "You could tell the struggles: the high strikeouts, the low walks. But last year was really the first year when things really started to come together.
"Hopefully, we got a little snapshot in August of what he has a chance to become, because it was pretty damn good."
For all the focus that the Phillies have put on replenishing their young pitching, Williams' development would help them in another area where they've been lacking for more than a half-decade: power in their lineup. It would seem impossible, given the bandbox that is their home ballpark, but the Phillies haven't ranked better than eighth in the National League in home runs since 2010, when they were fifth. They hit 130 home runs last season, ranking 13th in the league, and none of their players hit more than Ryan Howard's 23, an indication of how they've failed to replace the production that Howard, Chase Utley, Pat Burrell, and Jayson Werth supplied in the mid-to-late 2000s.
Williams, who bats left, throws left, and is 6-foot-3 and 195 pounds, wouldn't be the right-handed power bat that the Phillies have lacked since Werth left after the 2010 season. It's unlikely that the Phillies would promote him to their major-league roster before September, at the very earliest. "He's nowhere close to a finished product," Jordan said. "I think he would tell you that." But in time, he does offer the Phillies the possibility that he could be the player and hitter Domonic Brown was for just those startling few weeks in 2013. He has a long, lithe body, and he had 26 doubles, six triples, and 13 stolen bases last season. No guarantees, just possibilities.
"I like the way he works," Jordan said. "Guy's got a chance to play the game for a long time and have a good life. He's just got to focus on the complete game because he can impact the game with his legs, with his arm, with his bat."
Williams doesn't want to settle for just being a slugger, either. Gone, he said, are those adolescent days when he tried to hit every pitch as far as he could because he believed that he could. "I never really go up to the plate saying, 'I've got to hit the ball far,' " he said. "I think situational first because you've got to think of runs."
Still, as he wandered around Citizens Bank Park recently, a Texas-born kid freezing in the Philadelphia winter, he couldn't help notice those inviting dimensions -- just 369 feet from home plate to the right-center-field fence, just 329 feet to the right-field pole. "I'm like, 'Man, I want to take BP,' " he said. "I'm looking forward to seeing how that plays out." In that place, he isn't the only one.
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