Today, the Cincinnati Reds’ 30-year-old second baseman is still known that way. In fact, DatDudeBP is the name of his popular Twitter account and along with his all-star play and his all-embracing personality, it has made him arguably the face of the franchise even more so than oft-reclusive first baseman Joey Votto, he of the new 10-year, $225-million contract.
Phillips is now in that same financial ballpark. Tuesday, he signed a contract extension that will pay him $72.5 million over six seasons. A day later, just before the Reds’ 4-3 victory over St. Louis at Great American Ball Park, he stood at his clubhouse dressing stall and talked quietly about what it suddenly was like going from Dat Dude to De Dude.
Although he was nursing a hamstring strain from Monday night, he still felt like a million bucks — or, actually, 72 million.
“I still can’t believe it’s really happened,” he said softly. “I mean growing up I didn’t have that much, money-wise. But the things that really mattered, all them lessons about loyalty and working hard and trying to be a better person, my parents made sure we got them.”
His folks. James and Lue, whom he proudly noted “have been married close to 30 years,” were college athletes at Shaw University in North Carolina.
“My mom played basketball and my dad football and baseball,” he said.
His father ended up working for a tobacco company and his mom, he said with a grin, was “a domestic engineer.”
“We got what we needed, but there were some things we couldn’t afford,” he said. “I always wanted Nintendo, but we didn’t have the money, so I played it at everybody else’s house. Finally, after about five years I got Nintendo, but by then everyone else had Super Nintendo. All that just made me hungry.”
The one place he could satiate that feeling was on the baseball diamond.
In 1999, he turned down a University of Georgia offer because he was drafted by the Montreal Expos. Working his way through the minor leagues, he was traded to Cleveland and finally found himself on an Indians roster where he said “they had four second basemen.”
In one of the Reds’ greatest deals, he was picked up in a 2006 trade for “a player to be named later.”
“I didn’t know what my role would be back then,” he said. “I came off the bench my first couple of games, but then I got a start in St. Louis. And it just took off from there.”
In his early days with the Reds, Phillips could be kind of a prickly guy to deal with. That has changed for various reasons — he’s matured, he’s had great success and he realizes the fans embraced him. A lot of the latter has to do with Twitter.
“I wasn’t into it at first until I talked to my sister and Ocho,” he said of his sister Porsha, who plays for the WNBA’s San Antonio Silver Stars and New England Patriots and former Cincinnati Bengals receiver Chad Ochocinco:
“Ocho said, ‘Hey, man, you got to get yourself out there. You’re a great ballplayer and you’re just chillin’ in a box. Let people know the type person you are.’
“So I thought I’d try it and if I didn’t like it I easily could stop it. But now I feel like it’s the best thing that could have happened to me. It got me to open up. I had a lot of trust issues.
“It got people knowing what I was thinking. I was able to connect with fans and go see them do what they do and have them come see me, see the life of a big leaguer and meet my teammates and eat with me and do a lot of things.
“And once I started with it, it was like sports. I was gonna try to be the best I could be at it.”
As for his Twitter tag, he said that came from his sister: “We were going through names like Be Real and she said, ‘You should be Dat Dude again. People always knew you by that.’” They do again, so much so, he said, that the bond he now feels with Reds fans was a big reason for not leaving.
“I’m sure I could have gone to Los Angeles or some big market and had some fans there going crazy, but why? I love it here. I know the city. I know the owners of all the places in town. I know the fans. Why go someplace else and have to start over and try to gain everyone’s respect?
“I love my teammates here and the front office. There are a lot of things I love here and I didn’t want to go down a different path.”
When he agreed to his deal, he said the first thing he did was call his mother:
“I just said, ‘We finally made it!’ ”
And yet that’s not enough, he said Wednesday:
“I’m happy to have the financial security now for when I get married and have kids and all of that, but when it comes to baseball, I’m still missing some things. I’m missing a World Series and the only way to make that happen is by working hard and busting my rear end ... and I will.
“See, some things haven’t changed.
“I’m still hungry. I’m still Dat Dude.”
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