The Main Event

  • Darin Ruf (born 1986) – Born in Omaha, Nebraska, Ruf was picked by the Phillies in the 20th round of the 2009 Draft. He played nine seasons in the majors, the first five with the Phillies.

Darin Ruf was never supposed to have a nine-year major league career. He was a 20th-round pick, a senior sign out of Creighton University who signed for little more than a plane ticket, and for his first two pro seasons he profiled as organizational filler — a bat-first first baseman with a good average and not much thump. Then, in 2012, at age 26, he did something that doesn’t happen: he turned into a different hitter almost overnight, and baseball spent the next decade trying to figure out what to make of him.

Ruf was a star at Creighton before the Phillies took him in the 2009 draft as an afterthought. He hit for a high average in the low minors but showed little power, the kind of profile that gets a player released rather than promoted. That changed with Double-A Reading in 2012. Ruf hit .317 with 38 home runs, 32 doubles and 104 RBI, a performance so far outside the norm that it broke Ryan Howard‘s Reading franchise home run record and led all of full-season minor league baseball. He was named Eastern League MVP and Rookie of the Year and won the Joe Bauman Home Run Award, given annually to the top home run hitter across the minors. In one stretch that August, he hit 20 home runs in a single month — matching the major league record Sammy Sosa set in 1998.

Trying to live up to the hype

That season made Ruf a phenomenon in Philadelphia. With Howard and Chase Utley aging and injured and the Phillies’ championship core visibly breaking down, fans and writers alike wondered whether Ruf was next in the franchise’s remarkable run of homegrown talent — maybe even the guy who’d replace Howard at first base the way Howard himself had once replaced Jim Thome. FanGraphs writer Michael Baumann, who covered the Phillies at the time, later admitted he spent countless hours arguing the opposite: that a 26-year-old destroying Double-A pitching, in one of the most notoriously hitter-friendly parks in the minors, was a mirage. That skepticism turned out to be reasonable, but not quite right.

Ruf debuted with the Phillies that September and hit three home runs in 37 plate appearances. His fullest big-league season came in 2013, when he hit .247/.348/.458 with 14 homers in half a season’s worth of at-bats — solid, useful, but nowhere near the impact bat Reading had promised. Over five seasons in Philadelphia, he settled in as a part-time first baseman and corner outfielder, a right-handed bat off the bench who hit .240/.314/.433 with 35 homers in 286 games. By the standards of the hype, that was a letdown. By the standards of a 20th round senior sign, it was already a minor miracle.

Then came the twist nobody predicted. Traded to the Dodgers after the 2016 season – in the deal that brought Howie Kendrick to Philadelphia – Ruf instead signed with the Samsung Lions of the KBO League in South Korea. He didn’t just survive there — he was one of the best hitters in the league for three years, batting .313/.404/.564 with 86 home runs in 404 games and leading the league in RBI in 2017. It was a career-altering detour, both financially and developmentally: Ruf sharpened the plate discipline and power that had always been present but underused, and he did it against professional pitching, not Double-A arms.

That KBO run bought him a return ticket to the majors, and it’s here that Ruf produced the most surprising chapter of his career. Signing with the Giants for 2020, he immediately made an impact, then broke out fully in 2021, hitting .271/.385/.519 with 16 homers, including a .414 OBP against right-handed pitching and an even better line against lefties. He became a key piece of a Giants team that won a franchise-record 107 games, and in Game 5 of the 2021 NLDS against the rival Dodgers, in one of the most talked-about games of that postseason, Ruf hit a home run in an eventual loss — as close as he ever came to a signature playoff moment. San Francisco rewarded him with a two-year, $6.25 million contract, real money for a player who six years earlier had been organizational filler.

The highs to the lows, to the end

The ending was less kind. His production dipped in 2022, he was traded to the Mets at the deadline and cratered in New York. The Mets released him before the 2023 season even began. He bounced between the Giants’ and Brewers’ organizations that year in what looked like a quiet fade to retirement. Instead, it ended abruptly and painfully: on June 2, 2023, at Cincinnati’s Great American Ball Park, Ruf ran into an unpadded metal tarp roller left at the edge of the field. He tried a brief Triple-A comeback, appeared in seven games, and never played professionally again. In 2025, he sued the Reds, alleging the team’s grounds crew was negligent in leaving the tarp equipment exposed, which caused him to suffer what the lawsuit called “permanent and substantial deformities” to his knee. “This didn’t need to happen,” Ruf said in a statement. “Players shouldn’t have to worry about hidden hazards like that on a major league field.” The lawsuit is still working its way through court.

In September 2024, Ruf resurfaced back home, joining the University of Nebraska Omaha baseball program as an assistant coach — the same city, and not far from the same high school fields, where his career began.

The bottom line

So did Darin Ruf meet expectations, fall short, or exceed them? The honest answer is all three. Measured against the 2012 hype — the idea that he’d be a middle-of-the-order force for a contending Phillies team — he fell well short; he was, at his best in Philadelphia, a useful platoon bat, not a star. But measured against what a 20th-round senior sign realistically has any right to expect, Ruf’s career is a wild overachievement: nine major league seasons, three dominant years in Korea, a franchise record-setting team’s stretch run, a signature postseason home run, and more than $13 million earned across two continents. Few players ever get told twice that they’re finished — once as a suspect prospect, once by a torn-up knee — and answer back both times.

Philadelphia Baseball Events for July 28

  • July 28, 1928 – The Phillies acquired Chuck Klein from Fort Wayne in the Central League for Harvey MacDonald.
  • July 28, 1951 – Russ Meyer shuts out Chicago 1–0 for the Phils’ fourth straight shutout; their scoreless streak reaches 41 innings.
  • July 28, 1962 – A Pennsylvania Railroad train carrying fans to a Phillies game derails; 19 killed, 105 injured.
  • July 28, 1992 – Sent Julio Peguero to Los Angeles to complete the trade for Stan Javier.
  • July 28, 2002 – Harry Kalas is inducted into the broadcasters’ wing of the Hall of Fame after being selected as the recipient of the Ford C. Frick Award.
  • July 28, 2006 – Traded David Bell to Milwaukee for reliever Wilfrido Laureano, who never did reach the majors.
  • July 28, 2007 – Tadahito Iguchi starts at second base, becoming the first Japanese-born player to play for the Phillies.
  • July 28, 2011 – Lose to San Francisco 4–1, ending a franchise-record 46 game streak without back-to-back losses.
  • July 28, 2015 – Traded Jonathan Papelbon to Washington for pitching prospect Nick Pivetta.
  • July 28, 2017 – Traded Howie Kendrick and cash to Washington for McKenzie Mills and future considerations.
  • July 28, 2017 – Traded Jeremy Hellickson to Baltimore for Hyun Soo Kim, Garrett Cleavinger, and international bonus money.

ICYMI

Philadelphia Baseball Birthdays for July 28

  • Duke Esper (born 1868) – A left-hander who pitched for both the Philadelphia Athletics (1890) and the Phillies (1890-1892).
  • Ted Lepcio (born 1930) – A utility infielder with the 1960 Phillies.
  • Carmelo Martinez (born 1960) – Signed by the Phillies as a free agent in December, 1989 and was dealt to Pittsburgh the following August in the Wes Chamberlain trade.
  • Spencer Howard (born 1996) – Drafted by the Phillies in the second round of the 2017 Draft. He is currently pitching in Japan for the Yomiuri Giants.
  • Cade Obermueller (born 2003) – The Phillies second round pick in the 2025 Draft, Obermueller went 0-2, 2.78 in 11 starts for Clearwater this season. He was promoted to High-A Jersey Shore yesterday.

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