Former All-Star needed to stay connected to baseball. He’s found a way in Lexington.
Brandon Phillips chops his bat back and forth, lifts his left front foot up and sends the baseball skyward.
He leans back over home plate while taking an admiring glance at the ball, which soon lands in the vacant left-field bleachers at Lexington Legends Ballpark.
The two-run homer comes during the first inning of a late August game between the Legends and the High Point Rockers, but in the 30 seconds after the homer, Phillips rounds the bases with the passion and purity of a kid hitting his first long ball.
He blows kisses to the crowd, points to the sky and sports a giant grin across his face as he steps on home plate.
This is Brandon Phillips at age 40: Still celebratory with each home run, and later still disappointed with every ground ball he can’t reach.
Phillips is nearly three years removed from his last Major League Baseball appearance with the Boston Red Sox, and his time as a major league second baseman has almost certainly come to an end, highlighted by a decade with the Cincinnati Reds from 2006 to 2016 during which he was a three-time All-Star and four-time Gold Glove Award winner.
But his involvement with baseball shows no signs of slowing down, having first joined the Lexington Legends last summer.
“A lot of people that hear independent ball, they assume that they (players) can’t play in the major leagues or they can’t play in the minor leagues. Some of these guys never had the opportunity,” Phillips told the Herald-Leader just 90 minutes before that two-run blast. “You’re playing the game that you love, and that’s why I’m still playing this game, because I love it.”
Phillips joined the Legends last season for the Battle of the Bourbon Trail — a summer series played in Florence and Lexington — after his younger brother P.J. was named Legends manager for the series.
The Phillips brothers both returned to Lexington in 2021, P.J. as the full-time manager and Brandon with a new title of his own: Part-owner.
In May, the Legends announced Phillips had joined the team’s ownership group, led by the Shea family and Andy Shea, the team’s president and CEO.
The announcement came during a time of transition for the Legends.
Last December, the Legends lost their attachment to MLB’s farm system, which the team had held since their inaugural season in 2001. In February, the team announced its move to the Atlantic League of Professional Baseball, an independent league, but also an official MLB partner league.
During this change Phillips has been a constant. The cheers are still the loudest for him when he’s announced as a batter, Legends shirts sporting his name remain the most popular in the stands and the pregame pack of autograph hunters, both young and old, is still the largest for him.
And Phillips doesn’t plan to stop anytime soon.
“I just saw an opportunity really (to) save baseball in Lexington, especially playing in Cincinnati all these years,” Phillips said. “Just to see the opportunity to really do something with my younger brother, it’s like a blessing in disguise because (when) we played here last year for the Bourbon Trail we saw the potential of what this city can really be and what it can turn into.”
“I always wanted to own my own team, that’s something I always wanted to do. For Andy to give me this opportunity to make that happen, I couldn’t really say no.”
Brother inspires move into ownership
For years P.J. Phillips told his brother that once his playing career ended, he should go into baseball ownership.
“He’s a people person, he loves to please ... he’s an entertainer, so at the end of the day I just feel like he’d be a good boss,” P.J. said. “I can see him doing really well at this. People love him, he knows a lot of players. He’s got a whole phone full of dudes he played with that need jobs, so why not use those connections.”
When Brandon finally took this advice and decided to join the Legends’ ownership group, he kept it a secret.
P.J., the team’s manager, didn’t know until the Legends released an announcement on social media.
The rest of the Phillips family learned the same way, and the family group chat blew up once the news became official.
“If it wasn’t for me and my brother having those talks I probably wouldn’t have ever thought about it, because when I finished with baseball I always wanted to be around the game, but I didn’t know how I wanted to be around the game,” Phillips said, noting that he takes inspiration from the fictional Roger Dorn character in the “Major League” movie series when it comes to becoming a player-owner.
Phillips utilized past conversations with former Reds manager Dusty Baker, as well as MLB general managers and owners, when determining how to approach his new role.
“It really helped me out and let me see what type of owner and player I can really be in this league and what I need to do to be successful, how to just put the guys in a great situation,” Phillips explained. “Be honest with them, be upfront with them and just tell them go out there and be the best version of yourself. Don’t try to be nobody else, be yourself.”
J.J. Hoover, a Legends pitcher who spent five seasons with Phillips on the Reds, said Phillips never mentioned future baseball ownership during their time in Cincinnati.
But the friendship the pair struck up during that time led to Hoover’s arrival in Lexington.
Hoover had been without a baseball job since 2019, and he was training in Washington while spending time with his in-laws earlier this year when Phillips reached out with an offer.
In June, Hoover joined the Legends, an example of Phillips using his extensive baseball Rolodex to bolster the roster.
“It doesn’t strike me as something that’s outside of his wheelhouse,” Hoover said of Phillips as an owner. “It’s been great, just from a standpoint of playing with a Gold Glove second baseman behind you again and having somebody with his skill set and talent level be on the field with us when he’s out here, just having that friendship be extended.”
The Phillips brothers come to Lexington
P.J. Phillips spent 12 professional seasons as a player, a career that included winning the 2013 Atlantic League championship after being a 2005 second-round MLB Draft pick of the Los Angeles Angels.
In 2016 P.J. was playing independent baseball with the Vallejo Admirals in California when the team’s manager was let go.
After some prodding from the team’s radio broadcaster, P.J. abruptly became Vallejo’s player-manager. He fell in love with management, switching to that exclusively the next season as he guided the Admirals to the 2017 Pacific Association Championship.
When the Battle of the Bourbon Trail occurred last summer, P.J. was connected with Shea, the president and CEO of the Legends, and agreed to manage the team during the series.
He brought his brother on board with a simple phone call..
“I was trying to make my stamp, trying to show Andy that I (could) actually do this. So, (I) brought my brother in, brought Eric Young Jr. in, brought Iván De Jesús Jr. (in),” P.J. said, referencing former major leaguers who joined the Legends last summer. “Things got a little shaken up a little bit. We started having a little swagger.”
“I can say that I played for my brother ... that’s one of the best things, best moments ever,” Brandon Phillips, who plays home games and some road games for the Legends, said. “Being the owner, planning what I want to do and doing what I want to do, I never had that experience before.”
Phillips is now in a unique position in sports, not only as a player-owner but also as someone coached by his younger brother.
This situation isn’t new for the brothers though, as Brandon joined the Admirals in 2019 for a couple games in Vallejo with P.J. as manager.
There’s a six-year age gap between Brandon, 40, and P.J., 34.
“I move him up and down the lineup. I don’t ask him, I just do it and he has to roll with it,” P.J. said with a smile. “He’s humble, he doesn’t think he’s better than anybody and that’s the best thing about my brother. He follows directions, regardless (of) if it was somebody else as manager, he’s going to listen to him ... he makes it easy for me.”
Phillips is the most recognizable name in the eight-team Atlantic League.
Several Legends players, like former Kentucky Wildcat Ben Aklinski, have played in MLB farm systems when household names came down to the minors for rehab assignments.
But something Aklinski, drafted in 2018 by the Philadelphia Phillies, said distinguishes Phillips is the attention he pays daily to fans and the way Phillips enhances the spectator experience.
“Brandon has so much fun playing the game, it shows every single day on the field and that was something that became extremely obvious from day one,” Aklinski said. ”He understands just as best as anyone this is so much bigger than baseball and bringing a smile to a kid’s face and making sure they have fun at the park.”
“When you’re talking to him, he makes you feel like you’re a normal person, like there’s no difference between you and him,” Aklinski continued. “There’s some guys who are really good at that and then there’s some who aren’t and he’s one of those guys who just knows like, ‘Dude, we’re the same person, it don’t matter.’ He’s just a lot better at baseball.”
Reminders of Phillips’ stature exist at Lexington Legends Ballpark, from the Reds gear worn by fans that contrasts with the Legends’ blue and green color scheme, to an advertisement for the Atlantic League’s partnership with MLB on the right-field fence that features the Reds logo.
But it’s Phillips’ current position in the Legends organization, rather than his attention-grabbing name, that guides his current role.
“I am in control to make the team better ... it puts a lot of weight on you,” Phillips said. “My brother’s the manager, so I don’t want to make him look bad. I don’t want to put some guys out there who just want to play ... our name is on this, and Andy’s name and his family. We want to come here and make a good impression.”
Bringing a championship to Lexington
Phillips splits his time between Atlanta, where he grew up, and northern Kentucky, where he still has a home from his time with the Reds.
He’ll travel back and forth from either Atlanta or Fort Thomas when playing with the Legends, and sometimes he’ll stay in a local rental home or the Legends’ team hotel.
Phillips’ time in professional baseball spans more than two decades, from when he was drafted and signed with the Montreal Expos — a team that no longer exists — in 1999 to his current exploits.
Being able to use baseball to spend more time around family and friends is now what pleases him most.
“I really don’t know how real life is. Basically baseball has been my life,” Phillips said. “Just playing every once in a while, taking care of my family, taking my daughter and taking Micah, my son, to school and all that kind of stuff, even though COVID kind of messed up a lot of stuff, but just being able to do those small things it means a lot.”
“Baseball is an all-day, everyday conversation with me and my family,” P.J. added.
While family has now taken priority for Phillips, his baseball mind remains active.
“I love the city of Lexington. I mean just being here, just the people in general, it just reminds me of being back in Cincinnati,” Phillips said. “Right now I’m getting my feet wet. I’m happy where I’m at right now.”
In the immediate future, Philips and the Legends have pressing on-field matters.
Despite a slow start to the second half of the Atlantic League season — which is being played with the pitching rubber moved back to 61 feet 6 inches from home plate — the Legends already secured a playoff spot by leading the South Division at the season’s midway point, before the pitching distance increased.
For all the childhood memories rekindled between Phillips and his brother, and all the opportunities the Legends provide to overlooked and outcast baseball players, there is a regular season to finish with the promise of postseason baseball to follow in October.
“He’s been a part of it where a lot of money’s involved. ... He’s done it for the Reds at the highest level possible where they’re in a pennant race,” Aklinski said. “He gets it. He’s not putting any more pressure on anyone else, just like he’s not putting any more pressure on himself to go out and hit the 700-foot home run that people want to see.”
And with this perspective, Phillips is intent on making his first season as an owner a championship one.
“When you have that lion mentality man, you want to be successful, you want to do good regardless,” Phillips said. “I’m playing this game because I want to win a championship. I want to win for my younger brother. I want to win for this city.”
