Is Alec Bohm good? An existential investigation
In which we explore what ‘good’ is
It’s not Alec Bohm’s fault that I read At the Existentialist Café, Sarah Blakewell’s survey of the philosophical movement, just as the 2025 MLB season was kicking off, but it is his fault that he stinks at baseball.
As of this writing, the Philadelphia Phillies’ third baseman is batting .158 on the year with a single walk and a single extra base hit. Among the 23 players that spend most of their time at third base, he ranks 20th in defense. Baseball Reference has him at -0.6 WAR, meaning a theoretical, bang average replacement would be better. In 2021, he was unplayable and was demoted to the minors. I call him Groundball Bohm because, in 2023, he grounded into more double plays than any other player. He pouts.
There are many Bohm partisans in my life, however and unfortunately.
They point to the (abbreviated) 2020 season in which he hit .338 and earned second place in Rookie of the Year voting. They point to 2022, when Bohm was an improved, productive, and dare I say crucial part of a Phillies team that made it to the World Series. They point to last year, when he was an all-star thanks to a first half in which he hit doubles for fun.
And they point to his luscious locks and boyish smile. After Bohm got a hit on Opening Day—his lone double—a friend showed me a text from his mother.
There were Phillies, like Scott Rolen and Jonathan Papelbon, who were good, but who were hated. There were Phillies who were bad, like any role player from 1994-2006, but who were loved. I can’t think of a single player who is as divisive and perplexing as Bohm. He has good stats and good hair. He has bad stats and a bad attitude. It’s not just a matter of preference and opinion. An objective analysis both for and against him can be made.
*Puts bookmark in the page, crosses legs, rests hands on the knee* But what does being good even mean?
In the existential tradition, purpose, meaning, and freedom are ascribed by self, not by systems or institutions or gods. Alec Bohm doesn’t ruin my life. I let him ruin my life. It’s an important distinction, one rooted in personal choice. It is not that the Baseball Gods impel or punish me. I punish myself because I believe that in Phillies victories lies freedom. For that to be true, though, purpose, meaning, and freedom must also be found in supporting Bohm.
This is what makes an analysis so fraught. Casual fans ascribe value to traditional stats like batting average, home runs, and runs batted. Then Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill popularized on-base percentage, which led the world to discover Bill James, which led to new age fans and analysts to value advanced statistics like the aforementioned wins above replacement and defensive runs saved. If both camps took a seat at the existentialist café and they started arguing about Alec Bohm, as people do when in Paris, then both would be right.
With this philosophical frame in mind, I’ve conducted a category-by-category investigation to determine once and for all whether Alec Bohm is good or not.
Traditional batting
June 7, 2022. Alec Bohm, a 6’5” Nebraskan cornstalk, stepped to the plate and assumed the position: knees bent, elbows pinned to his ribs, hands held aloft in line with his bushy hair.
Opposing him was Milwaukee Brewers closer Josh Hader, who whipped the ball from his left hand so violently no team had scored a run on him in almost a year. In a 1-1 count, Hader twisted himself into his windup, then uncorked a 96-miles per hour fastball high and away. Bohm extended his gangly arms at the ball, made contact with it, then took a few loping steps toward first base. He hit a home run.
Running up the line, Bohm looked surprised. Sitting on my couch, I was stunned. Salvation: It ended up being the middle game of a nine-game winning streak that saved the Phillies, who had been 21-29. Four months later, they were playing in the World Series.
The above vignette is my attempt at practicing phenomenology, the study of things (phenomena) as they appear and the philosophical forefather of existentialism. Husserl would have been annoyed at my not “bracketing” out the context that the Phillies were bad at the time or that they’d go on to be good. Heidegger thought such context was essential to reality and consciousness and in turn human understanding. In any case, it’s an example of how Alec Bohm is at his best when he’s observed.
Tall, lithe, blonde, Bohm looks like an all-American athlete, and when he ropes a double down the line or pokes one over the fence it seems correct, like he’s a finely tuned machine, levers and fulcrums in sync. I think that’s what makes his traditional stats so seductive. If seeing is believing, then the observer must believe Bohm is good.
In 2020, Bohm didn’t officially qualify for the leaderboards, since he didn’t have enough plate appearances, but by many observable metrics he had an excellent season. His .338 average would have tied him for third in the National League, and on a rate basis Bohm tallied a hit as often as Trea Turner, who led the league with 78 knocks. Among Philadelphia regulars, only superstar Bryce Harper got on base more often than Bohm. Whenever you looked, Bohm was hitting the ball and/or on base.
In the World Series season, he drove in 72 runs despite batting in the last third of the order. The next year, Groundball Bohm somehow hit 20 home runs and accrued 97 RBI. He repeated the latter in 2024, his best season, and posted a .280 batting average. Moms want to pinch his cheeks and normies buy his jerseys. Looking at his traditional batting stats, and considering his physical form, I understand why. Verdict: Good.
Advanced batting
Wins above replacement, defensive runs saved, and all the other advanced statistics can’t be observed, so we must graduate from phenomenology to pure existentialism. This is especially true because, according to the most commonly used advanced statistics, Bohm regresses from his traditional, observed version.
His career WAR, which quantifies a player’s winning contributions compared against a replacement-level player, is 7.2, according to FanGraphs. That places him 20th among 32 active third baseman.
His career OPS+, which normalizes on-base and slugging percentages across the entire league, is 102, when 100 is the average.
His career WRC+, which measures overall offensive contributions, is 101. The average is 100.
Bohm was selected third overall in the 2018 draft, had an outstanding rookie year, and is a mountain of a man. His advanced stats could be disappointing, then. For years, we’ve been waiting for the breakout, for him to take that next step, but at this point we know exactly what he is: an average hitter.
At the same time, there’s value in being average—literally half of the league is worse than him. There’s also something spiritual about how he goes about being average. How does one quantify the effect of a man-child making goofy hand gestures at his teammates in the dugout after he ropes a double down the line? Bohm hitting an improbable home run off Josh Hader three years ago contributed to the Phillies’ most magical season in a generation. How is that measured? It probably shouldn’t be. That’s the point of magic.
Advanced statistics have become the standard for assessing players, and the RBI has been dismissed as a matter of luck. Even I, the commissioner of a fantasy baseball league, removed RBI as a scoring category. But this assumes there is an inherent quality to advanced statistics, that they’re determined to be the dominant and best way to consider baseball. Jean-Paul Satre would blanch at such an sentiment. There is no Creator, so existence precedes essence, Sartre said. We alone are responsible for our actions. Accordingly, I choose to have fun, and trying to understand what xwOBA means is not fun. Verdict: Good.
Traditional fielding
This is where the case for Alec Bohm falls apart. In the 2021 season, when he was demoted to the minors for a bit, he ranked among the league leaders in errors. Every player ahead of him had at least 213 attempts. He committed his 15 errors in just 153 attempts. He’s improved since then, but across his career he has a below average fielding percentage and since 2020 only 11 players have committed more errors. (One of them is the guy who now plays to Bohm’s left, Trea Turner. Bleh.)
He’s also an awkward presence on the field. On routine plays, he looks like a new dancer counting the steps—stay down, catch, throw. On tough plays, perhaps when he has to sprawl to his left or right, he looks like a distressed giraffe. Bohm looks good as a hitter. He looks bad as a defender. Verdict: Bad.
Advanced fielding
The philosophical space between traditional and advanced statistics collapses when they indicate the same thing: Bohm is a terrible third baseman. To use one example, Bohm had negative-15 defensive runs saved in 2022. It’s a gobsmacking deficiency that doesn’t deserve intellectualization. Verdict: Bad.
Vibes
After striking out, Bohm flings his bat and helmet toward the dugout. After an unfavorable call at the plate, he grimaces. If he makes contact that turns into an out, he sighs and frowns. There’s no other way to describe him, a 28-year-old man, besides as petulant.
This trait is epitomized in the Great “I fucking hate this place” Incident of 2022, in which Bohm muttered “I fucking hate this place” on the field after fans ironically cheered when he made a routine play—he had made three errors earlier in the game. After the game, Bohm copped to saying it, and in his next appearance the fans rewarded him with an earnest ovation.
Fans, the media, and even Bohm himself immediately placed him within a redemptive arc, such is our need for story, and the incident became something of Philly sports legend after Bohm later deconstructed Hader’s invincibility and helped the Phillies turn around the season. The problem is there really isn’t anything redemptive about it, not in the long run.
Bohm remains a hothead, he’s had an uneven career, and his defense is still bad, all of which indicate he hasn’t read the Sartre I mailed him. “The emotions got the best of me,” he said after the incident, which to existentialists is an excuse. We are responsible for our actions, and passing the buck to emotions denies our agency. Verdict: Bad.
Conclusion
My relations with my sports-minded friends have been reduced to my screaming at them about Alec Bohm. This analysis is helpful and timely, then, because in investigating his crimes I discovered my own.
I have not been gracious to him. In doing so, I violated a more ethical strand of existentialism that not only demands us to be less selfish but also requires action toward that ideal. “It’s not enough to back off and simply put up with each other, he felt,” Sarah Blakewell writes about Sartre, “We must learn to give each other more than that. Now he went even further: we must all become deeply ‘engaged’ in our shared world.”
In my mind, I’ve also stripped Bohm of context and reduced him to an inaccurate idea. “Groundball” Bohm has 58 career home runs and 126 career doubles. He really is a solid hitter, and I have not described him as he appears, as phenomenology demands. Blakewell offers a fitting analogy. “If I watch a soccer match, I see it as a soccer match, not as a meaningless scene in which a number of people run around taking turns to apply their lower limbs to a spherical object. If the latter is what I’m seeing, then I am not watching some more essential, truer version of soccer; I am failing to watch it properly as soccer at all.” When it comes to Bohm, I have not been properly watching baseball.
Finally, I was certain Bohm stunk at his job, which is to say I was ignorant. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in his 1953 lecture In Praise of Philosophy, explained how important it is to embrace ambiguity and to think about it using reason and science.
“The philosopher is marked by the distinguishing trait that he possesses inseparably the taste for evidence and the feeling of ambiguity,” he said. And the two concepts “lead back without ceasing from knowledge to ignorance, from ignorance to knowledge.” This can be summed up in the Socratic aphorism: The more I know, the more I realize I know nothing.
Blakewell thinks Merleu-Ponty’s is the most attractive description of philosophy she’s ever read, and “the best argument for why it is worth doing, even (or especially) when it takes us no distance at all from our starting point.”
In asking “Is Alec Bohm good?” what I’m really asking is “What do I think is good?” I am no closer to answering that, but in trying to here I learned things and, for that, I’d like to believe at some cafè Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and Merleu-Ponty and Camus and all the rest are cheersing to me and, more importantly, to Alec Bohm. Final verdict: Good, but he needs to convert to first base/designated hitter so that he can focus on hitting and diminish the impact of poor defense on his overall value; however, that’s not going to happen on the Phillies, which has, like, 13 first basemen/designated hitters, so the Phillies should trade Bohm, which will make all parties, especially me, happy.
I love this concept btw ... looking forward to more. ⚾
Career OPS .733. He's a "meh" in my book.