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Jewish Phillie Dalton Guthrie
Tries to Make Big League Club
Jarrad Saff ren | Staff Writer
Courtesy of Miles Kennedy/The Phillies
B y the time the 2023 Major League
Baseball season begins on March
30, the Philadelphia Phillies might
be a step closer to making a minyan.

Outfi elder Dalton Guthrie, 27, has a
chance going into spring training to join
Jewish backup catcher Garrett Stubbs
on the team’s opening-day roster.

If he does, he will enter a baseball season
as a big leaguer for the fi rst time. Guthrie
reached the majors last September after
an injury to right fi elder Nick Castellanos.

Playing for a team in a playoff race, Guthrie
went 7-for-21 at the plate with a home run
and six walks. He fi nished with a perfect
fi elding percentage in 70 combined
innings in the outfi eld (62), at third base
(seven) and at second base (one).

“I’m excited,” Guthrie said. “Whenever
I’ve come into spring training, even in
the minors, I’ve always been fi ghting for
a spot.”
Guthrie grew up in Sarasota, Florida,
with a Jewish mother, Andrea Guthrie, and
a Catholic father, Mark Guthrie, the MLB
pitcher for 15 seasons (1989-2003) with
several teams. During the holidays, Guthrie
and his two brothers were among the kids
who celebrated Chanukah and Christmas.

That, according to the 27-year-old, was
“the best of both worlds.”
But for the rest of the year, religion
was not a daily presence in the family’s
life. Dalton Guthrie attended the Goldie
Feldman Academy at Temple Beth Sholom
in Sarasota for kindergarten and fi rst
grade. Andrea Guthrie said she sent her
son there because she had heard from
friends that it was a good school. At Goldie
Feldman, Dalton Guthrie went to temple
and practiced reading Hebrew along with
his secular schooling. But before second
grade, he tested into Pine View Elementary
Magnet School in Land O’ Lakes, and his
formal Jewish education was over.

Dalton Guthrie did not have a bar
mitzvah. It was also diffi cult for the family
to observe the High Holidays during the
MLB season when his father was travel-
ing. Andrea Guthrie’s mother would call
her and remind her that it was Yom
Kippur, and she would say, “OK, I’ll try to
fast!” The Jewish mother made sure that
her children got a Chanukah dinner each
year with her parents.

But beyond that, she believed in
teaching her kids about her religion
and then letting them make their own
decisions. It was a philosophy that the
Guthrie parents shared. Mark Guthrie
took his son to midnight mass one year
to show him what Catholicism was like.

But he did not force his son to practice.

“I’ve had friends whose parents push
things on them, and then they go off to
college and do the opposite,” Andrea
Guthrie said. “I wanted to let them learn
it and, if that’s the way they felt, they’ll
continue that.”
Today, though, Dalton Guthrie’s religion
is baseball. The 2017 sixth-round pick
of the Phillies spent years surviving and
advancing through the franchise’s minor
league system. Andrea Guthrie said her
son has always loved to play all positions,
and he has used that mindset to make
himself useful in the minors, too, playing
at every spot but catcher and fi rst base.

But while Dalton Guthrie was always
a useful fi elder, his hitting didn’t catch
up until June 2021. Guthrie, then at
Double-A Reading, was in a slump, so
hitting coach Tyler Henson reviewed fi lm
with him going back to his high school
days. They discovered that the player’s
hands had fallen too low to catch up to
fastballs and react to breaking balls.

Henson asked his pupil if he wanted
to sit out to work on his new stance. But
Guthrie said he wanted to play. He went
out that night and ripped two hits.

“You could see him start to free up
mentally,” Henson said.

Later that year, Guthrie got called up to
Triple-A Lehigh Valley, where he fi nished
with a .292 average. The next season at
Triple-A, he hit .302 with a .363 on-base
percentage, earning his call-up.

“A lot of guys that get through the
minors, what they do is adapt,” Guthrie
said. “Find new ways to succeed.”
Guthrie has gotten through the minors.

But now the challenge is staying in the
majors. He knows that all he can control is
his approach. He said his father “was never
the overbearing dad.” The only times Mark
Guthrie got mad at his son growing up
were when he didn’t try his hardest.

“If I can give all my eff ort, I can live with
that every day,” Guthrie said. ■
jsaff ren@midatlanticmedia.com
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