Two-homer night keeps Aidan Miller sizzling after trade deadline
As the trade deadline neared and it became clear the Phillies were thinking bigger this time around, a handful of names toward the top of their farm system surfaced in trade chatter. Andrew Painter still seemed untouchable, but everyone else looked to be in play.
At least a little bit, for the right return, under the right circumstances, on the right day, that may have included Aidan Miller.
Miller, obviously, didn’t go anywhere. And if he’s playing with a sense of newfound freedom after officially staying put, it’s showing.
Miller homered twice for the Double-A Reading Fightin Phils on Thursday, part of a three-hit game that continued an August nothing short of torrid. Miller is slashing .356 with a .658 slugging this month. His season OPS has jumped 79 points in 17 games.
It’s not just that this has been the best month of Miller’s Double-A career. It’s that it comes after one of the worst of his overall professional career. Miller slashed .190/.333/.316 in July, and the small sliver of production he generated that month came mostly in its first week.
It created an interesting dynamic for Dave Dombrowski and the front office in late July. Perhaps Miller played his way downward into trade consideration — in other words, perhaps the Phillies were more willing to move him for the right price — but it also meant a trade would’ve been quite the sell-low. Miller had just turned 21, and he’s still one of the youngest players in Double-A, but while that’s reason not to get overly concerned about a bad month (or a few), it’s hard to convince rival teams not to look at the numbers in front of them. Those numbers were not kind to Miller at that point, apart from the stolen bases and the encouraging defense at shortstop.
It’s impossible to know what would’ve played out if Miller had been hotter — not scalding, but steady — as the deadline neared. But it’s easy to understand why the impending deadline might have weighed on him as the Phillies made it obvious they’d do what was needed (within reason) to commit to a current core with real World Series aspirations.
Or maybe correlation, not causation, is as far as you can draw the link between the calendar and Miller’s production spike. (He did go 4-for-11 in the last three games of July, when the stove was hottest.) Whatever the case, the month he’s had since he officially remained in Reading should have the Phillies that much more relieved that he did.