Phillies 50: Forgotten 2005 – Eude Brito

Our ‘Phillies 50’ series on the most random players from the 1971-2019 campaigns reaches the 2005 pitching entry, southpaw reliever Eude Brito.

He was signed by the Phillies as an amateur international free agent on July 3, 1998 out of his native Dominican Republic and came over to the U.S. the following summer to appear in a dozen games with the club’s Gulf Coast League affiliates at age 20.

Brito worked his way through the farm system over the next five years and reached Triple-A Scranton-Wilkes Barre. Though a reliever during most of his developmental time, the Phillies began to give him some starting opportunities at Double-A Reading in 2004.

In the 2005 season at Triple-A, Brito would pitch in 28 games, 15 of those as starts. He would also get to make his debut in Major League Baseball when the Phillies promoted him in late August.

On August 21, 2005 the Phillies first-year manager Charlie Manuel sent Brito to the mound as the starting pitcher for his big-league debut on a Sunday afternoon at Citizens Bank Park. He showed well that day against the Pittsburgh Pirates, allowing just one earned run on three hits over five innings, striking out two and walking one. Though he didn’t get credit for the win, the Phillies did take that one by a 4-3 final score.

Brito would stay with the big club for the remainder of the season. He pitched in relief once and then was given four more starts in September. His best outing by far came on September 12, 2005 in a Monday night game at Citizens Bank Park vs the Atlanta Braves. He shut the visitors out on three hits over six innings, striking out seven and walking one to earn his first big-league victory as the Phillies won by a 4-1 score.

Unfortunately his final two starts would not go nearly as well. He lost twice in short outings while the Phillies were trying to capture the NL Wildcard berth, a race in which they fell just one game short.

In March 2006, Brito was a part of the Dominican team that lost to Cuba in the semi-finals of the inaugural World Baseball Classic in March 2006.

“Brito”, a ram named for him, was the 2006 National Champion Ram at the North American International Livestock Exposition entered by Ruth Hartman, who was an alum of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League made famous in the “A League of Their Own” film.

Brito would appear in five more games with the Phillies in 2006, but that would be all for his career in the majors. He became a free agent in October 2007 and signed the following January with the Nationals. Released in mid-April 2008, he was grabbed up by the New York Mets who released him that November.

He would spend the next few years playing independent ball and back in the Dominican, last appearing there with Licey for one game in the 2012-13 winter campaign.

In that 2005 season for which he is the pitching representative for this series, Brito went 1-2 with a 3.68 ERA. He allowed 20 hits over 22 innings across six games, five of those as starts on the mound, with a 15/11 K:BB ratio.