Once upon a time, Maikel Franco was a rising star for the Philadelphia Phillies.
That feels like forever ago now.
But Franco is still playing baseball, and hitting towering home runs. It's just halfway around the globe.
Franco's last MLB game came in 2022 for the Nationals, and his Phillies tenure ended in 2019.
Now, he's slugging for the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles in Japan.
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He's got 22 home runs since arriving in NPB three seasons ago.
His latest was crushed:
It’s 2025 and Maikel Franco is still hitting bombs in Japan! pic.twitter.com/YPsJ4LINJl
— Phillies Tailgate (@PhilsTailgate) June 13, 2025
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Franco is still just 32 years old, but with an average in the low-.200s in each of his three Japanese seasons, it seems unlikely he'd ever make it back to MLB.
At this point, he'll have to be happy with hitting long blasts in the second-best baseball league in the world.
It's a solid final chapter in a career that included multiple years as a top-100 prospect and then three 20-homer seasons in a row for the Phillies.
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Franco was always going to wrap things up swinging for the fences and occasionally connecting.