Brookover: Phillies' future at first base wide open

Who's on first? That's a question Phillies fans have rarely had to ask since Ryan Howard arrived in the middle of the 2005 season and blasted his way to the National League rookie of the year award.

Sure, there was that time at the start of the 2012 season when Howard was sidelined by a leg infection after undergoing offseason surgery to repair the torn Achilles tendon that brought the 2011 season to a crumbling conclusion. Charlie Manuel tried to temporarily replace The Big Piece with Ty Wigginton, Laynce Nix, John Mayberry and Jim Thome, but all were fruitless attempts.

Since then, Phillies observers have mostly asked a much different question than the one that was famously posed by the…