A Critical Look at the Phillies Organization and Minor League Baseball
Much of Spring Training excitement has been converted to Bryce Harper watch, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t games that are about to occur. Much of the Phillies roster is locked in place, but that doesn’t mean we won’t get a look at some prospects in games this spring. With the lack of camp … Read more
Much of writing about prospects is about hope and optimism for the future. However, it can also be about failure and what that means and what the paths out of it are. It is no secret that the Phillies system is down compared to where it was a few years ago. Some of that has … Read more
Last night was the deadline for teams to add prospects to their 40 man rosters to protect them from the Rule 5 draft. As expected, the Phillies added RHP Adonis Medina, RHP Edgar Garcia, and SS Arquimedes Gamboa. The additions bring their roster to 38, though it is functionally 37 with Justin Bour reportedly put … Read more
The Phillies are holding a tenuous lead the NL East heading down the stretch in large part to graduations from their farm system. This year J.P. Crawford (1), Scott Kingery (3), Jorge Alfaro (4), Ramon Quinn (13), Seranthony Dominguez (14), Victor Arano (30), and Jesmuel Valentin (32) all have or will have graduated off of … Read more
There has been a common denominator between all of the successful Phillies teams over the last few decades: they had a great signal caller. Bob Boone, Darren Daulton, Carlos Ruiz. (and to a much lesser extent Mike Lieberthal). The “Chooch” era is over and now the Phillies are getting by with Cameron Rupp a majority of … Read more
Being a major leaguer has value, even if the player is not a particularly good major leaguer. For three players here they could be very valuable to a team, or just a value compared to the peers on this list of won’t make the majors. The margin between those two things is very small for … Read more
This section of the ranking was the hardest part of this exercise. There was not a huge difference among these 10 players (and the last 2-3 of the Top 10), and in reality you could reorder this list with little argument from me. It is easy to point to the top of the system as the reason for … Read more
Going into the draft this spring, there was a cry for the Phillies to draft a catcher because the team didn’t have an heir for Carlos Ruiz. Throwing aside that catchers develop too slow to help that quickly, there was public concern over the state of the Phillies’ catching depth. Right now after some crazy … Read more
I was going to wait for BP to publish these all in one place, but they haven’t so I thought I would consolidate these reports in a single spot because I think they are very good and important to read. Baseball Prospectus’ Tucker Blair made the journey to Hagerstown where he caught most of a series … Read more
Team Page Overview: The BlueClaws are far from the most stacked team in the system, the only top 10 prospects are defensive minded Deivi Grullon and Carlos Tocci. The pitching staff is fairly unheralded, but features a pair of very interesting Latin arms in Ricardo Pinto and Elniery Garcia that join a pair of returning … Read more