A Critical Look at the Phillies Organization and Minor League Baseball
The Phillies have a grand tradition of trying to make the slowest plodding players on the field play in the outfield. It started with an attempt to put Ryan Howard in left field to not have him be blocked by Jim Thome, and has continued to this day. Now some of this has been in … Read more
Trade Deadline Day can be such a stressful time for a number of executives as they try to make the right move for the team’s future or it’s present. On a day we have seen the Dodgers and Yankees beef up their rotations with Yu Darvish and Sonny Gray respectively, and a whole other bevy … Read more
Last night I made my third trip to Lehigh Valley this year to watch the Phillies top bats take on the Rays’ top prospect Brent Honeywell of Durham, who is considered one of the best pitching prospects in the baseball right now. Honeywell had his way last night after scuffling through the 1st five batters … Read more
JP Crawford since the day he was drafted 16th overall in 2013, has been labeled as the start of the next generation of Phillies baseball. He was considered the top overall shortstop in his draft class despite the lack of power due to his tremendous plate discipline, barrel control and his overall feel at shortstop. … Read more
Things are not going well in the major leagues for the Phillies. This has meant that the state of the Phillies’ rebuild has been cast into doubt. The problem with this assumption is that in the minors that the Phillies rebuild in the minors is going fine (even if it is not going at the … Read more
The draft countdown clock is rolling in to the final 10 days and the MLB mocks are shooting out from every direction. The Phillies are in a spot at 8th overall, where they could seemingly go in any direction. They could go to the prep level for the toolsy five tool bats (Adell, Beck) or the … Read more
The top of the Phillies system has some real impact, but what makes it special for me is the group spanning 8 to 15. The whole group is interchangeable, and while I went with 3 younger upside players in the 8-10 spot, I see them as equal in value to me to the 5 players … Read more
Since I am not doing a full prospect list update until August 1 so I wanted to do an update of sorts at the midway part of the minor league season. Yesterday I wrote about players off of the list who will jump on to the list this year. Today is the chance to talk … 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
After a short break the Top 20s continue with the South Atlantic League. The league is how to 14 teams so getting just one or two players on the list can be quite the accomplishment. Lakewood had two prospects made the Top 20, however the two chosen leaves some puzzlement with shortstop Malquin Canelo and … Read more