A Critical Look at the Phillies Organization and Minor League Baseball
I want to jump to the rankings Ever since the Phillies brought in Dave Dombrowski to run their baseball operations, they have been looking to overhaul the farm system and develop a sustaining long term pipeline. The process involved throwing aside large pieces of the previous framework, many of which have gone on to have … Read more
This Week’s Schedule *3 Game Series beginning 4/4 Hitter Spotlight 1B Carson Taylor 4-6 2 2B HR BB 2 K It is a 3 game sample size, and if you go 3 for 3 with 2 doubles and a home run in a game that is going to weigh pretty heavily. Taylor got a hit … Read more
Top Prospects Justin Crawford – The Phillies decided to aggressively push Crawford to AAA after just 40 games in AA. Crawford is a divisive prospect across the industry, but the Phillies clearly think highly of him. It is likely to be a process over results season for Crawford, both in the positive and negative. Is … Read more
Gameday / Statcast Spring Breakout Notes Pitcher Velocity Exit Velocity Other Notes Videos
For the second year in a row, MLB is hosting the prospect v prospect showdown that is the Spring Breakout. The Phillies will be facing the Pirates on Friday March 14 at 1:05pm ET at BayCare Ballpark. Rosters were announced today with the Phillies having a 27 man roster of 15 hitters and 12 pitcher. … Read more
This week MLB Pipeline released their Phillies Top 30 prospects. This completes the release of individual team prospect lists for the Phillies from the major national sites (Baseball America, Fangraphs, MLB Pipeline, Baseball Prospectus, ESPN, and The Athletic). Most of these lists are behind paywalls so I am not going to give individual lists or … Read more
These recaps won’t start in earnest until the minor league season begins, and I cannot promise there will be enough prospect content for each week in March. However, there are prospects in camp playing in games for now. Notes and Thoughts Pitcher Spotlight – Velocity Readings You can find all prospect velocity readings over the … Read more
One of the limitation of doing a top 50 is that there are only 50 spots and it creates a cut off. With the shrinking minor leagues there has been a condensing of talent and high rate of turnover. That means that most players in the system have some level of MLB upside, even if … Read more
The different tiers of prospects unsurprisingly look like a pyramid, with a large number of interesting players in the organization narrowing to a very few elite prospects at the top. Even here in this group of five there are three distinct tiers. At the top, Painter is an elite prospect, talent wise one of the … Read more
I talk a lot about tiers or groupings of players, and to me there is a distinct drop from 5 to 6 and then from 16 to 17. In a deeper system it would be better if this group started at 10 instead of 6, but this is not a group of bad prospects. What … Read more