It has been 4 days since the Phillies added 11 to the 40 man roster. I wrote about the actual players protected over at The Good Phight. This is going to be a bit more musing than scouting.
The only big surprise of the day was that the Phillies made room for 11 players on the 40 man roster. There was room to add more, but what this really did was fill up all the available spots for minor league players. If they have a non-60 day DL injury they are going to need to call up a prospect. If anyone is bad they are not going to be able to start a young player in the minor leagues. There are areas where this fine, like starting pitching, because they have the depth of major league ready players to make it work. However, overall it is going to make things tight, and players that lose their jobs aren’t just going to get a demotion, because there are minor league reliever as well as hitters like Rhys Hoskins, Scott Kingery, and J.P. Crawford who could force the major league issue and require roster spots.
On the player add front it was mostly obvious. The first surprise was Jesmuel Valentin. It sounds like the Phillies are open to Valentin winning an opening day spot on the bench, if that is the case he becomes a much easier add because he did have moderate danger of being taken in the draft. Alberto Tirado was not a lock, but given what is being valued by teams as major league relievers, Tirado’s appeal is evident. The biggest surprise for many was Drew Anderson. I thought the lanky righty was still a bit under the radar given his injury history and short track record this year. It seems like the buzz was there and given the danger the decision to protect looks obvious in hindsight. Anderson is still a work in progress, but he looked like a back end starter earlier this year with the reports out of Clearwater indicating there being a bit more there.
The biggest logjams after all this are in starting pitching and the outfield. The two biggest non-adds were probably Andrew Pullin and Carlos Tocci. Right now if we are talking about pieces of the future they are behind Dylan Cozens, Roman Quinn, Odubel Herrera, and Nick Williams as well as probably Tyler Goeddel and Aaron Altherr. That is a lot of people they need to beat out for a job. On the starting pitching side no one was left unprotected, but there 14 starting pitchers on the 40 man roster (including Morgan and Tirad0) and that doesn’t count high minors starters like Tyler Viza and Thomas Eshelman. That means that some pitchers are going to the bullpen (which is thin) out of necessity. It appears that Ricardo Pinto may be the first to make the plunge. His might be temporary if he can find a breaking ball, or it could be permanent. Someone like Appel could end up in the bullpen, same with the casualties of the Thompson, Eflin, Lively, and Asher battles.
The Phillies limited their flexibility with their moves, but what they are is a very young team with a lot of youth on the way. Some of that youth will fail, some will succeed, but what the Phillies followed through on was saying they wanted to see what those players had. It might be ugly, but at least we get to see Alberto Tirado in major league camp.