In past drafts there has been smoke both before the draft and afterwards that the Phillies intended to select college pitchers, but the board didn’t fall that way. Drafting three college pitchers with their first 3 picks doesn’t necessarily mean the Phillies set out to rejuvenate a pitching starved organization, but it does mean they didn’t have those players shoved down their boards.
When it comes to first round picks it is hard to draw real organizational trends. Even if a team shies away from a certain archetype, a first round talent can sometimes dictate that an exception should be made. However, when a team makes all of their picks of certain type of player, you have to raise an eyebrow.
Gage Wood is potentially a very good pitcher, and if you toss away his physical attributes for a second, he is a very Phillies type of draft pick. He fell in the draft due to risk, and not talent, and the Phillies have been more risk accepting than almost any team in baseball. They have also been able to keep pitchers healthy, and we have to assume they were comfortable with the medicals after the shoulder injury. They will need to build up his innings and workload, but if they can do that successfully, they may have added one of the best pitchers in the draft. But, we should get to the physicality of Wood. He is short, 6’0″, and the Phillies just do not spend picks on short pitchers. They have gone down to 6’2″ on guys like Griff McGarry and George Klassen, but 6’0″ has not been a place they tread. Instead, it has been 6’4″+ monsters with poor fastball shapes and heights that look more like a basketball team. The Phillies have only 6 pitchers in the org they drafted or signed out of the draft who are 6’1″ or shorter.
Wood’s height, coupled with a low release point and riding fastball, gives him one of the best pitches in the draft. Overall the selection and player type is very familiar to the Phillies acquiring Moises Chace from the Baltimore Orioles at the deadline last year. It isn’t that the Phillies have totally ignored the concept of low angle riding fastballs, it just has seemed like they have most zigged while others zagged, instead loading up pitchers with the full suite of options. While this has largely been a positive development, the organization has suffered from not even putting talented players into that development machine. If they can give Wood a good changeup while solidifying his slider into a good gyro/cutter type pitch they can build a much better version of what they had in George Klassen. Wood will definitely get some calls to be a reliever, but unless they are going to Chris Sale him where he goes bullpen now, and then back to starting dev next year, that is a siren song they should resist.
So that is all Gage Wood, a pitcher who threw a no-hitter in the MCWS. What the Phillies did was go back to that well two more times for LHP Cade Obermueller and RHP Cody Bowker. Neither Obermueller or Bowker has Wood’s raw stuff, and Obermueller might not have the fastball shape either. But they are 6’0″ and 6’1″ respectively with low angle deliveries. We will see how the Phillies value them from a bonus standpoint, but depending on your source, both were picked in a reasonable or expected range. Obermueller and Bowker are also much more slight than Wood, more in the traditional “future reliever” bucket.
This shift is a real modernization in the Phillies talent acquisition, though they should also keep a diversity of pitchers and embrace outliers, and one that really has been mostly contained to the domestic market. On the international side, many of their pitchers are on the shorter side, whether that is Jean Cabrera or someone like Ranger Suarez, we see a larger diversity of sizes and types from a market less attached to value maximalization.
I don’t know if I actually like the Obermueller and Bowker picks. I worry that there isn’t enough upside in either the rotation or bullpen, and Obermueller has already had a recent velocity jump and Bowker is coming from a major program that has churned out top drafted pitchers. Can the Phillies actually get their offspeed pitches to a place where they could be back end starters, can they pull out more velocity. These are things they have done in the past with more broken arms, so maybe they can. It is certainly more talent and strike throwing than the dev staff has been mostly handed up until now.
Regardless, it is good to see them go in some new trends and directions, and it will be interesting to see what carries over to the second day.