A Critical Look at the Phillies Organization and Minor League Baseball
Matt Winkelman 
The Phillies have done an incredible job rebuilding their minor league system in the past 12 months. They have built up incredible depth and acquired some real cornerstone pieces to put around their existing pieces like J.P. Crawford, Aaron Nola, and Maikel Franco. The hitting side of the system has some real impact talent, but … 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
At their best awards are just fun and meaningless. When there are a plethora of good candidates for something like the best minor league hitter in your organization, there really is no losers. In the past few years this has not been the case for the Paul Owens Award, where the winning candidates have been rough … Read more
Each year it seems like the talent in the Arizona Fall League gets even more crazy. This year the Phillies are adding to the very high end talent present by sending the #2 prospect in baseball to the desert. It wasn’t clear whether the Phillies would push J.P. Crawford’s season to make up for his … Read more
Fall League Rosters are coming out today (September 1), so time to start tracking where all the prospect eligible players will be playing. *Italics – No Longer a Phillie Winter League Statistics Liga de Beisbol Dominicano: Scoreboard Roman Quinn – Tigres del Licey – Contract over back in US Logan Moore – Tigres del Licey … Read more
As expected the Phillies’ September call ups are underwhelming, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t important. The three players getting the call today are relief pitchers Dalier Hinojosa (R) and Colton Murray (R), along with catcher Erik Kratz. These three players provide important depth for Phillies team that has been over performing, but running out of … Read more
Each year Mike Drago polls people involved with covering the Phillies’ minor league system for their Top 20 prospects and publishes a compiled list with his thoughts for the Reading Eagle. This year he asked if I would like to participate and so I updated my midseason list and sent it in. First lets look at … Read more
The Phillies traded Cliff Lee to Seattle on December 16, 2009 for Phillippe Aumont, Tyson Gillies, and JC Ramirez. Combined the Phillies received 67.2 innings of -0.7 WAR from that deal. Jerad Eickhoff has eclipsed that production just by existing, but he was just the 4th piece in the Hamels deal, Sunday he is joined … Read more
First the bad news, Nick Williams suffered a concussion during a collision at first base where the first baseman received the ball while standing on top of the base. I assume the Phillies will be slow with Nick’s recovery, and he may be ready by the Fightin’s postseason run, but that is small significance compared … Read more
The parade of rookies continues for the Phillies as Nefi Ogando gets the call up to replace injured rookie Elvis Araujo. Ogando came into the Phillies organization in a trade with Boston that sent out SS John MacDonald. Last year Ogando saw a big jump in fastball velocity and was sitting 96-98 touching 100 with … Read more