A Critical Look at the Phillies Organization and Minor League Baseball
Matt Winkelman 
So it appears a deal sending Cole Hamels and Jake Diekman to the Texas Rangers is coming together quickly. Right now the critical pieces are OF Nick Williams, C Jorge Alfaro, RHP Alec Asher, RHP Jake Thompson and RHP Jerad Eikoff along with the contract of Matt Harrison. It appears there are more pieces involved … Read more
The Phillies just traded arguably the best reliever in their history for a AA pitcher, in what is another good solid deal for the Phillies. The reliever is Jonathan Papelbon and right now we don’t know how much they are paying of his contract going forward but indication doesn’t seem to be much if any … Read more
Buried on the Clearwater transaction list was the fact that second baseman Jesmuel Valentin has been reinstated from the restricted list and activated for the Williamsport Crosscutters. Valentin was arrested this April on misdemeanor domestic violence charges, there is no news on any legal outcome. He has been at the complex in Clearwater for the … Read more
I try not to make light of other people’s work on this site, I leave that to Twitter. But I feel obligated to be outraged at the newest MLB Pipeline rankings because they are prominent and highly quoted. I don’t think sites should do deep rankings if they don’t know systems, and it is very clear whoever … Read more
*This will be brief because of writing the midseason Top 30, so I hope you all understand Hitting Spotlight: Scott Kingery 6-13 2B 3 K Some people on Twitter this weekend pointed out I haven’t talked much about the Phillies’ 2nd round pick Scott Kingery, which I realize has a lot to do with me staring … Read more
I struggled to find what to write about on Aaron Nola’s call up. I wrote a lot of words about him two weeks ago and I didn’t want to rehash it all. While I was thinking I pulled up his player page and was looking through his velocity since he has been in the system, and … Read more
Pitcher Spotlight #1: Jesse Biddle 7 IP 3 H 0 R 1 BB 7 K There could not have been a more different second start for Biddle after the disaster of his first AAA start. At his peak prospect value Biddle was 89-93 with a plus curveball and feel for a decent looking changeup. Now … Read more
Today BA put out their midseason Top 10 Phillies prospects. I won’t comment too much about the list as I will have my own list out in about two weeks other than to say Kilome is ranked exactly where he should be. J.P. Crawford Aaron Nola Franklyn Kilome Zach Eflin Ben Lively Roman Quinn Carlos Tocci … Read more
Keith Law put out his mideason Top 50 prospect list today. No surprise that J.P. Crawford was #2 on the list. However, Aaron Nola came in at #38 on the list. I ranted about this on Twitter so I won’t rant here and instead will just leave this. Nola has straight up better stuff … Read more
Development is rarely linear. There is no prospect that better exemplifies this than Aaron Altherr. Altherr was a 9th round pick in 2009 and at the time Perfect Game listed him as 6’1 155lbs and Baseball America cited him as an athlete who hadn’t played much baseball. He went unranked by Baseball America that offseason, but then … Read more