Ranking season is still going on, and today Baseball Prospectus rolled out their organization rankings. The Phillies ranked #4, their highest ranking yet (BA #8, MLB #7, ESPN #6). Here is what they had to say about the Phillies’ system:
These are four very strong systems that just don’t quite have the depth of the tier above them. The Phillies are the outlier here, both in how they built the system, and how different they look from last Spring. J.P. Crawford is still here, and is an elite-level prospect, but the Phillies added six new top-ten prospects in the last calendar year between the 2015 draft and the Ken Giles and Cole Hamels trades. The Phillies system may lack a true impact talent past JP Crawford, but Nick Williams has a chance to get there, and otherwise they have a nice blend of arms and bats, upside and floor. The 2016 subplot to follow: How Mark Appel and Jorge Alfaro deal with their change of scenery. Those two could make this ranking look overly conservative by the end of the 2016 season.
In case you forgot, BP had this as their Phillies Top 10 (Top 100 ranking).
- J.P. Crawford (4)
- Nick Williams (25)
- Jake Thompson (34)
- Franklyn Kilome (95)
- Roman Quinn
- Cornelius Randolph
- Mark Appel (64)
- Jorge Alfaro (70)
- Andrew Knapp
- Ben Lively
Nice! They are way higher on Kilome than most prospect lists.
Lively at 10 is a joke.
Yeah, I still don’t get it. Maybe they know something we dont, but there are several pitchers I’d place above Lively.
Different BP writers did the top 10 and the top 100 and they were done months apart, so the orders don’t match up.