A Critical Look at the Phillies Organization and Minor League Baseball
This week MLB Pipeline released their Phillies Top 30 prospects. This completes the release of individual team prospect lists for the Phillies from the major national sites (Baseball America, Fangraphs, MLB Pipeline, Baseball Prospectus, ESPN, and The Athletic). Most of these lists are behind paywalls so I am not going to give individual lists or … Read more
The different tiers of prospects unsurprisingly look like a pyramid, with a large number of interesting players in the organization narrowing to a very few elite prospects at the top. Even here in this group of five there are three distinct tiers. At the top, Painter is an elite prospect, talent wise one of the … Read more
I talk a lot about tiers or groupings of players, and to me there is a distinct drop from 5 to 6 and then from 16 to 17. In a deeper system it would be better if this group started at 10 instead of 6, but this is not a group of bad prospects. What … Read more
To me there is a distinct top 16 prospects in the system and what feels like a drop off in the late 20s. In between those two groups is an interesting set of players. It includes some injured players, some breakouts with questions, and some very flawed players that are one major developmental gain away … Read more
Ever since the Phillies brought in Dave Dombrowski to run their baseball operations, they have been looking to overhaul the farm system and develop a sustaining long term pipeline. The process involved throwing aside large pieces of the previous framework, many of which have gone on to have success in other organizations, in order to … Read more
As I mentioned on Monday with the positional rankings, I am trying a fun little ranking experiment. The first thing I do is positional rankings, and I can already see from your results for that poll that you have also created tiered clumps, which is something I find helpful when I then have to think … Read more
The major league season is over, free agency is about to begin, and prospect rankings have already arrived at both Baseball America and Baseball Prospectus. I have started my own writing, but I am not as proactive as either of those sites (nor do I have a book that I have to make a deadline … Read more
The draft picks have all signed and the trade deadline is next week, so like last year I am going to combine the two into a rankings update and thoughts on the trade deadline. Like always I have divided the list up into tiers. Within a tier the order is my preference. It isn’t 100% … Read more
We are now 12 weeks into the minor league season and 6 weeks before the trade deadline. With the FCL season over a month in, this year gives a good chance to have actual information on the breakouts already happening. Not all rankings changes may be as reflected in the actual number, as the tiers … Read more
A little late coming, but not every prospect can make the list and some weren’t particularly close. However, it is time to dump all of the notes I do have, because some of these guys could surprise because many are still kids and an eternity away or things just click sometimes for players who aren’t … Read more