A Critical Look at the Phillies Organization and Minor League Baseball
There are many flaws with ranking prospects. One of the biggest is where to end your list, and in the end we gravitate to nice round numbers because they are more aesthetically pleasing. This leaves us with an abrupt end to the creation of the list and an abrupt beginning to the journey. These lucky … Read more
As we near the end of 2016 we have another prospect list. This time it is the Phillies Top 10 put together by Ben Badler at Baseball America. BA will eventually release a full Top 30 prospects in their handbook, but for now we have their Top 10 which you can read here (the Crawford … Read more
In many years there are set to be surprises when the first prospect lists of the year come out. This year expect the lists to much more predictable in terms of names with some minor differences in terms of order. Today the first big list came out with Baseball Prospectus publishing their Phillies Top 10 … Read more
The ranking season continues with the Eastern League and Florida State League Top 20s. Florida State League: #14 – Scott Kingery Eastern League: #6 J.P. Crawford #12 Jorge Alfaro #13 Dylan Cozens Thoughts: Before jumping into my normal bullet points of thoughts, I wanted to talk about Cozens at #13 on this list. It is … Read more
Ranking season goes ever onward and we are now firmly into Baseball America’s league Top 20 prospects. Joining the GCL list we now have the NYPL list and SAL list. I am going to address the NYPL list first before going into my philosophical differences with the SAL list. New York-Penn League Top 20: (Link) … Read more
The GCL Phillies steamrolled through the GCL this year until they reached the championship game and the GCL Cardinals. The GCL is a 17 team league, so getting 2 on the list would get you in the top tier, instead the Phillies placed the most on the list with 4. It is important to note … Read more
For the second year in a row Mike Drago of the Reading Eagle asked me to participate in his end of year prospect rankings. The rankings aggregated rankings from bloggers, beat writers, announcers, and those that cover prospects for public sites. You can read about the 2015 list here and I am going to do kind … Read more
The Phillies don’t have the best farm system in baseball, and it is easy to look at a list like this and see a system bolstered mainly by the trade that sent Cole Hamels to Texas. This list does give me a chance to peel back the top of the system a bit to show … Read more
Last part of the series on midseason updates after looking at players off the list on Tuesday and hitters on Wednesday. This time it is pitchers, a position that has become and org focus in the past few years. With quantity comes some quality, but also some players that have dropped off. Up: Ben Lively … Read more
Since I am not doing a full prospect list update until August 1 so I wanted to do an update of sorts at the midway part of the minor league season. Yesterday I wrote about players off of the list who will jump on to the list this year. Today is the chance to talk … Read more