A Critical Look at the Phillies Organization and Minor League Baseball
It is August 31 and the Phillies are limping towards the end of the season. That means tomorrow the Phillies can call up reinforcements to help get them to the end of the season. Don’t expect much on September 1 though. However, the AA and AAA seasons end on September 4th and that provides another … Read more
Some years we look forward to the release of Arizona Fall League rosters. Given the distribution of talent in the Phillies’ system (not in Clearwater and Reading, and pitching heavy everywhere) it promised to be a light year for major Phillies prospects. With the announcement of rosters today, things turned out a bit better than … Read more
Each year, Mike Drago of the Reading Eagle reaches out to local and national bloggers, broadcasters, and writers for their Phillies’ prospect rankings. Those rankings are then aggregated into a combined Top 30. This was the second year that Mike reached out to me to participate and it gave me a good opportunity to make … Read more
Franklyn Kilome has been on my radar for a few years now and has been the one prospect that has eluded my scouting eye I’ve wanted to see in the system. Kilome was promoted last week from Clearwater to Reading and had a bit of a shaky AA debut last Thursday. Wednesday night, he would … Read more
During the trade deadline the Washington Nationals designated Jimmy Cordero for assignment, which made me look back on the Phillies’ moves this offseason to check in on where some of their castoffs are now. This is not hard hitting analysis, honestly I am just looking through the transaction log. Phillies Trade Darin Ruf and Darnell … Read more
The 2016 GCL Phillies had one of the most statistically dominant rotations I have seen at the minor league level. The rotation started with Sixto Sanchez who posted a 0.50 ERA in 11 starts, but then followed with Mauricio Llovera (1.87), Nick Fanti (1.57), Luis Carrasco (2.18), Kyle Young (2.67), and Will Stewart (4.06). It … Read more
I have been thinking a lot about J.P. Crawford’s midseason ranking and the quotes from unnamed scouts and executives thrown at him as different public sites went to bury him. On some level the criticism was fair. When Crawford missed 10 days of games in mid June he was batting .194/.313/.252. As is well documented … Read more
I was browsing through the minor league pitching leaderboards on Fangraphs this morning and I noticed that a name kept appearing at the top of almost all of the leaderboards among qualified pitchers (pitchers who would qualify for the ERA title in leagues where they have pitched). This pitcher was in the Phillies’ system and … Read more
The Phillies have a grand tradition of trying to make the slowest plodding players on the field play in the outfield. It started with an attempt to put Ryan Howard in left field to not have him be blocked by Jim Thome, and has continued to this day. Now some of this has been in … Read more
We need to rewind a month here, because I have yet to actually talk about an event that occurred on July 2. The Phillies entered this year with $4,750,000 to spend on international talent this year. We know the end of the story, but let’s go back to the beginning with who they signed, and … Read more