The deadline to add players to the 40 man roster to protect them from the Rule 5 draft. The Phillies faced 3 easy decisions, 2 tough decisions, and a host of mostly irrelevant decisions. In the end they made all of those decisions. They added Jimmy Cordero, Edubray Ramos, and Roman Quinn to their 40 man roster. They did not add Carlos Tocci and Alberto Tirado to their roster. As a bonus they claimed 27 year old reliever A.J. Achter from the Twins.
The three added make sense, all are in AA and should be in the majors in 2016 at some point and could be impact players. Achter makes no sense to me, he is 27 years old, with minor league success, but only averages about 90 mph on his fastball and has been back in the major leagues. He might be worth the flyer, but not with the players left unprotected.
Tirado* and Tocci will both be left unprotected in the Rule 5 draft. Tocci is not particularly likely to stick on a major league roster, but with the emphasis on defense up the middle and a ton of bad teams, there may be someone out there who hides him in a weight room all season. As for Tirado, he is a prototype Rule 5 pick given his raw stuff. His control is still really poor so he is not going to help anyone out this year, but he has the potential for 2 70 grade pitches and a 60 grade pitch.
*Tirado may not actually be eligible, it is very much still up for debate right now.
“*Tirado may not actually be eligible, it is very much still up for debate right now.”
Can you explain this? Tirado is the only decision I disagree with, and it seems pretty inexplicable to me. What is not known that would make him not eligible? What is the debate?
There are discrepancies about when he actually signed. Baseball America and milb.com both show his signing date as July 7, 2011 – but mlb.com’s transactions page lists him as having been signed August 30, 2011. It matters because the rule determines eligibility based on whether the league he was originally assigned to on his first contract was ‘in season” when he signed or not.
Today milb angrees with mlb com, saying August 30. http://www.milb.com/player/index.jsp?player_id=610143#/career/R/pitching/2015/ALL
Depends on where you look, Ken. The transactions listing at the bottom of the page (presumably pulled from the same database as the ML transactions data) says August 30th. The player bio (link next to his picture) says July 7th. Pick your poison.
Given the discrepancies, the truth is we just don’t know.
Note also that we have to be careful about anything that appears on the mlb.com or milb.com web sites. They’re pretty well known to put up inaccurate stuff. Just as an example, the milb.com page on the Rule 5 draft says “Players who were signed when they were 19 or older and have played in professional baseball for four years are eligible, as are players who were signed at 18 and have played in pro ball for five years.” BUT… the actual Rule 5, which you can track down online, says NOTHING about how many seasons a player has “played” – it simply says he’s eligible in the fourth, or fifth Rule 5 Draft that occurs after the date he signed an initial minor-league contract – thus the confusion that ensues when a player signs in one season, but doesn’t actually play in that season. What it means is that an organization cannot “redshirt” a prospect, to keep him out of the Rule 5 draft for an additional year.