Phillies Minor League Monthly Retrospective – May 2026

Stock Changes

*Rankings are from Preseason Top 50

Stock Up

RHP Ramon Marquez (#14) – A minor injury, plus some worries about building workload meant that Marquez didn’t make his official season debut until May. In those 18.2 innings he has walked 6 to 32 strikeouts. He is throwing harder this year with his fastball and changeup up 1.5 mph on average, but his slider is up 3 mph and is acting more like a cutter. The cutter in particular has turned facing righties from a struggle to a strength. This has allowed him to throw his fastball less, and reduce the amount of fastballs opposing batters have swung at. Given his fastball weaknesses, Marquez will probably need to split the pitch into a distinct 4-seam and sinker shape so that he can compete with his offspeed pitches. Marquez is sort of unconventional, but if he can continue to trend up he looks like a mid rotation starter.

OF Griffin Burkholder (#20) – April for Burkholder was all about staying healthy, and in May he did something with that consistent playing time, hitting .352/.440/.606. He hit some of his home runs in a non-Statcast stadium, but Burkholder is still showing solid power (106 mph 90th EV and 111 mph max) for the year. Burkholder isn’t chasing much, but he is struggling greatly vs spin (though slight improvement in May) and changeups, while crushing fastballs. That hole in his game is going to be exploited by better pitchers, and it was a worry before the injury, and he is going to need to leverage these consistent reps into better pitch recognition. It is good that he is starting to look like the guy they drafted.

RHP Wen-Hui Pan (#19) – Pan allowed two runs in the first game of his rehab and in his last. After walking three batters in his first appearance, he has walked 1 to 22 strikeouts in 15 innings. He is tearing through left handed batters with his splitter and velocity coming back from before the injury. He will need a bigger test than Jersey Shore to say he is a late inning reliever in the short term. He has come back from the injury as well as you could hope for.

OF Nathan Humphreys (UR) – Humphrey was signed as a non-drafted free agent last year, despite be liked by a lot of draft models. It was mostly bad luck that led to poor April stats, as he still walked as many times as he struck out. The BABIP rebounded in May and he had better top line numbers as result. While not as big as Brandon Marsh, Humphreys checks a lot of the same boxes. He can play some center field, hits the ball hard, and probably shouldn’t face that many lefties. Humphreys is hitting .261/.373/.454 off righties this year and is already being platooned against southpaws. As an older hitter in low-A he is a little passive, and will need to show his approach also works against better stuff. He doesn’t always take advantage of his raw power (106 mph 90th percentile and 112 mph max) due to some contact quality issues. However, he makes contact in the zone, handles velocity, and isn’t neutralized with spin. This all makes Humphreys not a top prospect, but potentially a useful one.

Stock Down

1B/OF Felix Reyes (#34) – It isn’t that Reyes hit poorly in May, he torched AAA over the last two weeks of the months after the Phillies decided to have not just sitting on the bench. It is that we saw all of his weaknesses exposed, and then we haven’t seen an adjustment. Reyes actually ran a 97% zone contact rate in the majors, but he had a monstrous 53% chase rate, up from his already ridiculous 44% in AAA. In the majors, pitchers just did not throw him strikes (41% zone rate). This left him with a 71% first pitch strike rate and a collapsed contact quality. Reyes is theoretically what the Phillies need, a right handed power bat, but he needs to really change who he is to be able to contribute.

OF Dante Nori (#6) – Offense is up across the minors, but after a good April, Nori hit just .198/.261/.274 in May. His walk rate (7.8%) was slightly up for the month, but well below where he was in 2025, and his strikeout rate (21.7%) isn’t enormous in the overall scheme of prospects but is high for a prospect that needs to rely on not making extra outs. After two months his power output (.118 ISO) is in line with where it was in 2025, and so is his batted ball profile. He hits a bunch of line drives, but he also pops the ball up, which had now led to a BABIP around .300 the last two years. You can’t be a prospect that doesn’t have at least one of outlier hit rates, power, and onbase ability, and so far that has been Nori’s problem. That all said, the Phillies sending him to Reading was on the aggressive side of moves given he didn’t really play at or ace Jersey Shore, so there is plenty of time to turn this around, it just is a real fall from the spring’s hype.

2B Aroon Escobar (#5) – Escobar has been a bit of the forgotten top prospect, and his performance so far in AA has not helped that. In May, his walk rate and strikeout rates took a turn for the worse, and all season RHPs have been taking his lunch money. For the season, he has seen a slight decrease in approach numbers, but largely they are within the expected range of outcomes. What has really suffered is his quality of contact. His line drives are down and he is just hitting the ball with authority as much. This has led to a drop in power and BABIP and that is what is really driving his overall numbers down. Escobar is just 21, younger than Nori, but his Rule 5 clock is ticking which makes performance this year more important, even if it is an aggressive assignment.

C Kehden Hettiger (#33) – Hettiger was a breakout prospect this spring. He was a young catcher with power and surprising plate discipline who only looked mildly overmatched against big league arms. In April, he didn’t hit well, but he drew walks and he struck out at a moderate rate. In May, he struck out in nearly have his trips to the plate (35 in 72 PAs) and it has driven his contact rate to a career low. Hettiger just turned 22 and is in AA, so this isn’t the end, but the contact worries date back to before the draft and while his 2025 season was better, it wasn’t amazing. He is not a finished product behind the plate which means his bat needs to be playable, and we know with catchers that trying to get a glove to playable can hurt a catcher’s offense.

Mixed

SS Matthew Ferrara (#23) – When you spend a month putting up unsustainable positive numbers and then the next putting up unsustainably low, you end up in the mixed section twice. Ferrara hit just .174/.282/.337 in May, but his walk rate went from 5.6% to 10.6% and his strikeout rate went from 31.4% to 21.1%. His whiff rate dropped from 35.2% to 30.8% and his BABIP was just .204 which drove down the triple slash line. More importantly, his approach had been geared to hit fastballs, and despite swinging at breaking balls just as much in May, he dropped his whiff rate on them from 56.7% to 43.9%. This did to some worse performance on balls in play vs fastballs, but not an increase in whiff rate. He needs to now find that sweet spot between not selling out for pull power vs fastballs and still being able to tap into positive contact, and given that he just turned 19, the ability to already make some adjustments is a positive sign.

RHP Cody Bowker (#15) – Bowker has a 5.55 ERA on the season while being one of the most prolific strikeout pitchers in the minor leagues. His 39.7% K% is 12th among all minor leaguers with at least 30 innings pitched, and he is doing it with a high, but not unreasonable 11.9% BB%. What is happening, is home runs. Bowker’s low velocity, low approach angle fastball is missing bats, but his breaking balls are letting him down. His slider and sweeper are both getting hit hard when hitters make contact. Given his profile, you might think part of his problem was platoons, but righties and lefties are hitting him hard when they make contact at pretty similar rates. He will need at least one of the offspeed pitches to work to be a reliever, but he is going to need both of them plus the changeup to make starting a real potential outcome.

Monthly Stat Leaders

Hitting

Pitching

Mailbag

@mitchrupert.bsky.social: Which “too old for their league” prospect intrigues you the most?

The answer is Nathan Humphreys for the reasons detailed above. However, the trio of Robert Phelps, Nolan Beltran, and Juan Villavicencio have all done a mix of platoon hitting, positional flexibility, and better contact. I don’t see the tools right now for one to really pop and become a big time prospect, but they have me intrigued.

@kp-paul.bsky.social: What (roughly) is the distribution of RHH and LHH who are seen as potential major leaguers? (I ask because lack of RHH in general in the majors. Probably a lot of righty throwing kids coached to hit lefty once analytics became dominant, and apparently everybody had the same idea.)

I decided to not be judgement about the seen as major leaguers piece and took just the rookie eligible prospects in the system and broke them down by position and the B/T.

Position	L/L	L/R	R/R	S/R
C	0	4	17	3
1B	0	2	1	0
2B	0	2	1	0
SS	0	5	10	4
3B	0	3	3	0
OF	6	4	16	1

My completely unscientific guess is that we have see more of a shift in the positions where you wouldn’t see a lefty normally and in some of the power areas. I also think there is also probably a drop in switch hitters that is part of this equation as well. But for science I also decided I wanted to look at this by country/region of origin.

Region	L/L	L/R	R/R	S/R
US/Canada	4	11	21	4
Latin America	3	7	27	4
Pacific Rim		1
Europe		1

That tends to lean towards this being more of a domestic thing, except that we see things like the first basemen are all draft guys, Venezuela dominates the catchers, and the US is where a lot of the outfielders seem to be from. The research for another time is probably about how many left handed throwers are actually just forced onto the mound.

@jaypb08.bsky.social: Right now, it looks like the only solid depth they have is in the bullpen, with a mix of AAAA guys and interesting arms built within. Do you see any improvement trending overall on the SP or hitting for the 2027+ teams of guys you project to be (at least) serviceable replacement players?

There isn’t much. I think Rincones gives them some OF depth this year, and I could see a world where there is replacement level call up utility out of Dante Nori and Dylan Campbell next year. Same could be said of Bryan Rincon and Aroon Escobar on the infield. Starting pitching is grimmer. There is nothing this year, and next year you might have Gage Wood waiting in the wings, which would be really good. Other than that, I like Braydon Tucker and Luke Russo as guys who might be Alan Rangel level depth. Maybe Luke Gabrysh, Mavis Graves, or Sam Highfill move quickly and join them, but I wouldn’t call that likely. The other pitchers from the 2025 draft are moving a little slower and are very unlikely to be 2027 depth.

@paulsocolar.bsky.social: Thoughts on the Players Association proposal?

I think the proposals that raise compensation at the very bottom end are all good and I think would make the game healthier by having young guys not be such an advantage because you can just not pay them. Also anything that moves more money into player’s primes is good with me. I think going after clubs just pocketing revenue sharing would accomplish some of what a cap would actually do, by forcing teams to actually spend some money, and dangling the carrot of more revenue sharing is good. I am also all in favor of removing the QO penalty on FAs while still giving something to previous team. Of course I also inhabit a world view on how this should work that thinks the PA is not asking for enough, and that their solutions to competitive balance are just better.

@frankvisco.bsky.social: I get that Wood is able to get it done with mostly FB, but why dont the coaches sort of mandate mixing in more of the offspeed stuff to aid development?

They are working in the offspeed stuff and in Clearwater he would have games that emphasized the slider or the curveball. He still is working on the splitter becoming a pitch he has feel for. So they are working those into the game plan, but also they need him to build workload, work on his fastball command, and to succeed. You don’t want him just never throwing his offspeed, but also teaching is going to work better if he is feeling positive and having success and you can only hold a competitive player’s arm behind their back so much. I think a lot of this is also why speculation the Phillies are preparing him for 2026 are premature, there is a lot of development and build up he still needs to do so he can be successful quickly when it is time for his callup.