On June 19, the Phillies called up outfield prospect Matt Vierling, adding him to the 40 man roster to replace Matt Joyce. Joe Girardi was quoted by the Inquirer on the call up.
“They come up with confidence, and they come up with not sitting a lot,” Girardi said. “I think there’s an advantage to that, yes. And the league doesn’t really know them that well yet. You could pull up [scouting] stuff on everybody, but there’s not a lot of history.” – The premise makes some sense, while Vierling only had been called up to AAA 4 days earlier, he was 24, a decently high round pick, and was hitting .354/.426/.616 in 27 games with the exit velocity numbers to back it up.
The Phillies would option Vierling back to AAA on June 26. In his time in the majors, he would start exactly one game, getting 6 trips to the plate, logging a single in 3 of them and a strikeout in two of the others. Vierling got no chance to earn more playing time, because he was given none to begin with. He would get one day in the majors on July 16 as part of a double header, before finally getting called up for a more established role starting August 31.
On the surface, this doesn’t seem like the biggest issue, Matt Vierling is one of the biggest breakouts in the system this year and he needs a 40 man spot this offseason to protect him from the Rule 5 draft. It is however indicative of multiple years of the Phillies clogging their 40 man roster with players who don’t need to be there and hamstringing their ability to improve the roster. The 40 man and the 26 man rosters are two of the very few finite things in baseball. In the case of Matt Vierling they used a 40 man roster spot for two and a half months for 7 plate appearances.
Over the course of the season the Phillies have continued to carry essentially duplicative players in AAA to those on their major league roster. Mickey Moniak, Adam Haseley, Nick Maton, and to a lesser extent Rafael Marchan and now Alec Bohm have all spent a bunch of time in the minors while similar or lesser talented players played in the majors. Now this isn’t to say that those players all should be in the majors, and there are very valid reasons that Rafael Marchan in particular was in AAA. But if you start to do the math, that is 4-5 40 man spots devoted to hitters in AAA.
To compound the hitting issue has been the Phillies overprotecting players on the 40 man roster and then not moving on. Last offseason the Phillies added Kyle Dohy to the 40 man roster only to quietly remove him this spring. It took until midseason for the Phillies to remove Mauricio Llovera and Ramon Rosso from the 40 man roster (Rosso was added back at the beginning of September), and Damon Jones has struggled all year with no real look at getting MLB time. Those relievers represented a core of players the Phillies seemed uninterested in calling up or moving on from. Meanwhile a lack of starting pitching depth has consigned Cristopher Sanchez and Adonis Medina to the rotation as opposed to being moved to roles where they might help more immediately.
All of these factors together have left the Phillies with a completely inflexible 40 man roster. One of the free ways a team can make improvements over the course of the season is through waiver claims and pseudo waiver claims (player is designated and the team sends a minor player or cash before the player goes on waivers). The Phillies have made 2 waiver claims all season and their one pseudo claim was sending a real prospect to the Red Sox for C.J. Chatham.
Meanwhile this season the Dodgers, a team with significantly more organizational talent have claimed Ryan Meisinger, Connor Greene, Evan Phillips, Anthony Benboom, Chad Wallach, Jimmie Sherfy, Bobby Wahl, Travis Blankenhorn, Phil Bickford, and Ashton Goudeau during the season. Of those, only Bickford has stuck and he has stuck as a good relief pitcher, something the Phillies desperately need. The Dodgers have not held onto these players for long, often designating them for assignment the next time something comes along. They similarly churn their 26 man roster with their own players, calling up and relying on those players to contribute in short bursts. The result of this is that they continue to find “surprise” contributors every year. Similar things occur with other top teams as the Rays and Giants rosters are littered with other team’s castoffs and misfits. Now those teams have unified and good player dev, two things that will not be said about the Phillies in the major leagues. That said, if you don’t even trust your player development staff to take a chance on fixing a player, then why do you have that player development staff.
This goes back to Matt Vierling. If the Phillies had given him an actual run in the majors or if they had really relied on him during those two and a half months as an up and down player, this is a different conversation. The same could be said of Mickey Moniak who got barely a look in the majors to work through his troubles. The Phillies have rolled with Ronald Torreyes and Luke Williams for a couple of months this season, because Williams has never been given the chance to supplant Williams and open up another roster spot for the Phillies to churn with.
The continued theme of roster management and usage has been to be conservative. At no point have the Phillies truly given themselves the chance to catch lightning in a bottle. Their manager has stuck with his veterans, never giving their young players a chance to establish themselves. Their front office has hung on to players, refusing to try and making the fringe roster moves to find players that could help them. The Phillies are very clearly not a great team, but despite their very obvious blow ups they aren’t a terrible team. Going into the season they needed some breaks and some breakouts, and they didn’t give themselves a chance to get those. As the primes of their stars continue to move along and their division rivals continue to not go away, the Phillies are going to need to start to manage their rosters in a way that allows them to find players at the margins who can contribute. If they don’t they are going to be stuck in the place they always have been.