A Critical Look at the Phillies Organization and Minor League Baseball
More news of the unsurprising variety this morning (though not all teams let their top pitchers go), but J.P. Crawford and Aaron Nola will be representing the Phillies in the Futures Game at All-Star weekend. Both are far and away the Phillies best prospects. This will be Crawford’s second trip to the game after going … Read more
My wife, by nature, is a planner. When we decide to go to a game, tickets are ordered well in advance. Very rarely, if ever, will we decide to go to a game at the last minute. Fortunately, for the purposes of this blog, she wasn’t feeling well enough to attend our son’s baseball game … Read more
Pitching Spotlight #1: Aaron Nola 8 IP 4 H 1 ER 0 BB 8 K We all know how good Aaron Nola is (and I will have a more complete report on him later in the week). Right now Nola has a 2.04 ERA over 39.2 IP, but that is a bit deceptive because of … Read more
Team Page Overview: Ever since the Phillies completed the trade of Marlon Byrd to Cincinnati for Ben Lively there has been whispers of a stacked Reading rotation. It turns out those whispers have become truth and the Fightin Phils will roll out a rotation of Aaron Nola, Zach Eflin, Jesse Biddle, Ben Lively, and Tom … Read more
Today Todd Zolecki published a very interesting interview with Phillies president Pat Gillick. There were a lot of very interesting answers because Gillick has an incredible baseball mind, but the quotes that stuck with me involve the draft and scouting philosophy. Question: You have new amateur scouting director in Johnny Almaraz. What do you think … Read more
Today the Phillies will send their top pitching prospect and 2014 #7 overall pick, Aaron Nola to the mound against the Yankees. It will be a shorter start and will be more of a cameo than a leading role for the young right hander. At this point we are all pretty familiar with the expectations … Read more
Depth Chart: Age Likely 2015 Level Top 50 Cole Hamels 31 MLB Cliff Lee 36 MLB (60 Day DL) Aaron Harang 36 MLB Chad Billingsley 30 MLB (DL) Jerome Williams 33 MLB David Buchanan 25 MLB Kevin Slowey 30 MLB Adam Morgan 25 AAA 45 Miguel Alfredo Gonzalez 28 AAA 33 Jonathan Pettibone 24 AAA … Read more
Kiley McDaniel continues what has been a very informative trip through prospects across the league with his Top 200 prospects. Kiley has divided the list into tiers based on his Future Value (FV) for each prospect. The result is a list that really gives more meaning than the pure numeric ranking in front of each … Read more
Baseball Prospectus continued the stream of rankings with their annual top 101 prospects in baseball. The list was previously released in the BP Annual but they have put it up on the site free to read. The Phillies have 3 prospects in the rankings with shortstop J.P. Crawford at #36, right handed pitcher Aaron Nola … Read more
A couple of reports yesterday gave some major hints at who will be in major league camp for the Phillies. The big name according to Jim Salisbury who will not be in camp is 2014 first round pick Aaron Nola. The initial reaction is that the dumb Phillies are holding down prospects because they want to … Read more