A Critical Look at the Phillies Organization and Minor League Baseball
Saturday was a very eventful St. Patrick’s on the backfields at the Carpenter Complex. While the big club took care of business at Spectrum Field (beat Atlanta 10-6), there was plenty of big league pitching going on in the backfield. On the Ashburn field, the big money arm, Jake Arrieta, made his “debut”. And there … Read more
Development is not linear. It is easy to look at many in this group of prospects and see disappointment. It is true that some of the prospects in this range dropped off cover the 2017 season, others jumped forward as they started into their pro careers, and two in Victor Arano and Ben Lively made … Read more
The Top 30 has become the standard of prospect lists. It is often a natural cut off when systems start to transition into filler. For the Phillies system, the gap from 31 to 30 is not a gaping chasm. However, we start to really get hints at what lies at the top. There are prospects … Read more
Clearwater technically has not wrapped up the first half of its season (it has two more games with Daytona before that), but the All-Star break gives as good a time as any to check in on the Threshers to see how things are going in Florida. Crawford Rampages: For a month J.P. Crawford used the … Read more
Team Page Overview: Last year the Threshers were possibly the worst team in minor league baseball at the start of the season. They had no players in my Top 30 Phillies prospects and even beyond that it was mostly filler to make out of a roster. Eventually Roman Quinn and J.P. Crawford arrived, and they … Read more
Positional Overviews: C|1B|2B|SS|3B|LF/RF|CF|SP (Upper)|SP (Lower) Depth Chart: Age Likely 2015 Level Top 50 Chase Utley 36 MLB Cesar Hernandez 24 MLB Chase d’Arnaud 28 AAA Tyler Henson 27 AAA Carlos Alonso 27 AA Angelo Mora 22 AA Jesmuel Valentin 20 A+ 22 Andrew Pullin 21 A+ 35 Drew Stankiewicz 21 A- Derek Campbell 23 A- Tim … Read more
This group from 31-40 is full of the players I was excited to put in my Top 30, but the Phillies went ahead and, since August, acquired 7 players that are in the Top 30 of this list. This leaves a group of 10 players with some real talent and major league upside. Traditionally, because of the … Read more
We will be spending all offseason talking about prospects, so this is the moment to honor those that put up the best statistical years for the organization. This list was put together with input from the staff here.
Catcher:
Andrew Knapp (.290/.354/.438 5 HR LKW)
It was a rough start for Knapp in his comeback from Tommy John surgery, but the former second round pick bounced back with a very good season in the South Atlantic League.
Lets be honest, its been a rough month to be a Phillies fan. We built a delusion of getting a big payoff at the deadline in the form of prospects with names we didn’t recognize that we could dream on. Cliff Lee has been a shell of himself with an injured elbow that makes us … Read more
Most of the draft picks are signed so it is time to revisit the preseason rankings. It is still a small sample size, and an even smaller one for those newly drafted, so this list may be a bit conservative on any large scale changes. In general the system is heading in the right direction, … Read more