2019-2020 MLB Non-Phillies News/Notes Discussion

flyers19rw 2020-08-22 18:56:38 UTC #1124

Reports are the Washington's Strasburg is finished for the season with carpal tunnel surgery. That's not the easiest surgery to rehab, especially if you are a pitcher.

andyb 2020-08-24 17:35:34 UTC #1125

I noticed on ESPN that an article making half-season awards choices was picking Yu Darvish as the NL Cy Young so far. If everyone remembers, Darvish got 6/126 (21 AAV) when Arreita got 3/75 (25 AAV). Darvish was hurt and ineffective the first year. He had a good second half last year though a so-so first half made the total year stats only average. Now he seems back to his old self (5-1, 1.70 ERA).

We still have 3 years to go on his contract, but there is a very real possibility now that it will turn out to be a pretty good value since the $21 million AAV is really pretty reasonable.

zambonir 2020-08-25 19:20:32 UTC #1126

The Giants win [the 8th seed] this week, barely edging the Mets, Nationals, Phillies, Brewers and D-backs.

Sub-.500 Rockies are seventh. Marlins 6th. The East probably won't rise above that 6th spot but any team could still win the division and be 3rd.

And of course last year, a lot of teams, Phillies included, saw no point in going all-out for a play-in game followed by an NLDS thumping by the Dodgers, but...

mdougherty12 2020-08-25 20:19:51 UTC #1127

Article from 538 on Cleveland's pitching staff and their 2016 draft:

mdougherty12 2020-08-26 02:56:30 UTC #1128

Lucas Giolito no-hits the Pirates with 13 Ks:

zambonir 2020-08-26 03:45:46 UTC #1129

That was the guy Pivetta worked out with right?

andyb 2020-08-26 04:00:41 UTC #1130

Yeah. The other side of the Nats trade for Adam Eaton also. Looks like that one has worked out for both clubs.

mdougherty12 2020-08-26 04:22:57 UTC #1131

Giolito was on the same Harvard-Westlake high school pitching staff as Max Fried of the Braves. Jack Flaherty from the Cardinals was 2 years behind them.

zambonir 2020-08-26 04:49:19 UTC #1132

What I was remembering:

Squire 2020-08-27 12:39:04 UTC #1133

RHP Ian Anderson (Braves #3 overall 2016) with yet another super MLB debut for someone in the Mickey Moniak draft.

allentown 2020-08-27 15:50:06 UTC #1134

Yes. 2016 was just a case of the Phillies brass over-reaching and thinking by saving money on Moniak, they could get themselves 3 stars out of the draft. Unfortunately, their brain trust just isn't nearly savvy enough to pull it off. Everyone, from Gillick on down over-rated Moniak -- badly. Then, it appears, they have had him too focused upon power. You can't win if you can't draft and develop H.S. kids or sign the right L.A. kid, when you lay out $4 million, or even know the actual age of the guy you give your top bonus to. The cynic in me says you also can't win when you always play by the spirit of the rules, perhaps not even when you play by the actual rules. In any case, boy scout coupled with inexperienced/stupid is not a winning combo, as we have seen. We can thank Gillick for his deadline part in the 2008 WC. Apart from that, he did the Phillies no favors.

LoneStarPhan 2020-08-27 17:14:04 UTC #1135

Wasting high picks on players who fall far short of the minimum expected performance of an average ML player make a difference.

The MacPhail era has been a huge disappointment. We probably would have done better and have more now if Ed Wade had continued as GM.

As a fan in the 69th year following the Phillies, I’m tired of rebuilds and starting over. I want and expect results now.

schillingfan 2020-08-27 17:25:17 UTC #1136

Not under Wade, under Arbuckle.

bkeich 2020-08-27 17:41:22 UTC #1137

But about 60 of those 69 years should probably prove otherwise to you. I fear you are in for a rebuild whether you wanted it or not, I dont have that number of years (although I am closing in on 50 years of fandom) but I think the cupboard is pretty empty.

zambonir 2020-08-27 18:57:55 UTC #1138

I might actually take the sunny devil's advocate view here: the Phillies are the losingest team in baseball history (or something like that - first team to lose 10,000 right?), but if you were born in the '60s (as I was) or even as late as 1979 they've won two championships, played in four World Series and won 11 division titles (eight if you're in the younger group). Is that actually bad?

Yeah, there are a small handful of franchises that, through either money, great management, or both, have been more consistent, and several with more championships, but there are even more with worse results, and almost none that don't go through cycles of boom/bust.

That's not to say the Phillies have ever been good at development, which was frequently combined with being cheap. But they've also never actually done a rebuild before. It's not like the late Thomas/Wade years were on purpose! It's just frustrating that, so far, the results of this rebuild are no different than the results of the team that signed Greg Jefferies or Kevin Millwood (though those teams were decent). In terms of restocking the farm, both in its initial trades and its initial drafts, it has very clearly already failed.

Purduke 2020-08-27 19:27:40 UTC #1139

Beautiful thing about Anderson was he was a classic underslot gamble when the Braves picked him #3. Was probably a #10-15 ranking who had slippage risk because he had only pitched something like 13 or so innings in 3 games his senior year because of illness and really crappy weather on LI that year. Braves banked around $2.5M on the signing and turned it into overslots for Joey Wentz (2 picks before the Phils could get him -- sadly - from an outcomes perspective, they went with Gowdy) and Muller from Texas and Owen Wilson. All in on four HS pitchers where they hoped to find a couple pieces of a starting rotation.

Muller is their top 2 or 3 prospect now and will start some day, Wentz was used to net Shane Greene (probably a disappointment to Atlanta so far) and Wilson was the fastest of the group to the majors (but is still trying to make his off speed stuff work). If they hit on Muller it will have been a boffo strategic performance.

I know some people hate the "complexity" of all the slotting stuff in the draft, but I love the strategy it provides to front offices that are willing to embrace it (and have the scouting to back it up).

flyers19rw 2020-08-27 21:40:32 UTC #1140

The Phillies had a plan for ‘16 draft that, sadly, just didn’t pan out. I applauded it at the time and still do because they did something outside of the safe Giles era strategy. It failed due to health (Gowdy needing surgery) and mismanagement (in the case of Moniak). MM was a fine H.S. prospect at the time. Top high schooler in CA at the time. He had all of the tools except for power. So what did the Phillies do? They tried to turn him into something other than what he was, a power hitter. They put him in weight program to have him muscle up; the messed with his swing and approach to hitting. He’s no longer the good defensive CF Prospect that he once since he’s added weight which cut into his speed. If they wanted a power hitting corner OF, they should have taken a different player. Gowdy’s situation is equally as sad. He was at the top of his class for HS pitchers in SoCal who earned a scholarship to go to USC. Then the elbow went bad and he seems to be one of the pitchers that, so far, has not responded well to TJ surgery The plan was good but everything after that was a fail.

zambonir 2020-08-27 22:15:17 UTC #1141

I don't think we'll ever really know how much of Moniak's path was a scouting failure and how much was a development failure (and how much is on him, which still counts as a scouting failure).

But to me the most obvious failure was still to do with the Phillies' organizational structure and glacial pace of change, dating back to the fact that they waited so long to let MacPhail take over and hire a GM. If Klentak had reallly had his feet under him, and the Phillies scouts and development people had been in sync, maybe they don't take Moniak, or maybe Moniak just gets better instruction his first two years. I think the chaos in the system probably hurt him as much as the Phillies trying to make him more powerful - and it seems to me that was always built in to their interest in him as a pick, even before launch angle got so trendy. If they didn't think his power could be unleashed, he wouldn't have been worth taking 1-1.

I mean, that Steve Finley comp sounds underwhelming when you hear it, but Steve Finley hit a ton of home runs (albeit in the steroid era).

RTaylor 2020-08-27 22:28:35 UTC #1142

I'm surprised by how little quantitative learning assessment is done to evaluate minor league players and systems. Universities do all kinds of learning assessment, so it can't be that hard! Age/level is a predictor, but so is the amount of time a player has received instruction as a function of production. How well have the Phillies minor league coaches taught, and which players have demonstrably taken to that instruction? I haven't seen anything on this subject, and it shouldn't be all that hard to analyze.

Purduke 2020-08-28 01:43:43 UTC #1143

For the record I didn't really have a problem with the Phils draft that year. Absent Senzel, it seemed like a rush to the bottom with the top prospects that year. Groome ate too much of the hype, Puk started so slowly that it made you wonder about him handling the pressure, the Hansen kid had control issues and them blew his arm out, Rutherford seemed to lose bat speed yada yada and MM seemed to emerge as a young projectible CF with the most often comp to Yelich. Would have preferred Manning or Wentz to Gowdy, but those weren't options at #42. My only issue with Gowdy was that I thought we paid more than was reasonable, but it didn't seem to matter as we still had money for Stephan and then again more to overpay Irvin, so the Gowdy money didn't seem to matter.

I just loved what the Braves did that year given they didn't have the #1 pick but #3 and in many ways it is hard to play the underslot strategy from there.