2019-2020 Phillies Offseason News and Speculation

[LoneStarPhan]

Some thoughts on Harper. His 35 home runs and 114 RBIs lead the team. While these numbers might not be as great as we may have hoped, they are pretty good. I'm not going to try to use the contract to diminish them.

I especially liked his hustle and I thought his fielding was pretty good. He certainly showed a strong arm from right field. I never liked Harper as a National but love him as a Phillie. I think he can be a leader to build a winning championship team around.

The Phillies had one player (a hundred at bats or more) with OPS over .900, five over .800, and seven over .700 (only counts stats with the Phillies).

OPS over .900

Miller .941

OPS over .800

Dickerson .886
Harper .882
McCutchen .834
Realmuto .820
Hoskins .819

The only other over .750

Kingery .788

Dickerson would be a good player to bring back if they can strike the right deal. McCutchen will be coming back from surgery and may or may not be able to play close to the level he was at when he went down. Dickerson would be a great platoon with Cutch to ease him back into playing time next season. Dickerson also impressed with 34 RBIs in 34 games played as a Phillie in 2019.

Miller also ended on fire and ends up hitting a home run every 9.83 at bats. For comparison, Bruce was a home run every 12.08 at bats as a Phillie; Harper was a homer every 16.4; Dickerson every 16.63; Morrison every 17.5; Hoskins every 19.66; and Realmuto every 21.5.

Hoskins pretty much disappeared from the offense over the final month and I think he declined consistently over the season. He still ends up with the numbers shown, but clearly he has to produce closer to his early season numbers to continue to be a factor in the Phillies growth to contending. I have seen some suggesting a trade of Hoskins for pitching, but I don't think his value right now would bring back enough to justify trading him this off season.

[zambonir]

Seems like the bloom is off that guy's rose too but they could certainly do worse (and have!) But wasn't Jim Benedict (who left in 2015) actually thought to be the real arm whisperer there?

[David_Criss]

I think Morin, Vargas, Vincent, Rodriguez, Gosselin, Gamboa, Nicasio, Hunter, Neshek, Pirela and Dickerson are the definite non tender/release list

Others:
Franco - who plays 3B if he is traded or non tendered
WIlliams - had such high hopes for him last year and will be cheap, but not a bench option
Hernandez - pretty steady 2B, but will cost $10 to $12 million next year
Knapp - You could do a lot worse than him as a backup and he is cheap, so he sticks
VV - has had three years to show he belongs in the rotation and has failed three times
Pivetta - I think stays in the pen
Ramos and Davis - ?????? what is their role

SP: Nola, Arrieta, Eflin, FA/trade, Smyly/Irvin
BB: Suarez, Neris, Parker, Hughes, Arano, Morgan
DL: Robertson, Dominquez
AAA: DLS, Medina, Hammer, Grullon, Garcia, Davis, Ramos

[Squire]

I mean Priority 1 of the Offseason is signing Realmuto to an extension. This is his last arb year. You'd think he'd be amenable to staying but not at a discount. If Realmuto doesn't sign an extenstion than I guess you have to put him back on the market, don't you? Unless you are prepared to let him walk for a comp pick at the end of the year. All other issues pale in comparison to me.

[el-pietro]

Realmuto has expressed some sentiment recently suggesting he would be amenable to a long term contract. I would be looking to get him tied down to a 4-6 year deal right away.

Realmuto open to being a Phillie for life

“I wouldn’t be opposed at all to staying here for the rest of my career, you know?” Realmuto said before Thursday afternoon’s series finale against the Braves at SunTrust Park. “Right now I’m going to focus on this playoff push, but once the offseason comes, I look forward to having those discussions.”

He finished 15th in the Fangraphs WAR leaderboard for position players, 7th in the NL, second in the NL East only behind Rendon who had a very impressive season and will get 1st place MVP votes. I'm surprised to see JT finished just ahead of Acuna, though its a decimal place difference and you could make an argument for either of them. We will need to get used to seeing Acuna though, hes going to dominate the league for a decade or more barring injury.

[Philsmania]

The bottom line is that the Phillies are in a very bad spot. They've come out of a long rebuild only have a mediocre ML team and a weak MiL system. We are miles behind the Braves, far behind the Nationals and behind the Mets, as well.

Our best hopes to pull into that three-way traffic jam is either...

a. Spend like mad. But rarely are teams successful spending their way out of holes, plus we would end up in the luxury tax, further neglect the pharm and,in a best case scenario, prop open the proverbial window of opportunity for maybe a couple of seasons.

b. Try to rebuild the pharm on the fly. But, that is not easy with prime draft position and the bigger question is, do we have the organizational talent and know-how to do that?

c. Hope that Bohm and Howard are as good as advertised and that our tier 2 prospects like Medina and Garcia take a step forward. However, as they teach in Business 101, hope is not a viable strategy for success.

d Hope for a '93 style patchwork miracle. See also "c" above and the viability of hope as a strategy.

Simply put, the odds aren't good for any of these. Of course, the alternative is to punt on the present and short-term future and start rebuilding all over again. However, earlier this year, we made a commitment to Harper while Harper made a commitment to us. I doubt he made that commitment with the expectation that his prime late twentysomething years would be spent in obscurity with a rebuilding team while opposing pitchers throw him nothing but slop knowing the subsequent batters are not likely to make them pay for walking him.. He won't be happy and I am sure Boras won't be either when Harper gets on the horn to him.. All that good rapport we've built with Boras? Gone, most likely, and good luck getting one of his guys to sign here again. If we rebuild and end up having to trade away Harper along with $50+ million, get used to chortling around this game about the Phillies and their "stupid money". Oh, and forget about Realmuto sticking around beyond next season. And, not to mention losing a generation of fans just as the lack of success from 1984-2000 (aside from 1993) lost them much of Generation X. The Phillies lucked out by starting to get good in 2001 just in time for the Millennials to enter young adulthood. Getting them back may be a challenge. However, our other alternatives to rebuilding realistic?

The situation is grim.

[flyers19rw]

It’s easy to see dark clouds when a season fails to meet expectations. However my view is not that grim. Bohm will take over 3B in the near future. Hasely has shown enough to indicate that he can be an adequate to plus CF. The issue with the position players is Hoskins; bust or not. I suspect that he was all messed up with the launch angle thing and doing too much pulling the ball. A winter working with Charlie could cure that.
The rotation needs to be reworked. IMO, Nola and Eickhoff are fine. If Arietta can get healthy, that makes three decent starters. Add a Wheeler and another equivalent starter such as Porcello and things would be fine. If Howard is ready by midsession so much for the better.
The BP is like any other BP. What looks good now may be a mess next year. Who knows?
The biggest decision is what to do with Kapler and his coaching staff? Sorry but my call is to clean house. Two seasons in a row of fading in September doesn’t do it for me.

[allentown]

The situation is grim

Yes. It is. Which makes it hard to keep the guys leading the organization. They are at the toddler stage of understanding analytics, yet act like we know it all and analytics will drive the whole show. Drive the show so hard that we unload a successful pitching coach, whose rotation had a very good FIP last season and replace him with an assistant who is going to remake our philosophy of pitching, based on what our toddler analytical guys say, and doesn't see the wisdom of first establishing a rapport with his pitchers and getting them on-board. We put so much faith on FIP and the analytics about last year's rotation that our GM stupidly chose not to bolster the rotation at all last season or in-season, and then what did we do with that rotation we thought was so promising? We changed our approach to pitching on the fly. The results stunk.

Last season it was chasing the fad of playing just about anyone at just about any position, and using analytics to position the OF, except we didn't, the OF coach significantly adjusted the analytical output so our analytical guys basically modeled his gut decisions. So the analytics did nothing. The revised version just gave the coach a printed copy which relatively closely matched his gut. He always went by his gut. The shift didn't help us last year either. We seem to have done better with that this year, although we've also done less playing guys out of position.

We seem to have a lot of inexperienced guys, who each know a bit about how their current job was handled in a successful organization, but don't really understand it pushing a world of organizational churn, while Klentak doesn't aggressively add talent to the organization and MacPhail seems just a stodgy filter between Middleton and the GM.

Whatever these management guys will ultimately develop into with their on-the-job training, they currently are not serving the Phillies well at all. The results don't lie. The Phillies are a highly dysfunctional organization.

[zambonir]

You mean Eflin of course.

I don't think Charlie's going to be doing much coaching, in the winter or otherwise. He'll show up at ST for a week but it will be on the new hitting coach to fix Hoskins. Funny, I don't remember anyone thinking Charlie was any good at getting our guys to hit even when they were great (which is to say, they were great players, and when they started to struggle, we fired their hitting coach and everyone wondered why the manager who used to be a hitting guru couldn't fix them too).

I agree it's not quite as bleak in the short-term. But if they don't do some winning next year it will probably be time for a teardown. If they do win, they can probably keep it up. With Arrieta coming off the books for 2021 and McCutchen and Herrera (however that plays out) for 2022 they'll be able to keep adding pieces (Segura will probably look like a mistake in 2022). Of course if Bohm, Haseley and Howard don't actually end up being major league pieces it will be a different story.

I think JT will get signed but if not you don't trade him until July, and then only if you're not in the the playoff race. You still want his production and the pick; plus you could still re-sign him. Honestly there's no way he doesn't sign, the open market may be tantalizing but security and injury protection for a guy who just had knee surgery is no small thing.

[julio]

Moved from the 2019 season discussion:

2019 Phillies Season Discussion (part 2)

Defined as younger players that we would want to keep in the future. We already know Harper has a long term contract. We already know that Realmuto and Nola are very good. Neris is probably pitching well enough to merit an extension potentially.

Beyond that, which younger player would you sign to a long term deal?

Well, you're working with two different definitions here.

Who might I want to keep? Excluding players with long-term contracts (and even they can be traded - Harper has a FNTC, but nobody else does). As you noted, maybe Eflin. Haseley.
Hoskins. Some of the young pitchers.

But in your second paragraph, you changed the terms. Who would I want to sign to a long-term deal at this point? Well, nobody on the pitching staff. For the arbitration-eligibles, I would recommend just going year to year - either because we just don't know about them yet (Eflin, Velasquez), or because they're relievers, and prone to collapse.

Non-pitchers? Realmuto. That's a no-brainer. Nobody else; the only younger players I really care about retaining, to see better what we have (Hoskins, Haseley, Quinn) aren't even arbitration-eligible. Tender them contracts with modest increases - I see no reason for any Kingery-type prospective long-term deals (given Hoskins' second-half struggles).

Nor do I recommend prospectively signing Alec Bohm or Bryson Stott to "Kingery deals" at this point in time. I mean, Bohm in particular might very well to go spring training next March, and explode the way Kingery did in 2018. If that happens (and assuming the same people are running the front office as were two years ago), I wouldn't be surprised if they treated Bohm the same way they treated Kingery - sign him for several years at what are likely to be favorable salaries, and bring him north to play 3B... but that doesn't mean I'm anticipating that, or recommending it. All things being equal, I'd like to see Bohm get some time in AAA.

Beyond that... potential non-tenders among the arbitration-eligibles: Morin, Parker, Knapp, Franco, Gosselin, EIckhoff, Morgan.

Options to buy out: Vargas, Hughes, Neshek.

Free agents to pat on the fanny and thank: Smyly, Nicasio, Morrison, Rodriguez, Hunter, Dickerson.

Free agents to talk to about coming back: Nick Vincent, Brad Miller. (Dickerson will be too expensive.)

[flyers19rw]

Yes, I did mean Eflin. My mistake.

[Austinfan]

Bring back Morgan and Smyly (for the right price).

Look at Suarez as a potential starter, he was a starter until last year, has three solid pitches, and could fill that LH starter spot, especially if Irvin works out as a LOOGY.

Have Bohm and Howard start the season in AAA, which is why you pay Hernandez for one more year even if it's $10-12M, cheap for a one year deal for a 2 WAR player. Hall, Listi, Maton, Stephen in LF, Moniak in CF, bring back Pujols in RF. Keep building AAA depth.

Bullpen: Neris, Arano?, Vincent? Morgan, Alvarez, Pivetta, Velasquez.
Look at Brogdon and Ramos, Davis, Garcia, et all in spring training, with most slotted to Lehigh with the Reading RPs.
Bring in low cost options to ST, they can't be worse than what we got from Hunter, Robertson, Nicasio and Neshek.

[zambonir]

I just figured I'd mention it before someone else was like,"KEEP EICKHOFF ARE YOU CRAZY?!"

Some Phillies and Phillies-adjacent content in this Athletic article. Sam Fuld's name thrown out as a possible Cubs manager ("it feels like he would fit in with the front office, being an educated East Coaster who looks like he could fill out a polo shirt and khakis.").

Also, doesn't Theo sound just like Gabe here?

“We fill empty spaces with formality and structure and rules and expectations,” Epstein said back in 2016. “When really it would be better to fill those empty spaces with, like, authenticity and freedom and allowing folks to just be themselves to get better results and better performance.”

Can the Cubs replace Joe Maddon with someone better? Easier...

[andyb]

But in your second paragraph, you changed the terms. Who would I want to sign to a long-term deal at this point? Well, nobody on the pitching staff. For the arbitration-eligibles, I would recommend just going year to year - either because we just don't know about them yet (Eflin, Velasquez), or because they're relievers, and prone to collapse.

Non-pitchers? Realmuto. That's a no-brainer. Nobody else; the only younger players I really care about retaining, to see better what we have (Hoskins, Haseley, Quinn) aren't even arbitration-eligible. Tender them contracts with modest increases - I see no reason for any Kingery-type prospective long-term deals (given Hoskins' second-half struggles).

I don't think I am really changing the terms. Being willing to go year to year with someone on arbitration, while sensible and conservative, is also a sign of lack of confidence that they will be long term plus players. For instance, why would we give Kingery that deal and not Haseley even after Haseley was better than Kingery in his rookie year? My answer is because he is not a "keeper" yet, or in baseball terms if he is below average defensively in CF then he would not be plus in either CF or a corner (where his offense falls short).

While one would of course sign Hoskins to another cheap 1-year deal, is there anyone that would extend him an expensive 5-year deal at this point? Are any of the young starters (Eflin, Velasquez, Pivetta) worth a 3-5 year deal after this season?

One can make rational roster decisions that involve keeping all of these players but also conclude that they have not done enough to want to sign them long term. The young core's lack of steps forward is a pretty big problem. The question is not who to keep year to year. It is whether anyone is worth keeping at this point for longer than that.

[andyb]

Bring in low cost options to ST, they can't be worse than what we got from Hunter, Robertson, Nicasio and Neshek.

Well they could be if they have a below zero WAR. We'll need to spend some money or prospects on the bullpen. The internal options are not good enough and one cannot rely solely on "low cost options".

[zambonir]

We have more than enough "low-cost options" internally (between the controllable players and the guys with options). I imagine we'll sign one mid to high-range free agent, maybe trade for another Alvarez/Nicasio type (Franco could get you one) if they are a clear upgrade over Morin/Parker/Hughes (but who knows?). If it turns out Arano and Seranthony are ready to roll and Morgan is still effective, too many bullpen arms is a good problem to have.

I don't think the Kingery contract established a trend where you lock up players with limited experience early; I think it was a unique confluence of timing, hype and making a statement about not artifically manipulating service time. That's no longer an issue for Haseley.

I could probably still make a case for signing Hoskins to an extension but only to get a discount/control over his arbitration years, not to buy out free agency. Even at his best I'm not terribly interested in keeping him that long. Of course if you now see him as Darin Ruf (or a much younger Ryan Howard) rather than a guy who will break out of an especially miserable and clustered slump, you can't do it.

And it would make him even less tradeable. Everyone thought Herrera's deal made him very tradeable once Haseley or Moniak were ready but that didn't account for him turning into a bad player while still in his theoretical prime (never mind the other stuff).

[bkeich]

Beyond that... potential non-tenders among the arbitration-eligibles: Morin, Parker, Knapp, Franco, Gosselin, EIckhoff, Morgan.

I can't imagine saying good by to Morgan, I really can't. He has been good when healthy, he was one of our best relievers this year (which isnt saying much).

[zambonir]

Not sure why julio put Morgan on his list, unless it turns out he needs surgery, but even then he has several controllable years left at a reasonable price. Could just as easily put the older and more expensive Alvarez on there.

[andyb]

I think Morgan was a super 2. $1.1 million last season but three more years of arbitration. He is worth the risk at $2 million as long as the injury questions are mostly resolved. At least one more year IMO until we think of non-tendering.

[julio]

One can make rational roster decisions that involve keeping all of these players but also conclude that they have not done enough to want to sign them long term. The young core's lack of steps forward is a pretty big problem. The question is not who to keep year to year. It is whether anyone is worth keeping at this point for longer than that.

But you're assuming that signing a player to a long-term deal when that player is just entering a 3-year arbitration window (or earlier, in Kingery's case) is sometimes a good idea. I would probably submit that this make sense only in very few instances - and frankly, IMHO that the Kingery case was not a good example of that. If you're talking about a 22-year old kid who's contending for league MVP... absolutely, lock him up! But a typical young player - even one who projects to have substantial value? Generally, I would not. I would agree that none of the Phils' young players has achieved that level... but it seems to me that's saying they're not among the two or three best young prospects in MLB at this time. While I wish that they were, I don't see this conclusion as particularly earth shattering (or dream shattering).