2019-2020 Phillies Offseason News and Speculation

[zambonir]

Arano probably can't help much in April or May (if he can even pitch). With Seranthony who knows. Our default is to assume the worst (re-injury/surgery). Probably can't expect an elite season in any case, he's never had one to begin with.

[EDmuch]

I am getting for and more tired by the bumbling approach of this front office. "Penny wise but pound foolish" seems like a phrase that was written to describe this stumbling, fumbling front office. They spend $200 million to try to put together a championship caliber team and then won't spend the extra $10-15 million to plug the obvious holes that still exist in the team. Very smart. (That is meant sarcastically).

[Austinfan]

Well, this is what happens when you try and buy your way into contention, you run out of money.

[fish]

And of that injured trio I feel pretty good about Morgan being back. Not so good odds-wise about getting full seasons from Dominguez or Arano though.

I suppose i'm not in the minority that Dominguez seems like a guy who could blow out before getting out of Spring Training. The problem with all the other guys is that if all of them don't perform or stay healthy, they haven't bothered to accumulate any depth yet to fill in. If by June 1 the bullpen is responsible for a lot of disappointing losses for an otherwise promising team, help really isn't likely to come from anywhere but trades. And at that point are they just going to decide they weren't good enough and it's not worth it to go over the luxury tax for some over-priced relievers that someone else is trying to dump?

Unless Klentak is spinning a master-plan behind the scenes, if he goes into the season with a bullpen construction strategy that consisted of nothing more than getting rid of the bad contracts he signed and relying on a core of guys that has otherwise been unreliable, it is entirely too obvious what the outcome is going to be. How can you spend 204 million dollars while completely ignoring the bullpen? He's signed, what, 2 guys that were released? If nothing else he should have 10 of them to try to find something that sticks. Still no priority on adding power arms aside from Stock. ugh.

[phillychuck]

Well, this is what happens when you try and buy your way into contention, you run out of money.

This isn't really a fair representation of the situation. They are not "out of money", they are choosing not to spend. And if spending would put them into contention, they'd make more than enough money back to cover the expenditures. It's still a long way until April, I'm sort of in waiting mode right now.

[Austinfan]

I'm not sure the bullpen situation is as dire as advertised, and FA RPs, as we've discovered, aren't always a better answer than your own pitchers.

RH: Neris, Pivetta, Hammer, Brogdon, DLS
LH: Morgan, Alvarez, Suarez
???: SD, Arano
Irvin has LOOGY potential, Garcia was called up too early but is a year older (all of 23).
Gilbert and Romero have LH potential, So do Singer and Davis.
Hernandez, Dohy, Russ and Dyer are later season potential call-ups. Llovera could rise quickly if moved to the pen.

With Howard, Damon Jones and Seabold good bets for the Lehigh starting rotation, DLS's future will probably depend on any progress with his secondary pitches, if not, he'll get moved to the pen. Russo and Eastman are AAA inning eaters, but they could allow a hard thrower like Llovera to move to the pen.

Point is not that they couldn't use some veteran RPs, but unless you're talking a closer or setup man, it's not worth breaking the bank for a middle or long reliever type given the organization has been stockpiling bullpen arms. As we saw with Arano and SD before they broke down, young pitchers can give you a boost.

[EDmuch]

PC, that is my point. They have the money to spend. They simply have chosen not to spend it. It seems to be another of Klentak's half baked plans that ignore reality just as he did last season with the starters. They really rather desperately need at least one more proven RH reliever. Seriosuly, after Neris they have Pivetta, Hammer, Brogdon, DLS ??? That is supposed to be a major league bullpen on a contender ?????? The only up side to this is that if we flame out again, hopefully Klentak will be out the door.

[andyb]

That is a whole lot of names without a whole lot of quality. Every team has 15 names you can throw out. Undoubtedly a few of the unknowns will be decent. More of them will be lousy, however. JD Hammer types that will get hit hard if they get overexposed.

Neris is good, though probably below average for your best arm in the pen. I am not sure they have anyone else projected as being above average. Morgan and Alvarez are fine as left-handed arms but they are not exactly shutdown relievers. Dominguez could be very good but is a huge question. There is just not a whole lot of track record out there and counting on guys like Brogdon is wishful thinking.

As currently constructed it is likely a below average bullpen with more downside potential than upside.

[fish]

Point is not that they couldn't use some veteran RPs, but unless you're talking a closer or setup man, it's not worth breaking the bank for a middle or long reliever type given the organization has been stockpiling bullpen arms. As we saw with Arano and SD before they broke down, young pitchers can give you a boost.

All very true, but the problem is he's done nothing to change what he had from last year except to subtract. To add someone decent now would have to come by trade. they have to start stacking up some power arms and try to find some answers. I feel like we could all agree that Pivetta or Vasquez have to have their roles defined, but as we all know the moment a starter gets hurt or flames out and they need an alternative, whichever of those two that were booted to the pen will be back in the rotation again because they haven't stockpiled depth. The rebuild effort took 1.5 years to start to focus on bringing in young talent and then prematurely stopped adding young talent when they decided to try to open a window. Now they just seem to have their head stuck in the window with no where to go. I'm getting more and more concerned now that this is heading towards an outcome where a new GM has to do what the Red Sox are now trying to do to clean up their roster/payroll construction.

Plan B, which no team seems interested in embracing, is to use the market inefficiency by pivoting against the other teams trying to stay under the luxury tax threshold. If you have it to spend, then spend the money other teams aren't willing to. Loss of draft position or international allocation can be balanced out when you can add supplemental picks and recent high draft picks by taking on someone's unwanted 11 million dollar contract.

[EDmuch]

"As we saw before they broke down....." Sigh. Do you read what you write? These young unproven guys can easily break down under the first time stress of pitching in a regular role in MLB. You cannot build a realistic plan based upon the hoped for performance of unproven young arms. It seems we have tried that approach before and it has not worked.

[allentown]

I wouldn't go over lux tax by enough to lose picks and international $, because, very frankly, our farm is too weak to do that. I also wouldn't trade any of our top prospects, for the same reason. Further, I think this team can be into the playoffs this season, by spending a bit more. I don't think spending quite a bit more takes us to the WS. There is a very real danger that this current rebuild falls flat, with just a one or two season taste of the playoffs, followed by another half decade of sub-.500 gloom. For this point in the rebuild cycle, our farm is incredibly weak. That should be seen as a huge red flag. This far into the rebuild, the team still lacks a significant young core to build around on the MLB team. (I realize that many disagree with me on this, and the very slow moving management churn certainly confuses dating, but I date rebuild to 2013, which is when the win-now approach ended. Certainly rebuild was no later than MacPhail hire. We'll churn baseball side management forever, but a new era and start of rebuild doesn't start with each new churn.}

I'm also concerned that the team's management still appears to be in disarray:
-- I still get the impression that Klentak and ownership are not on the same page
-- I still get the impression from last season that the team uses analytics very poorly
-- Our international scouting doesn't seem to be getting the job done
-- The organizational churn continues
-- It is hard to convince oneself that the organization actually has a viable plan or even an articulatable philosophy for building a team
-- We look like a fad follower. Fads often identify and exploit a market inefficiency or a clever, novel tactic/philosophy. The innovator prospers. The late follower, and let's be honest -- the Phillies organization doesn't even qualify as an early follower organization, seldom succeeds. You have to find your own great new thing or at least recognize another team's discovery and quickly follow
-- One of our tactics seems to have been AF's mass of foreign players and stressing quantity over quality on the farm; if MLB really implements the reported reduction of farm teams, then that strategy is kaput.

[allentown]

And it doesn't matter where you turn for evaluation, apart from Howard nobody considers these young arms (some not so young now) arms on the Allentown-Philly shuttle and upper minors as top prospects, i.e. nobody is giving them significantly above average odds to be significant contributors. It wouldn't surprise me if one or two of these names step forward, especially in middle relief roles, but to expect a big contribution from AF's list appears starry-eyed. It's like compiling a long list of guys in our lower minors who are interesting in one way or another and have a chance, but are not among the top minor league prospects across baseball, and pretending that we are somehow unique, or even above average, in having so many somewhat interesting names to list. We aren't. The same people who compile these large lists of interesting lower-minors prospects whom the rest of baseball just fails to properly recognize, have said the same thing for quite a few years now. Our international program is always forecast by this folks to be just on the verge of a breakthrough which will send a surge of these productive contributors to Philly. Well, enough years have passed since this long list phenomenon began to conclusively say that it hasn't happened.

[EDmuch]

Perhaps the most basic question: Why would anyone believe that Klentak is competent for the job he is assigned to perform? He has been at this job for a fair number of years and I have yet to see any place where he has shown a strong grasp of the issues. I mean, when both your pitching coach and hitting coach are out the door within a year, it does not say much for the person who invited them in the door.

[zambonir]

-- I still get the impression that Klentak and ownership are not on the same page

Hard to tell who's on which page though. Would Klentak have liked to sign a second starter or more expensive reliever and Middleton said no? Or would Middleton have been ready to open the bank for Rendon and Klentak and MacPhail talked him out of it?

Fundamentally, they have stuck with Middleton's promise. "We're not going to break the luxury tax to try and win the second wild card." The team has to show it is actually a contender first, and then they'll spend (and trade) for 2-4 more wins if that's the case.

The problem is the money isn't allocated well. Arrieta makes too much for them to be able to afford another rotation upgrade. Segura makes too much for them to be able to afford another IF (which would improve the bench and CF too). The Herrera $ also hurts. And the Robertson $ seems to be exactly what's keeping them from spending more on the pen.

Alternately if you traded Segura, while risky, you could have spent $8 million of that on a reliever and the rest on a Brock Holt (still available) or Asdrubal Cabrera.

I do believe in the value of no-name relievers though. The team is also designed differently this year. Last year the bullpen was supposed to support a ho-hum rotation and our manager and pitching coach were guys who'd pull a starter early. That's probably not going to happen this year. They can get by with the bullpen if the offense and Arrieta/Eflin produce (even the 5th starter probably doesn't matter that much for now). And if that doesn't happen a better bullpen probably wouldn't be enough.

Anyway, it's still (somewhat) early. The market's not as slow this time, but it seems like every year we've had these discussions about the Phillies' obvious failure to improve the team enough, and then it turns out they still have one or even two big moves left. While they may mean it, there's also no reason for them to publicly state that they are willing to blow by the threshold, except to appease cranky fans (and we would then be even more angry if they don't do it).

[Austinfan]

You don't need top prospects to build a bullpen, in fact, who was the last top prospect to end up as a solid bulpen guy for the Phillies?
Starting players and your top 3 SPs, are mostly going to come out of the top 10 prospect pool.
RPs often come out of nowhere.

[andyb]

who was the last top prospect to end up as a solid bulpen guy for the Phillies?

Seranthony Dominguez. Ken Giles before that. It helps to have great stuff. Are teams going to find bullpen players from the their top couple of prospects? Of course not. That will always be rare (college reliever who is a number one pick that is probably in the minors for a year at most). Dominguez and Giles were both top 10 prospects though. No relievers are close to them in the system at the moment.

The issue with counting on the Phillies' prospects in AAA and AA to fill out the bullpen is that there is nothing to suggest that many of them are very good. They are not that dominant in the minors. The ones with great stats tend to be old for their level. We also don't have a bunch of guys that throw 98 outside of Seranthony. That is what other teams are bringing up (and was a specific weakness Klentak tried to start addressing in the offseason with guys like Stock). We can definitely come up with a few more relievers from our prospects in the upper minors. They are just going to be more middle relief types as opposed to shutdown/back end relievers.

Saying teams should not invest in the bullpen is a bit of a cop out. It does not always work, but good bullpens are usually a mix of good prospects, veteran acquisitions, and surplus arms that you catch on a good year.

[zambonir]

Gomes, Bottalico, Neris, Madson. "Top prospects" or even "prospects" is a matter of semantics (and I guess Gomes is ultimately considered a failure) but it would be nice to have one guy who you know is going to stick when you throw him at the wall, since we don't know about the others. They overdid it with vets last year and now they are overreacting (in part because of apparently $ limits) the other way.

That said, bullpens are easy to fix if you decide it has to be done. Will just cost them in July to get good guys, instead of what they did last year.

[bkeich]

Will just cost them in July to get good guys, instead of what they did last year.

Problem is that it may be too late by July. As it stands right now we are going to start the season with one of the worst bullpens in the league by any measure (we have 1 solid reliever, a couple more that had success before injury and a whole slew of guys that have mostly failed so far in their short careers).

As the number of innings starters pitch goes down every year the bullpen gains in importance every season. Since we have 1 quality starter, 1 league average (with an actual 100 ERA+ for his career), 1 guy who has skills diminishing and then the same slew of highly questionable young guys starting our bullpen is even more important.

We came into this offseason needing to GREATLY improved our pitching. We have done a little bit so far.

[allentown]

Interesting that you say Segura costs too much. In addition to his salary, they traded talent to acquire him. Trading your possible SS (or 2B) of future for the chance to over-pay a stopgap is... not at all smart. Worse than over-paying a non-comp FA. or even a comped FA

[zambonir]

They did dump Santana's salary in the deal but yeah. Seemed like an okay short-term trade at the time - his cost-controllability even looked like a plus- but now it doesn't. And for the second year in a row Klentak has had to walk back a big move (Santana completely and Segura away from SS).

Since we have 1 quality starter, 1 league average (with an actual 100 ERA+ for his career), 1 guy who has skills diminishing and then the same slew of highly questionable young guys starting our bullpen is even more important.

We came into this offseason needing to GREATLY improved our pitching. We have done a little bit so far.

If you don't think Wheeler is our #2 starter, a possible All-Star and a huge upgrade then yes, the team didn't get much better - but it's probably not worth wasting more money and the future on a bullpen either. If Wheeler and our $25 million third starter can perform (along with the offense) they will be competitive in July. Heck, they were competitive into September in 2018 (bottom fell out a little earlier last year once they lost Cutch).

Truth be told they should sign Tommy Hunter. He will probably take a minor league deal and is no worse a risk than the free agents other teams have snapped up in the past two weeks. All relievers are "highly questionable," even the better ones. They could trade for Ken Giles (or could have gotten Edwin Diaz last year) and still get nothing.