If you don't think you're signing a "sure thing" you're probably better off spreading your money around on kids who are less physical mature than their peers at 15-16 instead of getting into bidding wars for early bloomers.
Almost all the players the Phillies gave big money to have flopped over the years.
And most of their LA major leaguers and top prospects haven't been million dollar bonus babies.
That is actually not true. Big money guys have become good players (even going back to Carlos Silva and Carlos Carrasco). The real issue is giving players $2 to $4 million when they should get only $1 million..
All these 16 year old kids have risk. You still need to spend at the top of the market though to get the better tools. We just need to negotiate a better price on the top kids than the Phillies have done historically.. A "never spend big money on anybody" strategy like you seem to advocate probably does not work either. I want more players with medium money. I do not think signing 50 players for low money works.
The answer is not for the Phillies stop signing big money guys, the answer is to get better at it. No different than the high end of the domestic draft. If they can also find an Altuve for $15,000 or an Acuña for $100,000 that's good too. They don't have much history doing that either.
Unless you have a "sure thing," and history shows most multi-million dollar LA signings are a waste of money, you're better off spreading it around to a portfolio of small and medium signings, Tait was $70K for example. You can sign a lot of lanky pitchers who might fill out and add 5 MPH. You can look for kids with good tools who aren't physically mature at 16 and bet on them filling out. You'll miss on most, but the Phillies missed on most of their high priced signings. Silva did what? Carrasco is the only name, Ortiz, Encarnacion, the overage OF, etc.?
The Phillies just flipped Starlyn Caba at probably top 100 prospect value as possibly the best defender in the minors and best players in his class. I would say that signing was both good and worth the value they paid.
Which is why I think the Phillies spend more on pitcher bonuses in their international signings. We've spent the vast majority of bonus $ on positionn players and the results aren't good. We do better on pitchers. We do horrendously on OF, where we spend a ton of $. Better on IFs and catchers, but not as good a return as with pirtchers.
i think the time has come to crush this whole corrupt system and begin anew, preferably with an international draft, but definitely with an honest system which certain teams cannot take advantage of, pretty much with impunity.
BA Updated their list to a Top 100
Phillies are linked to:
59 - Nieves Izaguirre, SS, Venezuela (Phillies)
67 - Elias Marrero, SS, Dominican Republic (Phillies)
72 - Deivis Velasquez, C, Venezuela (Phillies)
Are they BA's #1,2,and 3 prospects overall? If not, where do they sit? The original post shows 1, 2, and 3 before their names.
The formatting on this page always does that to me when i drop in information. I need to figure out a way to defeat it. In any event
Nieves is 59
Marrero is 67
Velasquez is 72
Not bad if we get them all. It's hard to rank LA guys at such a young age, maybe they are all better than the scouts think!
Phillies, by my count are also linked to two other catchers: Anderson Araujo and Gabriel Azocar (from GT baseball academy).
$3 million was a very large bonus though. $2 million might have been more appropriate for someone without much power. The Phillies tend to overpay based on where the prospects rank. There is no question Caba is a good prospect. Bottom of the top 100 now (or just outside the top 100). Some of that is due to performance since he was signed though. And I suspect most of the $3 million bonus guys in his class are top 100 too since they have so little high level performance to change their rankings.
A player can be a really good prospect and the bonus at the time could still have been a bit high. Both things can be true. This organization just has a long history of overpaying. The errors on players are mostly scouting and development issues. The negotiations on bonus however are about us overpaying to get the player and these overpays can hurt if we start at a smaller bonus pool level than other organizations.
Or other teams overvalue LA prospects early in their careers?
Caba seems like a solid but risky (to succeed, he has to fill out and develop gap power) prospect, far more risky than say Crawford.
The difference between the draft and LA is in both cases you can shift money between players (and the cap on LA money operates similar to the draft in that you only get one or two "top" picks) is information. You're drafting 18 year old HS players or 22 year old college players v what is essentially 15 year olds for the top guys and 16 for everyone else. Which is why more LA "late picks" surprise than MLB later draft picks.
Because there's far more risk in LA signings, you should probably avoid overpaying at the top unless there's a "Sure" thing, and how many LA prospects can be considered high probability to succeed, compared to the 1st rd of the ML draft? This variability in results may make it more efficient to spread money around.
I hope the Phillies have sat down and figured out the odds and the optimal strategy, instead of relying on scouts' gut feelings.
I didn’t do a deep dive, but looking at pipeline’s top international list from 2023, the notable prospects are Sebastian Walcott, Ethan Salas, Felnin Celesten, Alfredo Duno, and Luis Morales all of who ranked above Caba. Of those, using Pipeline’s top 100 only Salas ($5.6M), Walcott ($3.2M), and Celesten ($4.6M) ranked above Caba.
It seems pretty clear Caba got paid at the caliber player he is. He is also near universally viewed as a better prospect than Crawford. Baseball America and Baseball Prospectus had him ranked higher, and he would have been ahead of Crawford on my own list. I don’t want to say the Phillies are good at this or there aren’t flaws, but you are tilting at windmills with a lot of your analysis on this, imaging that things exist (lower bonuses for top ranked players or good 16 year old pitching prospects) that just have no evidence that they exist.
I feel like it all stems from the Phillies either being unwilling or unable to work with the buscones who had the best players. That left them overpaying for guys who might not have otherwise been gettable (no different than, say, Jefferies or Thome back in the day) or for that one guy their entire class turned on. But it really is a crapshoot. It like everything else, all three approaches (big $, six-figure guys, cheap guys) are necessary and produce fruit.
I should have been more specific, I was thinking of the SS Crawford we traded. Apples to apples.
Simply that Crawford was a top fielder with hitting questions, but a higher floor than Caba because he was older when drafted.
If you could draft Caba after last season (at 18, similar to HS seniors) would he go at a spot similar to his bonus?
And if so, he was then overpaid, b/c you should discount for paying that money at 16.
The point is that LA players are inherently more risky and the bonuses should reflect that, but I think they're driven up by bidding wars - but since paying one player excess money reduces what you can pay to the rest, there is a serious opportunity cost to overpays.
It's the basic Moneyball issue, given a LA "salary cap," what's the most efficient way to allocate bonuses.
I just think it is less clear. Your analysis considers his success the last 2 years and not his tools when signed. Take our Luis Garcia for example. Another severe overpay IMO and that was an opinion formed when he was signed and not in hindsight today. He led the GCL in hitting at age 17 when Caba was still in the DSL. He was ranked near the bottom of most top 100 lists after that season. I can't find your list but you had Garcia 4th in the midseason rankings that year after he struggled at Lakewood in the first half of 2019.
But in January of 2019 you would probably have said that the $2.5 million bonus he got was appropriate. Now of course in hindsight it was not. Caba has a more substantial carrying tool with his defense, but we really had less to go on about his offense especially when he was signed. The big bonus kids in his class generally had louder tools than Caba did.
The $3 million bonus may have been appropriate in the market, though that market is trending towards smaller bonuses these days with the pool limits. I just think it is a fair question to ask when considered with the knowledge teams had about him when he was signed and not today.
