Looking ahead to the 2018 draft

Yankees benefited from giving up nothing for a wife beater and getting a top 10 guy for him.

Well, they did well in a baseball sense. We kicked Domonic Brown out of RF to accommodate a guy whose career was already bust and who had just assaulted an elderly Jew in a hotel lobby not long before we signed him, so we don't base all our signings on personal virtue.

So basically the Phillies aren't interested in winning because they'd rather spends their allotment every year vs. signing a high priced lottery ticket?

The Phillies will spend the money when they have some semblance of a contender to build around. This isn't about being cheap.

In the case of the under-23 international market, these are 16-18 year olds we are talking about. It makes no sense not to trade for extra allocation and spend 50% more. You don't need a contending nucleus to do that. This is how you build a contending nucleus. And yes, we do want to sign more of the highly regarded LA kids. That's the source of a lot of the LA stars in MLB.

Is there an early top 10 out or won't those start appearing until after the 2017 draft?

You are kind of like Trump on this. There is absolutely no evidence that they could not have spent an additional 50% allocation and you really should stop repeating this. There were a dozen Cubans that became eligible throughout the year.

They CHOSE not to trade for additional allocations. This does not mean that their current class is not good. But they chose not to add a $2 million addition to the class which they easily could have. But it was not because there were not available prospects. And Trump's inaugural crowd was not the largest in history.

I haven't seen a ranking, but my personal cheeseball is Vandy outfielder Julian Infante- that guy is a beast who can really mash. Beer controls the strike zone better, but Infante isn't too far off.

Is it possible they decided the talent they would have to give up would not be worth it?

Or another question, who did trade for allocations?
Which is the Holmes question: "why didn't the dog bark in the night?"

Possible but unlikely. We gave up nothing substantial in the Ortiz allocation deal and the sheer number of teams in the penalty this year meant there were lots of unused slot allocations up for grabs (remember each team gets $700K to spend even before we got to the slot allocations).

The lack of trades for allocations was not likely the high price of them. It was the reality that the Padres and others were exceeding the cap this year. Most teams could not trade for allocations large enough to make it worth it. The Phillies are the exception though since they had the largest allocation. Thus we could trade for the largest allocation increase.

I think this has more to do with the Phillies old-school notion of what a $2 million prospect is worth. They probably would have needed to overpay a prospect to have used that allocation. That upsets their historic play-by-the-rules sensibilities.

But, who, organizationally makes that call, or continues to hold that belief? Seems to me it would have to be Sal, as well as Almaraz (who spent much of his career doing Sal's job for Atlanta). Middleton wouldn't even have an opinon. Now, maybe Klentak and MacPhail feel that way too, but it's hard for me to believe, given the timing and context of their arrival, that they wouldn't have signed off on the moves if their people, who they chose to keep and know more than they do in the trenches, were lobbying hard for certain players, or allocation $ in general. There are just too many variables (including what kind of deal that might have made) to know anything for sure.

There were over a dozen high priced Cuban players that became available in the last year. These were not deals that were already locked up. The Phillies chose not to spend here. The price of allocations had almost nothing to do with that decision since so many allocations went unused by teams in the penalty. They would have dealt them for a warm body if there was a market.

There was one pool trade a couple of weeks ago and it looks like the O's are being cheap and dealing their slots:

Alex Katz for $750K in slots.
Damien Magnifico for $850K
Paul Fry for less than $200K.

All warm bodies. Magnifico was #11 in the Angels system which is among the worst. May not have been top 30 with us. May have been released by us even.

I think Montgomery made the overall budget, which, under the previous regime, was tantamount to ownership making it, but I really don't think the other owners got involved in how the money gets spent. For a major decision like the Halladay trade or the Howard contract, sure, the GM goes to the President and they may take it to the owners.

Now MacPhail makes the budget. Given how little money they have been spending on major leaguers I find it hard to believe money is the reason they didn't take full advantage. I guess I'm just choosing to be more optimistic about their process because in truth, your version of it really does suggest they are stupid and cheap and things haven't changed. Maybe, maybe not.

I think this is the specific Phillies ownership pathology. They hate spending money on amateur talent. This was Giles' thing. When his team bought the Phillies, the first thing he did was gut the scouting system and reduce spending on the minor leagues. They have been stingy on minor league bonuses ever since. I don't think Middleton is as driven by the bottom line as Giles and Middleton were -- I don't think he would have ordered Gillick to trade Burrell and his salary (became Abreu, when Burrell invoked his FNTC) to balance the budget, nor would he have dumped Pence for the same reason. Given a chance to make a really serious run at a 2nd WC, I believe Middleton would have given RAJ permission to go $9 mill over budget and go with both Lee and Halladay in their primes.

However, as of today, no indication that Middleton cares about maximizing the farm and spending an extra couple of million on under-23 international and perhap $5-10 mill on over-23 internaitonal to do so. He can be sold on spending $tens of millions on marginal vets like Kendrick and Saunders, but it seems hard-wired in the DNA of the post-Giles Phillies that you don't spend aggressively on the farm. You spend just 'enough'. You do nothing to irritate the commish. You don't seize opportunities. Good enough is good enough, even if you have the weakest team in MLB, while the Braves have the strongest farm.

It is not a question of being cheap overall. Middleton, in total, has spent about as much as is reasonable to spend this season. I don't think he's spent it wisely and he seems to have deliberately chosen not to do as much as he could on the farm. He has been an owner for a long time. He has soaked up the vibe of Giles and Montgomery.

Notice Chicago using the slot to reduce their penalty for signing Roberts, i.e., trading marginal prospects to save money.