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Aug 2024

21 years old with a FB that tops out at 100. Bulk inning reliever now that they may try to stretch out to see if his velo holds up. Working with 3 pitches right now.

Dominated low A to the tune of around 13.5Ks/9 (sound familiar?). Now in high A after an early season injury. Maybe we can change his name to George Klassen and everyone will stop worrying about our trade for Estevez.

Would we have felt better if it were Pan instead of Klassen in that trade? I think I would have since I'm such a Klassen fan, but I don't know about others. I haven't seen Pan reported as high as triple digits, though. I can't recall, does Pan have a high-effort delivery? Klassen throws 97 pretty effortlessly, at least to my eye.

Pan video. Balance is awful after his release in many pitches. One was 99.

https://www.mlb.com/video/wen-hui-pan-strikes-out-the-side6

Pan hit triple digits a few times last year early in the season. When the outings got longer than an inning or two he settled in a couple mph below that.

I think Klassen has a higher ceiling than Pan. A little more velocity and athleticism in general. His offspeed stuff generates swings and misses too. Of course with hard throwing pitchers it would be nice to have both of them (or a dozen of them) because half of them will have a serious injury in their development.

Klassen has already had TJ surgery in college. 6'2 170 at 21 coming out of college is less likely to significantly bulk up, and that's a light frame to throw in the upper 90s for extended innings, which is why I think he'll end up in the pen.

9 days later

BA Pre-season rank was 21 and mid-season rank was 14. So we moved up. Part of that is that they had no promotions to the majors. But a good chunk was the leap of Miller and Caba and sustained success of Crawford.

The ESPN pre-season rank was 23. I do think the lack of promotions is the biggest reason we moved up rather than individual prospects being rated more highly. And we just traded 2 or 3 of those prospects that had increased in value.

This year's draft probably had no real positive impact as we had one of the smaller pools out there.

The move up could also be because other teams traded away prospects and thinned their systems as well.

We've had a few players step up, Tait, a couple pitchers, etc.
This despite having a number of pitchers with TJ.

Abel stepping down has lost the system as much value as anyone stepping up. We just did not graduate anyone with value this year. That is the biggest change in the system. Miller being better than anticipated is the second biggest change. Tait is not enough to even offset Abel in the way these things are calculated.

It would be interesting to look back at system rankings from, say, 10 years ago to see how that compared to major league performance of the prospects that made it.

I suspect there's only a limited correlation, b/c rankings are generally based on "name" prospects (high draft picks and bonus babies). Unknown prospects who fly up a farm system are often recognized only when they're on the verge of the majors, then they stop counting for rankings - so a high draft pick who slowly moves up the ladder helps rankings more than an obscure prospect who flies up the ladder, even though the latter is more likely to be a star.

  1. The farm really stank back then. If someone has an old set of BA prospect books, it would be an interesting research task. Mine are gone.

That's why we were so excited that Muzziotti, who'd been signed by a more competent, albeit rules-violating franchise (those two things might be related!), fell into our hands.

I wasn't limiting this comment to Phillies farm rankings. I was wondering how relevant they are in projecting future MLB production. Do the higher ranked systems produce significantly more MLB value than lower ranked systems?

I suspect the Phillies system wasn't highly ranked in 2011, despite that Brown was the #4 overall prospect and Jon Singleton was #30. (Kyle Drabek was #12, but I think he was a Blue Jay by then.) And the top 10 listed there produced no stars and probably single digit cumulative WAR. So if they were ranked low, that was accurate.