Getting closer to the top. Wondering a little who is 5th (unless we are still ranking Caba since this might have been written before the trade). Painter, Miller, Crawford, Tait, ???
Caba would have been 3, but he and Boyd were not written yet at time of trade. The name you are missing is actually ranked 3rd on this list.
Updated BA Top 100
Andrew Painter is 9
Aidan Miller is 36
Eduardo Tait is 93
Justin Crawford is 96
FYI Caba is 72
Rather have Tait than Caba, though Crawford and Caba are probably a wash.
My breakout candidates:
Johnson, 2 years from TJ
Abel, doubt he's totally lost it.
Mendez, has the eye to hand coordination, fix his swing and . ..
Nori, same, fix his swing to get more pop
Graves, frame and age where a jump in velocity could result in a big improvement
I'm not sure you can teach a young hitter how to hit breaking balls or develop real plate discipline, I suspect a lot of that is innate, the ability to see spin and the eye to hand coordination to adjust in real time.
Same with command, most of those high velocity/poor command pitchers have failed to improve.
Command is probably related to another innate talent, body control, which relates to consistent mechanics and not developing a "tell" on some pitches.
wow so without that trade the Phiillies would have had 5 in the top 100. When was the last time that happened
And Fangraphs has 'the name you are missing' at #3, also. They are higher on our pitchers and lower on our position players than most lists.
There is some thought they are just bad at pitching development. Here is the guy they traded for Eflin (https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=baumei000jac7). They have sort of the old style of Astros pitching with piggy backs and not having guys really work on pitching.
Even so, I still can't believe Gregory Soto got almost as good a return as the Angels got for Estevez (but that's also what made them nicely paired moves).
Fangraphs ranking only 30 players is not a great sign for depth. They rank all players over a certain FV and many teams get 40-50 players ranked.
Kind of amazing that our return for Soto is also going to end up so much better than our return for Dominguez who is now an actual useful pitcher.
That was a pretty fair one-for-one swap though (well, okay, Phillies had to throw in Pache). It tilted in O's favor because they deemed Seranthony worth keeping and Hays wasn't. Part of that was his bad luck/health but clearly the Phillies overrated him a bit (having wanted him in the past, and seeing him as an everyday player).
If Seranthony has a better year than Alvarado and someone in the middle tier doesn't step up (or Romano/Kerkering aren't great) we will definitely lament his absence.
And the top of the list:
Interesting thoughts on Crawford. The first sentence is perceptive: In many ways Crawford gets credit for things that won’t work at the next level while hiding skills more impactful than often talked about.
I have sort of had that take too. The swing is not built for power so the contact approach and high OBP may not work as well without some power. And the defense is merely good but nowhere near great. He'll need more offense than Rojas to succeed there.
No doubt Crawford has a significant ceiling, but too many serious holes in his game for me to rank him this high today. I prefer where Fangraphs has him and could rationalize just outside our top 10. A big issue for me is that Crawford has the sort of hitting issues which the Phillies development staff have done very poorly at correcting, really for decades. It seems the course of the Phillies system and why we have had to turn to so many costly FA position players on too-long contracts. Even when we get a home-grown position player to achieve a 3+ WAR (Brown, Kingery, Rojas) they seem to backslide to close to 0 in a year or two (hopefully not Bohm, who had his breakout to 3 WAR last season). Especially considering that the successful power hitters for the Phillies in the recent past (Howard, Hoskins) have not been prospects the Phillies felt good enough about to give 1st/2nd round or top international bonus $ to, I still strongly believe they need to stop dumping big $ on OFs/1B and more on pitchers, catchers, and middle IFs. Very little evidence to date that they have expanded their scouting/development area of excellence to OF/1B.
I should have noted that Stott only sort of matches this pattern. Stott burst out at 4.3 WAR then only fell to 2.5, buoyed by his defense. He only sort-or fits the above pattern, because although his WAR dropped significantly, it didn't fall to much below 3, but... he sort of fits the pattern, because his o-WAR was cut in half and his OPS+ fell from 103 to 89.
The best OF they drafted in recent decades (Drew) became a Bill Giles joke and the best OF they signed, who could have been CF of the future (Bourn) they traded after seemingly not appreciating much.
I think the short-term answer to helping CF is getting Rojas back to his 2023 performance and giving him a platoon partner. It seems impossible for Crawford to be the late-2025 answer and mid-season 2026 seems highly unlikely.
Here is the more positive take on Crawford: his defensive flaws in CF are average jumps and bad routes. Both of those flaws are things that almost all professional outfielders improve. Unless the Phils development staff is horrible or Crawford is uncoachable, he should be an above average CF in a year or two with his 70+ speed. His hitting weaknesses are correctable with strength gain and very small adjustments to his swing. He has good eye-hand-bat skills, which should translate. However, it is VERY hard for a pro athlete who is having success to buy-in to technique changes, so, again, the question is how coachable he is. His pedigree is blue-ribbon, maybe his father has been a good influence on his approach to the game, maybe not. But if he gets good coaching and listens to it he could be a decade-long major league player with 2-4+ WAR each year. Matt, you hear things from the inside...is Crawford a hard worker that listens to coaching?
Rojas has had a very good Dominican winter. Still playing in the playoffs and maybe the Caribbean series next week. He'll probably end up with 150+ plate appearances with an improved walk rate, good defense, and lots of stolen bases (771 OPS with a 382 OBP and 23 SBs without a CS in the regular season).
He really needed those AA/AAA level minor league at bats that he just did not get when he was jumped to the majors. I worry a little that the winter league rosters are a little watered down now so not as good as in the past, but at least he has done exactly what one would hope he would do this winter. If we were going to nominate winter pitcher and players of the year they would be Painter and Rojas in terms of younger players getting valuable experience.
I don't know if I have heard anything special about Crawford, but I also haven't heard anything negative either, but I won't say I am plugged in that way right now (it also was a lot of noise when it wasn't extreme in one direction). He has clearly been making small adjustments, so it isn't like he is totally stuck in a way.