Prospect Lists - Phillies and Overall - 2022-2026

Which is a move that has some logic…if you’re good at developing hitters… and strange if pitching development is somewhat a strength.

Law out this morning with his top 100 prospects on The Athletic which of course is subscriber based so I won’t post full list. Notables: Painter 12, Miller 13, Crawford 41, Caba 72

And whom did we score with? First rounders Nola and Painter! We did get Kerkering later in draft and Suarez in LA. I think your method works with relievers and 4th/5th starters.

I'm thinking of McGarry, Baker, et al.
Klassen is probably the only one they got value out of. And by trading before he may crash and burn.

Graves and Brown weren't big arm/bad command, but young arms with upside.

I'm starting to think that command, like being able to see spin for hitters, is an innate quality that can't be taught.
Either you have the body control to consistently repeat your pitching motion or no amount of tweaking your mechanics will fix the problem.

I like Bohm, still have hope for Rojas in CF, and think Aiden Miller will be a solid IF addition for us (although, to be completely honest, I thought more highly of Kingery). To me, that seems an inadequate yield from our emphasis on position players. We are a team whose lineup is not homegrown, suggesting that the make-your-own hitters and buy pitching is not a sustainable proposition. That is the elephant in the room when we talk about it being logical for the Phillies to de-emphasize the acquisition of solid pitching prospects. We simply haven't signed/developed a hitter who has achieved the value of Nola. With Wheeler and Nola aging, it would be good to replace them internally, as our MLB budget is strained. Painter, hopefully, replaces one of them in a few years. The home-grown Kerkering seems set to be a high-leverage reliever for us. That's another win on the pitching development side. The hitting side consumed a lot more $ and gave us Bohm and Stott, with Aiden Miller perhaps the position equivalent of Painter, although I must argue lower ceiling for Aiden. I don't think position players are lower risk FOR THE PHILLIES.

Pitchers are more variable, which is why you go high or low, but not in between.
And the big arms without command rarely pan out, you're better off with the low cost skinny guys who fill out and add velocity.

Hitters are more predictable, which also suggests that they're not worth drafting outside of 5th rd value or so, because at that point you're looking at lower ceilings, and you can always pick up AAA+ guys on waivers or cheap trades, so growing your own should be a low priority. Whereas solid BP pieces have more value.

They didn't do that last draft.

There are a lot of moving parts with pitching acquisition and development. A lot of it comes down to development and traits. The Phillies go big on stuff and poor command for relievers, especially small schools and places with poor development (Miami is one of them and one of the reasons why Alex McFarlane was breaking out before his arm blew out). The Phillies also mostly do not emphasize fastball traits over everything, both in the majors and minors they make up for fastball shape with multiple fastballs. They also fill in the gaps in arsenals, most of their starters and many of the relievers will throw two different breaking ball shapes with different utilities. The Phillies are also one of the teams (the Rays being the one of the others, and you can pinpoint the connection) that likes weird outliers. There are funky arm angles and pitch shapes throughout the org whether it is someone like Sanchez or Kerkering, or some of the reliever types they have brought in, they don't min/max they get funky.

To top it all off with pitching, so much of it is pro scouting and development. It is finding Jeff Hoffman, Andrew Bellatti, Jose Ruiz, Matt Strahm, etc and identifying untapped potential and bringing it out of guys.

Pitching is injury risk, but a lot of why it is valued the way it is, is because you have a tier of guys who get paid because they are "safe" and then much of the rest is betting on a collection of things that you can make better.

Raw stuff without command doesn't even work out the pen most of the time.
What does seem to work better are high spin rates.
That is a 4 seamer that rises at 93-95 is harder to hit than a "straight" 4 seamer at 95-97.

The 88-90 guys without upside are useless b/c except for a few outliers, no SPs are successful these days averaging under 92. But once you hit that minimum, command and secondary pitches are far more valuable than an additional 1-2 MPH.

Guys who average 95+ with 3 secondary pitches and command are rare as hen's teeth. Which is why the Phillies pay Wheeler big money and why Painter is a top 5 prospect.

Out of the pen, velocity has more value, but as Neris showed, 95-97 when his split didn't work was HR city.
You have to have a plus secondary pitch to set up your FB.

I think it's pretty hard to claim any sort of trend at all when you're talking about a 10-year period that spans four different baseball department heads (if you count Gillick 2.0 as one of them) and three different scouting directors.

Barber's reign has seemed more situational than anything, in terms of team goals/needs, draft position and also the specific pick. Abel was thought to be a possible steal given his youth and lack of experience (due to COVID); had they not felt he was a good value there probably they would have taken a position player (five of the next six guys taken after him were non-pitchers).

I also feel like Barber's first drafts were reactive to his predecessor - taking two HS pitchers on the heels of two college position players who already looked like they were going to work out in 2020. Before Bohm and Stott the Phillies also took position players three previous years in a row. During much of that time the team believed it already had the makings of a homegrown (if mostly trade-acquired) pitching staff, and it kind of did, in that Eflin, Pivetta and Ben Lively were all still credible major league starters last year, and Velasquez did give them innings (with Thompson being the big flop). In the end they also traded both Sanchez and Howard.

Then Barber reacted to his own drafts and the team's seeming depth by pivoting to HS position players, having stocked up on pitching at the top in '21 (and with two of the four picks in '20).

When you factor in the 2020 draft and the subsequent changes to the draft the Dombrowski/Barber data set is small, and any larger data set is full of variables.