Phuture Phillies

Alright gang, here are this week’s updated minor league rosters. You can compare this to the week 3 roster and week 2 rosterand week 1 roster that I had posted earlier if you would like.

Quite a few cuts all in around in the minors this week, with one more round left to go this week before minor league rosters are finalized next Monday.

I’ll keep on the lookout for each new officially posted roster and keep them updated here as needed.

I don’t know how much of a limb I am going out on to project this, but I have updated my Clearwater Threshers website with this (click here) as my projected 2008 line up. The projection is based on the latest 2008 ST roster mixed in with a little intuition. I’m guessing I’ll have about 20 of the 25 players correct, with a few free agent signings thrown in at the last minute just to mess things up and maybe a few other moves in the mix.

The minor league workgroups posted here list all the Phillies minor league players currently in camp.  It is likely that most of the players in group 5 will end up at either Williamsport or on the GCL team in Florida.  This year there are 17 new players on the roster that have not previously played for the Phillies on their U.S. affiliates.  Given the huge number of new faces it is likely that a few will get sent back to their home country leagues (usually the DSL or VSL) prior to the start of the season.  A final reason for the larger number of new faces is that the U.S. work visa limits have been eased in recent years.  This allows more players to play in the U.S. or simply work out at Extended Spring Training in the minor league complex with all the coaches present.

This post will briefly go through the new names in camp with a summary of their statistics.  The comments here are all based on statistics and observations on a handful of players from news stories over the Internet.  In most cases we will not know how good these players are until we see them in action here.  If 3-5 players turn out to be solid prospects among this group the Phillies will have done well. Read the rest of this entry »