Philly.com Prospect Mailbag

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So this week David Murphy posted an article yesterday with the Top 10 prospects posted by Baseball America and Fangraphs.  I decided to descend into the comment section (big mistake).  But the good commenters of philly.com have some questions adn comments that they need answered so lets take an opportunity to delve in.

Sounds great but the Phillies player development is non-existent. They will either get hurt or burn out because they will leave them down in the minors too long.

— Phillip Phan

I hear this criticism of the Phillies fairly often, it is usually accompanied with an argument about how so and so team double jumped a prospect or that other team’s rookies are younger.  The truth is, I don’t know of a single prospect the Phillies hurt by keeping them down too long.  Ryan Howard could have come up quicker but Jim Thome was kind of at first base.  Good prospects move quickly, and some orgs also promote their prospects quickly.  The Phillies do not have those elite prospects, and actually tend to move their college guys rather quickly.  The Rays move their prospects, especially their pitchers, really slowly and their pitching development is unparalleled.

Must be a typo or two here. I can’t seem to find Philippe Aumont or Tyson Gillies on either list.

— dasher
Phillipe Aumont is no longer rookie eligible so he could not qualify for the list.  Gillies has taken some step backs over the year.  Can we move past the Cliff Lee trade now, you can’t celebrate when all of the prospects you traded didn’t pan out and then kill your GM in the same sentence, prospects are not sure things.

Whats the difference how they’re ramked when the GM favors old over young? Enough of this nonsense.

— Justaschmuck
FAs by definition have spent at least 6 seasons in the major leagues, which means that they are hitting the FA market for their first contract at ages 28-31.  Those young stud players go for a lot of money, see Kershaw.  Right now old players are going for cheaper and shorter deals which keep the team from hamstringing itself going forward.  As for the trades, the team traded for current performance because it was trying to win a title.  You don’t trade your established players for prospects when you are in a pennant race.

If you think these guys have a credible future, then you think you can keep your health insurance if you like it.§

— Son of Quixote
We’ll avoid the political piece here.  Actually these guys have a credible future.  As floors the top three guys are major leaguers (Crawford at very least is a utility guy).  But I guess you are right, we should abandon the minors because there is no hope, we were wrong to believe in a better tomorrow.

Tocci does nothing for me even though he’s a young kid but he’s not going to hit the side of a barn with his bat yet alone a ball. Cozins may surprise people. Altherr got torn apart in the AFL and is a poor man’s John Mayberry if there is such a thing.

Actually making contact is what Tocci is good at, the kid has an advanced feel for putting bat to ball.  Right now it doesn’t go very far but he can spray it all over the field.
Carlos Tocci_HeatMap
I don’t know who Cozins is but Dylan Cozens has gotten plenty of attention and people like him, but he does have his flaws.   Altherr was a bit fatigued and hurt his wrist in the AFL, but the scouts liked what thye saw even is the 45 AB sample size looked poor, also he can actually play CF unlike Mayberry.

Someone correct me if I’m wrong…but, Crawford has no trade value as in…he can’t be traded because he has’t been in the system for an entire year after being drafted. But yeah, really looking forward to seeing him develop!

— WYO ME
Technically he can be traded as a player to be named later, but yes Crawford has limited to no trade value right now (losing spring training is not good for development).

@Uncle – I guess it’s not too soon to say the Philies GM is a moron … since he traded good prospects for Pence and then turned around and traded Pence for useless garbage (Tommy Joseph … LOL).Let me ask you this: Did SF win that trade? The one where they gave us TRASH T. Joseph for Hunter Pence?

— Copper34
I will go down defending the Pence trade until the end.  Right now it doesn’t look good because of the other pieces.  But Tommy Joseph was a good prospect at the time (and still could be).  This is the same group of people that wanted him to make the team last spring when he raked in Spring Training.  Concussions are a serious thing (I had two in a 6 month span and it took near a month for effects of the second one to fully go away), it wasn’t in Joseph’s control and the Phillies are making sure it doesn’t mess up the rest of his life.

Ohhhhh I bet all the teams in our division are just QUAKING thinking about facing these players in the coming years.

— truthfirst
I am not sure about quaking, but pitchers really are not going to like facing Franco.  He has his warts, but he can put a bat on anything and anything he can put the bat on he has a chance to hit really hard.
Only one of the prospects in the Pence trade has made it to the majors (Cosart) and he’s only pitched 10 games.
Somewhere Josh Zeid and his 27.2 major league innings is shaking his head and wondering why no one ever remembers him.  Using Baseball Reference WAR Zeid and Cosart have a combined 3.0 WAR, over his time in Philadelphia Hunter Pence was worth 3.0 WAR.

I like to look at prospects I have watched at some point play in 2013 by position. If I had to build a 25 man roster plus two on the DL exclusively from the Phillies farm system of young players who have never played in a major league game on a team to start the season here’s what it would look like: Starting five pitchers; Jesse Biddle, Mario Hollands, David Buchanan, Hoby Milner, and Sevie Gonzalez plus Adam Morgan on the DL. Relief pitchers, Closer Ken Giles. Set-up Tyler Knigge, Daniel Child, Hector Neris. LOOGY Jay Johnson. Long relief Percy Garner, Mark Leiter. Catchers Deivy Gruillon, Logan Moore. Infield Maikel Franco 3b, J.P.Crawford SS, Carlos Alonso 2b, Art Charles !B with bench players Zach Green 3b, Andrew Pullin 2b plus Roman Quinn on the DL. Outfield Kelly Dugan, Aaron Altherr, Dylan Cozens, with right-handed bat Cameron Perkins, left-handed bat Cord Sandberg off the bench. These are some of the guys I will be watching eventually in the minor league camp this spring. Conclusion: Power pitching is most lacking in the system with legitimate MLB prospects at the every day positions.

— Dull
Really an impressive amount of thought here, and I agree with his final conclusion as well.  Pitching is really shallow in the organization as a whole.  On my Top 30 there are only 3 starting pitchers who will be healthy to start the season and 8  pitchers overall.

Can one of the shills please point to a prospect that The Boob acquired that has ade it in the big-leagues?He has traded some big-name players … Cliff Lee … Hunter Pence … Shane Victorino …He has been the GM for five years. Forget prospects that have made it in the bigs … just name a really good prospect he has acquired … LOL …

— Copper34
Ethan Martin and Cody Asche (Aumont and JC Ramirez as well).  To be fair from 2009 to 2011 he didn’t trade major leaguers for prospects so he really only has had two years to acquire prospects (outside Lee trade).
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About Matt Winkelman

Matt is originally from Mt. Holly, NJ, but after a 4 year side track to Cleveland for college he now resides in Madison, WI. His work has previously appeared on Phuture Phillies and The Good Phight. You can read his work at Phillies Minor Thoughts

25 thoughts on “Philly.com Prospect Mailbag”

  1. To be fair to the last idiot, I think he meant “traded for” when he said “acquired.” Cody Asche was acquired only in the sense that he was drafted. So by my count, the list (in rough order of major league service time) would be: Horst, Aumont, Martin, JC Ramirez. Did I forget someone? I guess you could also count Mini-Mart as a “prospect” he acquired, via the Rule 5 draft.

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  2. Great idea to create a mailbox out of the comments from the tools on Philly.com. I got a couple of laughs out of this.

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  3. Regarding the second Pence trade, at the risk of repeating myself, the population that has problems with that trade is the same population that thinks we should get multiple elite prospects in trades for each of our veteran players, even guys like Rollins and Howard.

    Of course (correctly) pointing out that Amaro did pretty well in that deal just highlights how bad the original Pence deal was. Despite my many bad habits, I usually don’t remind people of when events have proven me right, but boy did I call that one.

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    1. I think the problem with the trade was the fact that we drastically overpaid for him and then sold him at slightly below average. if you look at the whole deal it looks like this , Cosart, Singleton, Santana traded for a 2/3 of a year for Pence and how could we forget his underwhelming playoff performance , and sherholtz who was allowed to walk with no value in return , Rosin , now on somebody else’s team, I think the Phillies get some money for him because rule 5 , and now we have a very big question with Joseph if he doesnt learn to become a catcher or be concussion free , we have nothing in him his bat doesnt play at 1st , maybe he can pick up the knuckleball, so that is how I look at the trade not sure there is any other way to sugar coat it . an even worse trade than the Lee debacle in my opinion , but everybody has one and is should probably entitled to there own without some ridiculous comparison stereotype about how peanuts equal bananas

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      1. I think the Pence to the Giants trade was fair, although if they were going to just let Schierholtz walk then they shouldn’t have taken him in the deal in the first place. Should have gotten another minor leaguer.

        It’s just unfortunate what’s happened with Joseph. Maybe they should have been more concerned with his concussion history, but I don’t remember reading even one word about his prior concussions until his most recent one.

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        1. I didnt read anything about Joseph either until he had a concussion in philly and then I heard that was his 3 in two years , which is red flag territory. I said the trade was slightly below average , but if you wanna say fair I wouldnt argue with that. However I agree the phillies should have taken a minor leaguer instead of nate of the great and maybe there medical staff is to blame in Joseph’s case and not necessarily the GMs fault. I guess my problem with the Hunter Pence deals was just how much we paid for , and I even forgot to mention Josh Zeid who we just threw in because I dont know three prospects werent enough

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          1. It really wasn’t a bad deal. I’m not sure Rosin isn’t in the major leagues within a year and Schierholtz certainly had value, even if the Phillies somehow lost sight of it. Some bodies in management thought Delmon Young would be better, or someone like him. I suspect Joseph was the Giants’ little secret from the Phillies. If the Phillies knew of 2 concussion in the year prior to the trade, then shame on them. With all the talk from the NFL, concussions were certainly the topic du jour in the sports world and were being perceived as a lot more damaging than the old thinking said. Joseph’s value was inflated by a big year in the California league and by being young for AA. His AA numbers were ok/good for a prospect, not very good/great, but that depends upon how much of an age adjustment you apply. Any way you slice it, Joseph lost about a year. Now he’s age appropriate, so we’ll see how he hits in a return to AA. He likely was promoted to fast last season, but the numbers he put up, prior to the concussion. really weren’t good.

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        2. The funny part is that the Giants basically forced Schierholtz into the deal as he had previously demanded a trade and they wanted him gone. Rube took him as a temp solution to cover RF for the rest of the season. A shame they didn’t keep him over Laynce Nix but that’s life I suppose.

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  4. Wow, I have to hand it to you – you waded through the cesspool of mouth-breathers that populate those Comments sections there, and actually made it worth reading. Nice work!

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  5. The second Pence trade wouldn’t look so bad if there was more to the plan than signing Delmon Young as a starting RF’er

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    1. Really perhaps the biggest failure of the Amaro regime was a failure to plan a transition from the WC outfield. Almost every individual decision regarding the outfield has been bad, but the overall result is actually worse than the sum of those bad decisions.

      People talk about there being no apparent plan with this organization. I think that’s mostly wrong – which isn’t to say that the plan is a good one – but with the outfield in particular there does not seem to have been a real plan.

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      1. Trading Worley for Revere was a fine move. They traded from a position of strength (starting pitching) to obtain a cheap young player.

        Dom Brown was always a big part of their plan, and rightly so. So that’s 2/3 of the OF well taken care of.

        Also, you figure they were hoping another OF prospect would work out (Gillies comes to mind).

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        1. I don’t think Gillies ever profiled as a corner OF under the best of circumstances. He was supposed to be the CF of the future. Speed and D, but not a corner OF bat. I think it truly is totally fair to say that there never was a backup plan for the second corner OF spot after the Phillies let Werth walk and traded Pence and Vic. Perhaps they saw Schierholtz there at one point, but somebody in the org very quickly drastically soured on him. That was a mistake all in itself. I won’t say they saw Mayberry there, because it’s obvious they never thought much of Mayberry. There was certainly nobody proximate on the farm, except Ruf, and I don’t think they every really considered him as an OF. I think it fair to say that their main concern with Ruf from day one was that he not be seen as competition for Howard. After this season, Franco steps into that role. Hopefully he is treated better than Ruf.

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        2. IMHO, I think Revere will do well this year and surprise people with his plate production. In CF, we may be holding our breaths again, it could be the same old story, hopefully he has overcome some of those route-running and judgment deficiencies.

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        3. What allentown said re Gillies. The continuing failure at one corner OF spot is the most conspicuous failure.

          But not the only one. As for the Revere move, it was good in and of itself, but part of what I mean about the overall picture being less than the sum of the parts. He’s a guy who is a slightly above average regular at best. Not as good as what they had, granted that getting younger at the position made sense. he’s a good backup plan, but only that. Ironic, though, that two positions they decided to get younger at, the guys they didn’t re-sign are playing very well. (In contrast to Howard and, last year at least, Rollins.)

          As for Brown, I think the organization deserves some of the blame for his failure to be quite what we all hoped, at least so far.

          Bottom line, they went from 2 borderline all stars and an above average regular to a couple of youngish average regulars and a stop gap older guy who, last year aside, is about the same. 11.6 WAR in 2008; 2.6 WAR in 2013. It should be better in 2014 but still mediocre at best.

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  6. “Ohhhhh I bet all the teams in our division are just QUAKING thinking about facing these players in the coming years.

    — truthfirst
    I am not sure about quaking, but pitchers really are not going to like facing Franco. He has his warts, but he can put a bat on anything and anything he can put the bat on he has a chance to hit really hard.”

    C’mon Matt. Turn the sarcasm meter on.

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        1. Yes, it was, but that is a near-wrist bone. I would expect less problem from a hamate than from an actual wrist bone or tendon, but I’m not a medical person.

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          1. yes but the hamate bone injuries almost always requires surgery to remove the hook of the Hamate after it breaks off the rest of the bone , Maybe if we are lucky Altherr’s injury will not require surgery.

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