You’ve had your say, both individually and as a collective group, now I’ll toss you my list. Before I get into it, I want to make a few general comments. The minors are generally like kindergarten; you’re there to learn to interact with others, to learn how to listen to a teacher, and to pick up basic skills which you’ll use as you progress. Similarly, the main job of a minor leaguer is to learn how to improve different aspects of his game, whether it be hitting for contact, base running, refining a changeup, or hitting the ball to the opposite field. If you look at a generic stat line, with no context, it tells you absolutely nothing. The work that I have been doing is aimed at trying to look at a player’s statistics, consider the league he was in, his age relative to the prospects in the league, and then figure out just what his numbers mean. Generally speaking, I’m not that concerned with the traditional statistics, because they mean very little. Instead, I targeted things like walk rate and strike out rate, as I think those metrics lead to some idea in terms of prediction. After compiling the numbers, I considered everything I know about the prospect in terms of scouting reports. This point here is really important. While I tend to bristle when people only consider a player’s raw tools, it’s equally foolish to just assume a guy with good numbers in Low A will be good just because he has a good K rate. The truth is, if he has an 85 mph fastball and a good curveball, he’s likely to get clobbered as he moves up the ladder. I place more emphasis on performance to date over projection, but it’s a close split. So let’s get on with it..
Category Archives: 01. Site Features
Savery ranked 16th among AFL prospects
Just saw this, had to get it up here. BA is doing a chat at 1PM if you have the means, check it out.
16. Joe Savery, lhp, Peoria Saguaros (Phillies)
Like a lot of Rice pitchers, Savery comes with some medical baggage. The 2007 first-rounder had minor surgery last year to shave down a bone growth in the back of his shoulder that was causing some fraying in his labrum. That didn’t affect his reputation too badly, as the Dodgers were ready to take him if the Phillies didn’t in the first round. In the AFL, Savery showed much better stuff than his pro debut. He clearly benefited from the short break between instructional league and the Fall League, finishing 1-1, 0.64 in 14 innings. Savery’s fastball velocity was 87-92, but still struggled to command it at times. His secondary pitches—a slurvy breaking ball and changeup—still need more polish, and his 5-11 strikeout-walk ratio is indicative of that.
Swamped
I’m under the kosh here at work today. My goal is to put up my Top 30 prospect list on Monday. I’ve decided I’m not going to bother posting every team’s Top 30 here, enough people expressed they wouldn’t want to see that, so I can just give my Phillies list, my thoughts on each spot, and then maybe at some point I’ll compare our system to the other four teams in our division, and also do positional rankings. So, check back Monday for that.
Top 30 lists submitted by you
Here is a graphic depicting the individual lists sent to me, compared with the Community List we cranked out. In the next few weeks I’m going to organize a new page at the top of the site to keep track of all of the Phillies prospect lists from this offseason, as well as our community list, and can compare as the season progresses. It should be interesting. I’m still working on my list, and hopefully I’ll have it done over the next few weeks, but time will be short over the holidays, so we’ll see. Anyway, here’s the graphic. If the image is too large or too small to properly see on your monitor, click here.
Last call for Top 30 lists
If you haven’t sent in your top 30 list and you still want to participate, send the email to phuturephillies@hotmail dot com and send it soon, as I’m going to collect the few that were given and compile them later today or tomorrow and then post the results.
BA’s Phillies Top 10 List
Hot off the press
01. Carlos Carrasco
02. Adrian Cardenas
03. Joe Savery
04. Josh Outman
05. Kyle Drabek
06. Dominic Brown
07. Greg Golson
08. Lou Marson
09. Drew Carpenter
10. Jason Jaramillo
No real shocks here. I had guessed that Carpenter, Marson and Jaramillo would be close, and with the Lidge deal moving two of our guys out of the top 10, Carpenter and Jaramillo were logical choices. The chat at BA is scheduled for 2PM, let’s see how many questions we can get answered. Chat update below
Costanzo interview
Baseball America got Costanzo’s thoughts on the deal. Clearly he’s disappointed, but he seems motivated by it. Best of luck Mike.
BA’s Top 10 Phillies prospects (guess)
Baseball America is trotting out their team Top 10’s and started this year with the NL East. Atlanta, New York and Washington have already been unveiled, which means Philadelphia and Florida will come next Monday and Wedenesday. So, get your guesses in now. I’ll give it a shot, based on how I think they think
01. Carrasco
02. Cardenas
03. Savery
04. Brown
05. Outman
06. Drabek
07. Donald
08. Sampson
09. Galvis
10. Mattair
wildcards are d’Arnaud and Marson.
Some odds and ends
Darren Byrd won the vote yesterday for the 31st spot on the list, and with everyone else moving up 1 spot, he becomes the 30th prospect on the list. I wanted to again thank everyone who came here every day and voted during the process. I hope you guys stick around and become more active in the comments section of new posts, because discussion and discourse is what this site is all about. If you still want to share your personal top 30, just send an email to phuturephillies at hotmail dot com and give me your list in order. I’ll collect all of the lists and post the results sometime in the next week or two.
I also wanted to give a little update on my personal prospect rankings. As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time working on a system to evaluate prospects, both as a tool for comparison and a way to come up with rudimentary predictions for future success/failure. The actual design of the formula wasn’t too tough, but importing the data for 700 players takes a lot of time, and I’m really only about 50% done at this point. I want to make sure that it’s complete and ready to go before I start discussing my findings, so my own personal Top 30 is going to be delayed for a little while.
In conjunction with the above paragraph, I have a question. Would it be interesting for you guys to see my lists of Top 30 prospects for every other team in baseball after I give my Phillies list, as well as positional rankings and overall team rankings? I ask because I’ve debated starting another blog devoted to all of the minors, but at the same time I realize there isn’t a whole lot of Phillies news in the offseason, and I could probably just discuss the lists here. If you guys have no interest in reading about that stuff, then I might have to go about setting up another blog for that purpose. Just wanted some feedback on that.
Next week, I wanted to start working on guesses as to where prospects will start 2008, starting with 3A and working our way down. So, start thinking about that and we’ll get started on Monday or Tuesday.
Reader Top 30, #31
As it was suggested, we now have one spot open in the top 30 with Costanzo being traded. So, here’s the recap post, go ahead and vote for the next prospect on your list and we’ll update it.
