Friend of the website Kevin Goldstein has his Phillies Top 15 prospects list up today, which you can check out here. Like everyone else, he’s bullish on Domonic Brown, and unsurprisingly, he likes Phillippe Aumont quite a bit. He’s not as high on some of our other prospects, dropping lots of 3 star ratings on guys who I might value a bit more, but his assessments seem quite fair. I’m going to attempt to work in another Q/A with him about his list, as its always a popular feature, but with his increased workload at Baseball Prospectus in 2010, I can’t make any promises. If you have any questions you’d specifically like to ask him, post them here and I’ll see if I can incorporate some of them if he’s able to do a quick Q/A.

This content is free to view, so I’ll link it here. BA profiles Aaron Altherr, Harold Garcia, Troy Hanzawa and Anthony Hewitt on their “32nd player team” which is a list of guys who just missed the cut for the annual Top 30’s, and then missed the cut for #31, which they also include if you buy their book directly from BA. Altherr is the most interesting guy on the list, and a guy I’m interested to see in 2010, though I suspect he’s going to go through plenty of growing pains.

Just remembered that the list will be posted tomorrow. The list itself will be free content, but the scouting reports will not be, so please don’t post them here. I was going to roll out the SONAR scores for pitchers today, but I haven’t had a chance to finish writing it up, and we’ll have other stuff to discuss with the Top 10 list, so I’ll hold off till Tuesday or Wednesday. I have no inside knowledge of the list, obviously, but I’m going to take a guess, based on BA’s tendencies.

01. Kyle Drabek
02. Domonic Brown
03. Michael Taylor
04. Anthony Gose
05. Travis D’Arnaud
06. Trevor May
07. Sebastian Valle
08. Yohan Flande
09. Kyrell Hudson
10. Brody Colvin

Im pretty sure the top 10 of my top 30 won’t look like this, but this is my expectation, or something close. We’ll see.

Check below the fold for the actual list

Continue reading Phillies Top 10 at BA →

A central theme is developing here; top prospect list, three Phillies will be named. This time its the Eastern League, and the Phillies are represented by Kyle Drabek (3rd overall, 2nd pitcher), Domonic Brown (6th, top OF), and Michael Taylor (9th, 2nd highest OF). So, the second best pitching prospect and the top two OF prospects. Not a bad haul. For those of you who ask for snippets from the scouting reports. Drabek = 3 above average pitches, needs to work on command. Brown = great all around profile, only question is eventual power production, and needs to work on route running, his arm is good. Taylor = good all around athlete, might be limited to LF, needs to continue to rake.

BA continues with their league Top 20’s, and the Phillies end up with 3 guys on the list; Gose (13th), D’Arnaud (17th) and May (19th). The list is here. Again, the scouting reports are subscription only, do not post them here.

The SAL is one of the biggest leagues in the minors, so for the Phillies to grab 3 guys is mildly impressive.

Its that time, Baseball America lists its top 20 prospects from each US domestic league. The Phillies placed 4 guys in the GCL top 20; Jarred Cosart (4), Jon Singleton (7), Domingo Santana (10) and Jonathon Villar (18). Its notable that Cosart was ranked the top pitching prospect in the league, a very promising sign. Please do not post the full scouting reports/blurbs here. Thanks.

BA always does an updated midseason Top 25, and this year 3 Phillies made the list; Dominic Brown (17th), Michael Taylor (23rd), and Kyle Drabek (24th). This also got me thinking about how the Phillies Top 10 would look now, and how our best prospects would be lined up if you were dividing them into tiers. For me, our Top 20 or so would look like this…

Tier 1: Drabek, Taylor, Brown
Tier 2: Knapp, Carrasco, Marson
Tier 3: Donald, D’Arnaud, Worley, Savery, May, Gose, Collier, Dugan, Santana
Tier 4: Pettibone, Sampson, Shreve, Stutes, De Fratus, Correa, Cisco, Mattair, Flande

Does that seem accurate? Am I missing anyone?

I am planning on cranking out another Top 100 for this season, probably sometime next week, but I was thinking about last year’s list, so I figure I’d take a look back and see how good/bad my list was last year at this time. At some point I’m also going to collect the Top 100 lists from BA, BP and Keith Law and add them into a spreadsheet for comparison’s sake. But for now, here’s a review of my top 100…

Continue reading Review of my Top 100 prospects for 2008 →

Last year I took a look at how PECOTA, the Baseball Prospectus forecasting system, felt about Phillies prospects. The two metrics I used were UPSIDE and Beta, and I’ll use the same numbers again this year. For a full explanation of these metrics, check last year’s post here. Basically, the higher the UPSIDE the better, and the lower the beta, the more reliable the forecast is. PECOTA is unique, in that it takes many more factors into account than your typical projection system. If you’re unfamiliar with PECOTA, here is a good primer. For reasons that I don’t know, only three of our position player prospects have PECOTA’s, in Marson, Mayberry and Harman. My guess is that has to do with them being on the 40 man roster. But there are 13 pitching prospects with PECOTA’s, many of whom aren’t on the 40 man, so I have no idea. I’m going to try and get ahold of someone at BP and find out what the story is there. When/if Donald and others have forecasts, I’ll write up a supplemental post. But for now…

Continue reading PECOTA and Phillies prospects, 2009 edition →