The other day, we wrote up a quick newser about Baseball America releasing their top prospects in the Phillies’ organization. They included a ton of extras with it as well, things like predicted lineups
for five years from now, best tools and so on. Overall, the tenor of the article was one of cautious optimism.
Baseball Prospectus has released their list of top ten Phillies prospects ($) and the outlook is a bit less sunny.
Quite a bit less sunny.
I won’t do a write up about what they said for each of the prospects because, well, you should probably just buy a subscription to BP since it’s some of the best analysis about the game we love that is publicly available. I’ll just give you the names:
- Aidan Miller
- Andrew Painter
- Gage Wood
- Aroon Escobar
- Justin Crawford
- Dante Nori
- Gabriel Rincones
- Cade Obermueller
- Moises Chace
- Matthew Fisher
It’s not a bad list of names, even if it is a bit top heavy. However, the real kicker came in the system overview written about the team’s developmental system.
The top five of this system is okay, if a bit thinned out from trades. Behind that is the weakest farm depth in the majors, the victim of years of poor drafting and middling development, only propped up even a little by a bunch of fun 2025 Draft arms. At least the MLB team is still really good? This is all very Dave Dombrowski.
That’s….not ideal. It’s kind of important that the distinction is made between “weakest farm depth” and “worst system”. I would disagree that it doesn’t have depth since if it didn’t, there wouldn’t be deals made at the deadline. However, yeah, it’s not in the greatest of shape.
We’ll have more on the lists as they come out.
