The deadline to protect players from the Rule 5 draft is Tuesday, November 18th. Any player that is eligible that the Phillies wish to protect from being selected to another team needs to be added to the 40-man
roster by that date and there have been some things written about it already.
Over at Fangraphs, one of their writers did a great job of running down all of the candidates for each NL team that could and should be protected. If ever you wondered how long players need to be in the organization for before a decision needs to be made, this is a quick explainer.
Eligibility is determined by a mix of how long a player has been with their parent organization and how young they were when they signed: Players who signed at 18 or younger must be added to the 40-man within five seasons, while everyone else must be added within four.
For the Phillies, it went like this:
Obviously, Andrew Painter is going to be protected. He has the inside track on one of the open starting rotation jobs. Rincones looks like he has a decent shot at being a platoon bat at the major league level to start the season (just don’t ever let him see a left handed pitcher).
The question for today: which players, outside of Painter and Rincones, should the Phillies be protecting by Tuesday? Alex McFarlane is an interesting name, probably likely to be stashed as well. But are we going to have the Griff McGarry debate again?
