The Top-Five Phillies Prospects by Projected WAR
Earlier today, Kiley McDaniel published his consummately researched and demonstrably authoritative prospect list for the Philadelphia Phillies. What follows is a different exercise than that, one much smaller in scope and designed to identify not Philadelphia’s top overall prospects but rather the rookie-eligible players in the Phillies system who are most ready to produce wins at the major-league level in 2015 (regardless of whether they’re likely to receive the opportunity to do so). No attempt has been made, in other words, to account for future value.
Below are the top-five prospects in the Phillies system by projected WAR. To assemble this brief list, what I’ve done is to locate the Steamer 600 projections for all the prospects to whom McDaniel assessed a Future Value grade of 40 or greater. Hitters’ numbers are normalized to 550 plate appearances; starting pitchers’, to 150 innings — i.e. the playing-time thresholds at which a league-average player would produce a 2.0 WAR. Catcher projections are prorated to 415 plate appearances to account for their reduced playing time.
Note that, in many cases, defensive value has been calculated entirely by positional adjustment based on the relevant player’s minor-league defensive starts — which is to say, there has been no attempt to account for the runs a player is likely to save in the field. As a result, players with an impressive offensive profile relative to their position are sometimes perhaps overvalued — that is, in such cases where their actual defensive skills are sub-par.
5. J.P. Crawford, SS (Profile)
| PA | AVG | OBP | SLG | wRC+ | WAR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 550 | .220 | .275 | .306 | 63 | -0.2 |
The Phillies’ first pick of the 2013 draft, Crawford is the only player among the five present here who hasn’t made an appearance above High-A. In terms of Steamer’s computer math, that’s significant, as level of competition is a non-negligible variable in the model — and yet, despite that handicap, Crawford’s production in the low minors (along with his place on the age curve) renders him basically a replacement-level player at this point. That makes him more valuable than Ryan Howard, among a small collection of other major-league regulars.