Mick Abel has a classic starter profile and a high ceiling. No. 20 on our recently-released 2022 Top 100 Prospects list, and No. 1 on our Philadelphia Phillies Top Prospects list, the 20-year-old right-hander features a four-seam fastball and a diving slider, plus offerings that he augments with a changeup and a curveball. Drafted 15th overall in 2019 out of a Beaverton, Oregon high school, the 6-foot-5, 205-pound hurler is, in the words of our prospect team, “a prototypical power pitching prospect with huge arm strength, a plus breaking ball, and the frame [to potentially grow into] a No. 1 or 2 starter.”

Abel discussed his repertoire, and his early-career development, over the phone last week.

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David Laurila: How much have you learned about your pitches since signing with the Phillies?

Mick Abel: “I think I had a really good sense coming in, with how I was brought up with Kevin Gunderson back home. He was sharing the analytical side a lot better than a lot of kids would get from their pitching coaches. But I’ve definitely learned a lot. I’ve learned about things like seam-shifted wake, which is something I’ve asked about a lot.

“As far as my data goes, I haven’t tried to do too many crazy things with it. I know that I’ve got the stuff. It’s more so, ‘How am I going to maintain that, and not deviate too far off of what my normal numbers are?’”

Laurila: That said, have you looked to change any of your pitch characteristics? Read the rest of this entry »

Today marks the 79th day of the owner-initiated lockout. It still remains to be seen how long the lockout will last, but whatever its length, we’re likely to see a whirlwind of a mini-offseason as soon as the league and the players come to terms on a new collective bargaining agreement. While that kind of thing is fun to cover — the week before the lockout was a thrilling frenzy — there’s still quite a lot for baseball to do. So let’s roll up our sleeves, lend a hand, and find some new homes for a few of the remaining free agents. The trick here is that they actually have to make at least a lick of sense for the team signing them. But just a lick.

As we have a lot of work to do, we’ll nail down the hitters first and then divvy up the pitchers in another piece to follow.

Carlos Correa to the Angels – Seven years, $240 million

While there has been some speculation around the interwebs about Carlos Correa possibly landing a $300 million deal, I don’t think that is the likeliest result. Correa had a fabulous 2021 season, reminding people of the phenom he was when he won American League Rookie of the Year back in 2015, but there’s going to be at least some concerns about his durability. Not alarming ones, mind you, but the fact is that before 2021’s 148-game campaign, Correa hadn’t played in 120 games since ’16, a long time for a young player, and that’s even ignoring a pandemic-shortened season during which no one could play 120 games. That’s probably not going to scare teams off, but it will inevitably be priced into his offers since front offices these days are populated more by mean nerds like me than they are dewy-eyed optimists. Read the rest of this entry »

Title: Organizational Intern, Player Development

Department: Player Development
Reports to: Manager, Player Development
Status: Full-Time Salary Non-Exempt Intern

Position Overview:
The Philadelphia Phillies are seeking passionate and knowledgeable applicants for an entry-level Player Development internship. This role will work closely with the Manager, Player Development and various stakeholders in the PD department. The position will be based out of Clearwater, FL. A strong candidate will provide a diverse perspective and administrative support to our PD group. This position will offer opportunities to contribute throughout the many facets of the PD department. Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s start this one with the basics. What’s a four-seamer, and what’s a sinker? At their core, they’re both fastballs; the main difference between the two is in the grip. Place the seams perpendicular to your index and middle fingers? That’s a four-seamer – each finger crosses two seams. Place the seams parallel to the fingers? It’s a two-seamer or sinker – one seam per finger.

Of course, you could also define them by their movement. Does it have a ton of tail and not much ride? It’s a sinker. Does it mainly fight gravity with backspin, paired with far less tail? It’s a four-seamer. If you think of archetypical examples of each, it’s easy to tell the difference. Think Clayton Kershaw’s four-seamer – all backspin – and Adam Wainwright’s sinker – boring in on righties’ hands and knees.

Real life doesn’t operate in archetypes, though. Real life is messy. Statcast doesn’t get to stop the game after each pitch and ask a pitcher what he threw, and not every fastball is a textbook definition of its type. Plenty of pitchers throw both varieties of fastball, and they can look extremely similar, even with the benefit of high-speed cameras and piles of pitch data.

Want a practical example? You’re in luck – or, well, not really. I’ve walked you into wanting a practical example with my introduction, and that’s on purpose, because today I want to talk about Aaron Nola’s two fastballs. Nola, like many pitchers, throws a sinker and a four-seamer. Like many pitchers, he releases them from a consistent arm slot – a remarkably consistent arm slot, in fact:
Read the rest of this entry »

Blake Brown had an uninspiring transcript when he signed as a non-drafted free agent with the Philadelphia Phillies in 2020. In four collegiate seasons at the University of North Carolina-Asheville, the 23-year-old right-hander had logged a 4.99 ERA and been credited with just six wins and eight saves. He had a psychology degree in his back pocket, but outside of a promising fastball, little in the way of baseball bona fides.

Based on his first professional season, the Phillies may have secured a diamond-in-the-rough. In 34 relief outings — 33 with High-A Jersey City and one with Double-A Reading — Brown fanned 59 batters and allowed just 22 hits over 41 innings of work. Walks were an issue — he issued 36 free passes — but his ERA was a laudable 3.07, and his batting-average-against a Lilliputian .155.

Brown — No. 31 on our newly-released Phillies Top Prospects list — discussed his draft experience and his emergence as an up-and-coming arm in a recent phone interview.

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David Laurila: You were a non-drafted senior sign. What were your draft expectations, both in your junior and senior years?

Blake Brown: “My junior year, I thought there was a decent chance that I’d get drafted, but they weren’t especially high expectations. I didn’t have the greatest year. But my senior year, going into the five-round draft, I thought that I was… not guaranteed, but I was more certain that I would at least get a call. And I did get a couple of calls during the draft, with some money on the table. Things just never panned out.”

Laurila: Why didn’t things pan out?

Brown: “So, a couple of the teams called and said, ‘Hey, would you take X amount of money in the next round?’ Before the draft, it was ‘Would you take X amount of money if we were drafting you today?’ I would say ‘yes.’ But when that round came and the team’s name popped up, it was never my name getting called. I think it was a matter of teams having someone on their board that they didn’t expect to be there, and they were like, ‘OK, we’ve got to hop on that.’”

Laurila: Where did the Phillies fit into the equation? Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Philadelphia Phillies. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our own observations. This is the second year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the numbered prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2022 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

As the Phillies looked to turn the corner from pretenders to contenders in the new millennium, they signed future Hall of Fame slugger Jim Thome to provide some middle-of-the-lineup thump via a six-year, $85 million contract in December 2002. Outwardly at least, they didn’t appear to expect much from their fifth-round 2001 draft pick, a 6-foot-4, 220-pound first baseman with 80-grade raw power but notable contact issues and questions about his defense. Thome’s presence kept Ryan Howard in the minors long enough for him to hit 46 home runs across two levels in 2004, his age-24 season. But when Thome suffered a season-ending elbow injury the following year, Howard stepped in and flat out stole the first base job.

Howard won the NL Rookie of the Year award in his abbreviated 2005 season, leading the Phillies to trade Thome to the White Sox that winter, then followed up by launching 58 homers and claiming NL MVP honors in ’06. He became a cornerstone of the Phillies’ five straight NL East titles from 2007 to ’11, a run that included a World Series win over the Rays in 2008, and another NL pennant in ’09.

At a time before the lessons of Moneyball had been fully absorbed on a league-wide basis, Howard’s big home run and RBI totals led to massive paydays, while his limitations in the field and on the basepaths — which had already become significant factors as he’d filled out to a listed 250 pounds — were overlooked. Unfortunately, an Achilles tendon rupture, suffered on the final play of the 2011 Division Series agains the Cardinals, turned his biggest contract into an albatross. Midway through that deal, an ugly legal fight within his family over the handling of his finances came to light, a heartbreaking turn of events that couldn’t have made his on-field struggles any easier. Read the rest of this entry »

A few days ago, I ran a Twitter poll asking which of Bobby Abreu and Ichiro Suzuki had the better MLB career. The latter won in a landslide. Of the 1,183 votes cast, 86.8% went to Ichiro, while Abreu garnered just 13.2%.

The poll results don’t reflect their respective numbers:

Ichiro: .311/.355/.402, .328 wOBA, 104 wRC+, 57.8 WAR.
Abreu: .291/.395/.475, .378 wOBA, 129 wRC+, 59.8 WAR.

If you favor counting stats, here are a few of those:

Ichiro: 3.089 hits, 362 2Bs, 96 3Bs, 117 HRs, 3,994 total bases, 509 SB.
Abreu: 2,470 hits, 574 2Bs, 59 3Bs, 288 HRs, 4.026 total bases, 400 SB.

Unless you place an especially-high value on hit totals and batting averages, Abreu clearly has a career-wise statistical edge on the undoubtedly Hall-of-Fame-worthy Ichiro. Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Philadephia Phillies.

Batters

Perhaps there’s a bit of recency bias in play since I just wrote about them, but the Phillies as an organization feel a lot to me like the Angels do. Both have significant high points on their roster: the Angels with Mike Trout, Shohei Ohtani, and Anthony Rendon, the Phillies with Bryce Harper, J.T. Realmuto, Aaron Nola, and Zack Wheeler. But both teams share some less desirable qualities: ownership that seems to spend mostly in short bursts; major, obvious holes that go unanswered for years; and an unfortunate lack of reinforcements from the minors.

Entering the 2020 season, the Phillies ranked dead last in our positional rankings in center field. The projection was not far off, as they got a .637 OPS out of the position. They did little to address the problem after 2020, and though they did a better job thwarting the projections than the year before, I doubt anybody seriously thinks Travis Jankowski or Matt Vierling is going to be a great long-term option out there. Odúbel Herrera was already showing decline before his release, and the team has done just about nothing at the position since. In left, Andrew McCutchen was never better than simply a temporary stopgap; now that he’s gone, the Phillies don’t have a better idea. There’s still more of the offseason to come, but as of now, fans should be apprehensive about these two positions.
Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2022 Hall of Fame ballot. Originally written for the 2020 election, it has been updated to reflect recent voting results as well as additional research. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Bobby Abreu could do just about everything. A five-tool player with dazzling speed, a sweet left-handed stroke, and enough power to win a Home Run Derby, he was also one of the game’s most patient, disciplined hitters, able to wear down a pitcher and unafraid to hit with two strikes. While routinely reaching the traditional seasonal plateaus that tend to get noticed — a .300 batting average (six times), 20 homers (nine times), 30 steals (six times), 100 runs scored and batted in (eight times apiece) — he was nonetheless a stathead favorite for his ability to take a walk (100 or more eight years in a row) and his high on-base percentages (.400 or better eight times). And he was durable, playing 151 games or more in 13 straight seasons. “To me, Bobby’s Tony Gwynn with power,” said Phillies hitting coach Hal McRae in 1999.

“Bobby was way ahead of his time [with] regards to working pitchers,” said his former manager Larry Bowa when presenting him for induction into the Phillies Wall of Fame in 2019. “In an era when guys were swinging for the fences, Bobby never strayed from his game. Because of his speed, a walk would turn into a double. He was cool under pressure, and always in control of his at-bats. He was the best combination of power, speed, and patience at the plate.” Read the rest of this entry »