Philadelphia Phillies Top 41 Prospects

Abel has been the best pitching prospect his age since his sophomore year of high school, and he’s continued to track like an impact starter early on as a pro. He has the prototypical starter’s frame at a broad-shouldered 6-foot-5, already throws hard, and should be able to at least hold that kind of velocity for entire big league seasons thanks to his looseness and flexibility, and perhaps add to it as his frame fills out. Abel was already sitting in the 90-94 mph range as a sophomore, then climbed into the 93-96 range and has stayed there for all but the dog days of his pre-draft summer when he was clearly tired. His fastball averaged 95.4 mph during the 2021 season, a year in which his overall numbers, especially his strikeout and walk rates, should be viewed with a grain of salt as he was pitching in an experimental environment that made use of an automated strike zone (this applies to every player in Low-A Southeast in 2021). In addition to the big velocity, with which he tends to throw quality strikes, Abel has a strong natural proclivity for spinning his breaking stuff, and his low-to-mid-80s slurve is already an above-average pitch and could be a 70-grade shove machine at maturity. Abel will also flash a really good changeup once in a while; that pitch tends to be in the 86-89 mph range. We’re projecting heavily on Abel’s command in anticipation of him growing into his body and arm strength. If he can consistently execute his secondary stuff — his breaking ball is way ahead of his changeup in this regard — Abel will be a front-end arm.

Stott rocketed through the Phillies minor league system in 2021, starting the year at High-A and closing it out at Triple-A. He performed well above league-average at each of those stops in the way you’d hope an early first round pick would. He carried that momentum into the Fall League, where he slashed .318/.445/.489. In addition to the statistical performance piece, Stott showed improvement in his lower half’s flexibility and general conditioning, as well as with his arm stroke, which used to be so atypical that while he was an amateur it caused some concern among scouts about his viability at short. Those have evaporated with the subtle improvements he’s made. The question of Stott’s in-game power lingers on, however; while he hit 16 homers in 2021, most of them came during his time at Double-A Reading, whose home ballpark is notoriously hitter-friendly. Stott has uncommon raw power for a shortstop but his approach has caused us to project his in-game power output below his raw. We still think that’s true, but also think his swing decisions have improved enough to close the gap. He can adjust mid-flight to breaking balls when necessary, but he’s now able to better lay off the ones he shouldn’t be swinging at in the first place. Lefty-hitting shortstops with this kind of power are tough to find and Stott is basically big-league ready. We expect him to usurp Didi Gregorious as the Phil’s everyday shortstop at some point in 2022 and remain entrenched there for at least the next half decade.

Rojas spent most of 2021 at Low-A, but was promoted for the last month of the season and improved his stats across the board at the higher level, slashing .344/.419/.563 and hitting three home runs in his 17 High-A games (he’d hit just seven in his 78 games pre-promotion). He boasts the best raw power/speed combination in the system, and some of the more exciting raw talent ingredients in pro baseball, but he has an odd swing resembling Victor Robles‘. Rojas’ confidence in his bat-to-ball skills may be partly to blame for his habit of expanding the zone, which hampers his ability to take advantage of his plus-plus max-effort bat speed. Despite this, Rojas hits the ball hard and often. His speed gives him a chance to be an impact center field defender, and if that happens, he’ll profile even if he’s a slugging center fielder with a low-OBP in the Drew Stubbs mold.

Painter is a prototypical prep arm with an XXL frame, premium arm strength and nascent feel for spin, and like many high schoolers of this ilk, he has a mid-rotation shot if everything comes together. Painter’s fastball velocity climbed throughout the 2020 summer, and he wrapped sitting 94-97 mph during his last abbreviated showcase outing. He has three other pitches: a mid-80s changeup, a mid-70s curveball, and a mid-80s slider that has cuttery, horizontal action right now, but for which Painter has good arm-side feel. You could point to Tyler Kolek and argue there’s some elevated risk in taking a kid this large in the first round, but his stuff belonged in the middle-third of Day One and that’s exactly where Painter went. He’s a classic high-ceiling, high-risk teenage pitcher.

A 2018 fifth rounder out of Notre Dame, Vierling hit .324/.364/.479 in 34 games with Philly last season while playing four different positions. He could be in line for lots of 2022 at-bats as a righty-hitting complement to the lefty-hitting outfielders projected toward the bottom of Philly’s lineup (former first rounders Mickey Moniak, Adam Haseley). Beware of hitter-friendly Reading, though. Vierling had an OPS over 1.000 there, where lots of former Phillies position player prospects have overperformed because of the hitting environment, and Vierling was doing so at age 24; he hit .248/.331/.359 later in the year at Triple-A. He’s similar in many ways to former notable Phillies prospect Cameron Perkins, another Day Two pick from a Midwest college (Purdue) who hit in the upper minors and had a cup of coffee with multiple big league clubs. Some teams think Vierling can play a passable center field as part of his multi-positional suite, however, which is a meaningful separator. His name was floated in some pre-lockout trade rumors, with Philly ultimately backing away from a deal because they didn’t want to move him. He’s poised to be a lefty-killing, multi-positional role player in 2022.

The Phillies have gone out of their way to accelerate O’Hoppe’s climb up the minor league ladder since the moment he signed. He kept his head above water in the college-heavy New York-Penn League at age 19, then was a youthful part of the Phillies’ alt site activity in 2020 before slashing .270/.331/.458 in ’21 (mostly at High-A, with a cup of coffee at Reading and a shot of espresso in Allentown). He wasn’t hurt or anything — he played just over 100 games during the season — and yet the Phillies still pushed him to the Arizona Fall League.

There has been a lot of turnover among the catchers in this org during the last several months, and O’Hoppe is emerging as a potential long-term solution at the position thanks to his bat. Eric considered O’Hoppe’s swing severely detrimental to his prospects, but he was wrong: it’s a feature not a bug. O’Hoppe, who tracks pitches very well and is adept at identifying breaking balls, steps in the bucket. His front side opens up way down the third base line. This type of swing typically leads to pull-only contact and can leave hitters vulnerable on the outer half of the plate, and the low-ball nature of O’Hoppe’s swing made him appear vulnerable to fastballs at the top of the strike zone, too. While Fall League pitching didn’t stress-test the latter potential issue, it became obvious that O’Hoppe, like fellow bucket-stepper Eddie Rosario, can simply get extended and still cover the outer half of the plate pretty easily. He’s short to the baseball and has pretty good strength-driven gap power for a catcher, especially one this age and with this sort of strapping, projectable frame. A solid receiver, O’Hoppe also has surprising lateral agility for a young catcher his size. He’s a lock to catch and has developed at a surprising rate for a cold weather high schooler. He’s a potential future everyday backstop.

The compact Wilson is a short-levered powder keg, built like an American muscle car, and with the same sort of power. Wilson hit a whopping 17 home runs as a freshman at South Alabama but never recreated that level of output again, partially because the 2020 season was so short. He only popped eight homers in 2021, but he was seeing fewer hittable pitches as the core force in the Jaguars lineup, and also saw more changeups, the offering against which he has been the least effective. He still made a ton of contact, though, and while we re-ordered him and Painter (they were stacked back-to-back Wilson then Painter on the draft list), their FV grades remain the same. We had a late-first round grade on Wilson before the draft, but he ended up falling into the middle of the second round and signing for slot. He’s a high-probability corner platoon piece, especially for a fresh, small-conference draftee. We think he’ll move through the minors pretty quickly.

Part of the Kyle Gibson/Ian Kennedy/Spencer Howard trade, Crouse made his major league debut for the Phillies in their last home game of 2021 despite having previously made only one start above Double-A. His under-seasoning was perhaps most apparent in his command, as while his three offerings each displayed decent movement, he had difficulty locating any of them. He allowed two home runs — including one on the very first pitch of his big league career — and issued seven walks against just two strikeouts in his seven innings over two starts. Crouse’s colorful, semi-eccentric, heavily-inked (imagine if Mark Fidrych was a Soundcloud rapper) mound presence can range from jovial to ultra-competitive, and everything in between, and he also has a disorienting release. Historically, Crouse has sprinkled shimmies throughout his windup, at times reminiscent of Johnny Cueto, Daisuke Matsuzaka, and quite frankly, Tyra Banks. He only pitched from the stretch in the big leagues and during Fall League looks, so the timing upset has been harder to come by and we’re not sure it’s there anymore. While the Phillies rotation situation makes it likely that Crouse will remain a starter for now, we think major league batters will be better at adapting to his delivery after they’ve seen him, and a multi-inning relief role may be a better fit for funk optimization purposes. He’s also transitioned away from a traditional curveball to a firmer slider/cutter hybrid. That pitch rotates a few hundred rpm slower than his curveball but seemed to give hitters fits in the Fall League.

It was hard to know what to expect from García heading into the 2021 campaign. His impressive small sample of Rookie Ball production (he won the GCL batting title in 2018 at age 17) was followed up by a horrendous 2019 at Low-A, during which he posted a wRC+ of just 55. After the lost 2020 season, a 20-year-old García returned to Low-A and his on-paper production resurged, with his walk rate showing especially marked improvement (caveats related to automated balls and strikes apply). It was enough for the Phillies to put García on their 40-man, a move almost certainly made solely to protect him from the Rule 5 Draft, as García is still too green to project for 2022 big league impact. While he has gotten strong enough to handle full-season pitching, he needs to continue if he’s going to hit big leaguers. At barely 21, that’s feasible for García, who lacks typical projection but looks stocky and strong everywhere but in his arms. The main feature here is still García’s terrific defensive actions, which are a middle infield lock. His build allows his swing to be practically compact even though it’s long, which enables him to check a lot of boxes we like: switch-hitting, short-levered, above-average rate of contact, middle infield profile. Those things alone allow for lots of on-roster utility. As García goes from big-bonus teenager to upper-level college-aged player, his ultimate ceiling is coming into greater focus, and increasingly it’s looking like that of a good utility guy.

À la Dakota Chalmers, McGarry will show you three plus pitches (a mid-90s fastball, a slurve, and a nasty, tailing changeup) but he has 20- or 30-grade command. He walked a batter per inning at Virginia as a starter, but still sat about 95 mph while bending in plus-plus sliders and the occasional plus changeup. If McGarry can develop even 40-grade control, he’ll be an impact big league reliever, perhaps in a multi-inning capacity thanks to his repertoire depth. Though McGarry was, in essence, a senior sign (he was undrafted in 2020 as a true junior) and will be 22 during his first full season in pro ball, he has a long developmental runway because he only just signed, meaning his 40-man evaluation year isn’t until 2024. The Phillies could fast track him in the bullpen, or see if he can develop late like some other arms who have left Charlottesville have and remain a starter.

Miller’s velocity waxed and waned while he was at Stanford, and he’s been hurt in pro ball (rotator cuff strain in 2021), working just a handful of short starts in July before shutting things down until Fall League. When healthy, Miller was pitching at the peak levels of velocity he showed in college, working in the 93-95 range, but in part due to the 2020 shutdown and in part due to injury, he hasn’t had an extended stretch to prove that he can hold that velocity under a starter’s workload. His secondary stuff is also very promising. His changeup was his best weapon in college but his two breaking balls each have big spin and distinct shape from one another. It’s a starter’s mix with fringe command and an injury history shading Miller toward the bullpen in our estimation. He still has five-and-dive fourth starter ceiling because of the pitch mix, but even that high-end outcome is probably years away since Miller hasn’t been able to build a foundation of starter innings.

Lee is a very physical teenage infielder who lost and then regained some of his explosiveness coming off a severe back injury sustained sometime between when he was seen in 2019 and ’20. The formerly projectable Lee, once a viable two-way prospect, is now burly and strong and looks more like a shift-aided second base athletic fit on defense. He also rakes. Lee signed in June of 2021 and came stateside for the back half of the year, appearing in a handful of complex games and at instructs. He rips his top hand through contact with purpose and has authoritative pull power for a teenage hitter, as well as a track record of above-average contact dating back to his amateur days, though there’s very little pro track record right now. The defensive fit is precarious based on Lee’s size and middling athleticism, but he has a potent hit/power combination that gives him a shot to be something approaching an everyday player.

The Phillies added the wild, high-profile Morales to their 40-man roster after the 2020 season and sent the 21-year-old straight to Double-A, where he struggled very badly throughout the entire season. While the Phillies big league staff (especially the back of their bullpen) felt the strain of injury and inconsistency, Morales spent his first option year in Reading, walking about 15% of the hitters he faced while working exclusively as a starter. Morales has, at best, been on the starter/reliever line since the moment he signed, mostly due to his physical maturity. He’s never thrown strikes at an average or better rate, nor really developed a third pitch, though he does have the huge arm strength and vicious slider of a traditional late-inning reliever. Rather than move Morales to the bullpen proactively (if you call doing it in his fifth pro season “proactive”) the Phillies got nothing out of his first option year, all while he occupied a precious 40-man spot. They’re likely to burn yet another option in 2022 unless Morales enjoys a sudden and dramatic strike-throwing improvement during the 2021 offseason and becomes one of the Phillies’ best four or five relievers during the course of spring training. He’s trending like a frustrating middle relief piece, though he undoubtedly has the stuff to grow into a much more prominent role if he can throw strikes with his fastball.

Ottenbreit is a super-projectable righty with low-90s velo right now and a more advanced curveball/changeup complement than is typical for a cold weather high schooler. While his stuff quality is advanced, that descriptor does not extend to his command. Pitches often sail on him, up and to his arm side. He needs to develop control several grades better than he currently has just to be a reliever, but Ottenbreit has starter-quality stuff and fits in with the $1 million prep arm archetype that typically falls toward the top of the 40 FV tier on our lists.

Viars is a young, big-framed Texas high school outfielder who is likely headed to a corner in pro ball. He’s short to the ball despite his size, and currently peppers both gaps with doubles contact. He was an athletic two-way high schooler who will be a right field dev project in pro ball.

McArthur is similar in age to a bunch of big-league ready relievers in the system, but as a big-framed, long-levered righty with a short-for-his-size arm action, he has more of a chance to start and therefore more upside. Outside of four innings at High-A (perhaps due to COVID-related roster shuffling), he spent all of 2021 at Double-A. His fastball continued its gradual velo increase, touching 97 mph, and he showed greater comfort throwing his secondaries when he was behind in the count, including a two-plane curveball in the low mid-80s. His late-season dominance prompted the Phillies to protect him from the Rule 5 draft. Overall, he’s a low-variance 40 FV and is likely to find his way to the big league ‘pen in 2022.

A high schooler drafted in 2015, Sands spent the last few years (very) slowly traversing the Yankees system and hadn’t yet escaped A-ball due in part to a logjam of catching ahead of and around him. All the while, he slowly improved his feel for airborne contact, which helped him have a career season in 2021 split between Double- and Triple-A. Sands came into the year with eight career homers, but hit 10 of them in his first 50 games with Double-A Somerset, then hit eight more at Triple-A Scranton. When he was drafted, he was viewed as being at risk of a 3B/1B move, but he’s actually become a good receiver and pitch framer, especially at the bottom of the strike zone. He catches on one knee and his glove works from the ground back up into the zone on low pitches, which Sands tends to present in a convincing fashion. His arm is less consistent, popping in the 1.95-2.03 range right on the bag, though Sands is a little slower out of his crouch than average and his accuracy is mixed. Philly acquired him and Nick Nelson in November of 2021 in exchange for T.J. Rumfield and Joel Valdez. Sands is in the backup catching mix for 2022 and fits in that sort of role long-term, as a bat-first archetype.

Can teams coax better ball/strike recognition out of their young hitters? Martin will be an interesting test case in Philadelphia, as he was one of the more physically gifted college players in the 2020 draft class but developed a sudden and alarming inability to discern balls from strikes. After posting a combined .940 OPS as a freshman and sophomore in the SEC, Martin started to swing at pitches at his eyes or in the other batter’s box; during the shortened 2020 college season, he went through a high-profile amateur version of what Scott Kingery has gone through. Was it an extreme slump or had Martin been exposed? Even in an extreme pitcher’s environment, a .223/.316/.356 Low-A line from an SEC alum isn’t great, and his 40% strikeout rate after a promotion to High-A suggests these issues weren’t a small sample blip from 2020. Like Kingery, Martin’s other physical tools are scintillating. He’s an elite runner and athlete who also has plus pull power. Even with a 30-grade bat, a player with that kind of power/speed combination and the athleticism to play multiple positions is probably a flawed-but-impactful utility man. Plus, Martin’s effort level and competitiveness would have a certain appeal with this fan base. That type of role is looking more like Martin’s hopeful ceiling than his most likely outcome.

Visa issues kept Muzziotti off the field for most of 2021, but once he was activated in late August, the Phillies put him on a fast track. He played one game on the complex, then three at Low-A, four at High-A, and four at Double-A before finishing the season with eight games at Triple-A. That month-long whirlwind makes for a miniscule sample, upon which it seems unreasonable to pin many drastic changes to the center fielder’s report. The component most lacking is still his power production, with just five of his 21 hits going for extra bases in 2021, and none leaving the park. He’ll occasionally show an incredible ability to rotate, but doesn’t yet do so consistently enough for him to build around it. He can rip his hands through and get the barrel on pitches inside, and he can spoil tough pitches on the edge of the zone, but most of his contact is in the form of groundouts and lined singles. That said, during the fall he laid off the out-of-zone pitches he once typically squibbed into easy outs. We’re enamored with the rotational athleticism here and want to see what happens when he gets to play a healthy season.

Ortiz repeated High-A to start 2021, the same level where he hit about 20 bombs but reached base at a sub-.300 clip in ’19. Now 22, he dominated there (.262/.358/.521, though with a 28% K% and .378 BABIP) while continuing to play defense in the outfield, including part-time in center field. He still hasn’t played first base in an affiliated game, so while we’ve had Ortiz projected there since the day he signed, now that he’s on the 40-man roster it’s time to change course and project him to the outfield. While staying there lowers the offensive bar Ortiz would need to clear to profile as a big leaguer, his hit tool is still below what we think fits in an everyday capacity in the outfield. We liken Ortiz to the Kyle Blanks/Christian Walker-type hitters in the Quad-A/low-end corner area, the sorts of bats who tend to find roster equilibrium in an org that has a playing time opportunity rather than forcing their way into their parent club’s plans.

The headline signee of Philadelphia’s 2021 international class, Flores is a physical, righty-hitting corner outfielder with present power. His muscular frame and short swing evoke Marcell Ozuna and Justin Turner. The recent track record of Philly’s physically mature, power bat signees like this (Jose Pujols, Jhailyn Ortiz) is not good in part because it’s so tough for right/right corner guys to hit enough to profile, but Flores has shorter levers than Pujols and isn’t as physically mature as Ortiz was at the same stage. He didn’t have a great pro debut on paper but we’re still in on the bat speed and pull-side power potential here.

While it’s typical for prospects’ numbers to spike during their time at hitter-friendly Double-A Reading, Moniak’s numbers have done the opposite. He hit more homers in fewer games at Triple-A than he had in 2019 at Double-A, despite having left Reading’s hitter-friendly confines, which could lend credibility to his having sustainably addressed his previous shortage of in-game power. Moniak spent the bulk of 2021 at Triple-A but showed up on the big-league roster for several short stints throughout the year. His cumulative performance there left a lot to be desired. In his 37 major league plate appearances, he got only three hits – two singles and a home run – and struck out 43.2% of the time. If he can maintain the boost in power and tap back into his feel for contact, he’ll slot nicely into the bottom of the Phillies lineup as a lefty-hitting fourth outfielder, but it looks like the entire industry whiffed on projecting Moniak’s hit tool.

Segovia showed velo spikes throughout 2019 (91-94 mph) and again during ’20 instructs (92-95 and touching 97), then sustained that jump throughout ’21 (averaging 93.8). His low-80s slurve flashes plus and he has the makings of a power-action splitter in the upper-80s, though he barely throws it; he has great feel for killing spin on the split, but he struggled to throw strikes so badly in 2021 that he rarely had opportunities to mix it in. Like many of the pitching prospects Philly has acquired on the international side, Segovia’s frame lacks typical projection, but that’s always been true and he still found a way to throw harder into his early-20s. So long as his walks from 2021 were an ABS anomaly rather than a regression to his career mean, Segovia looks like a solid middle relief prospect.

In last year’s write-up, Eric backpedaled on Simmons’ placement based on an extended look at the infielder’s time with the Australian Baseball League, during which he sometimes struggled to even hold on to his bat. Simmons has since credited the ABL with allowing him the environment necessary to examine the flaws in his swing and significantly shorten his path to the ball, creating more consistent backspin on the balls he puts in the air, so it’s possible that Eric’s look came when Simmons was in the midst of his swing tweaking. His 2021 season began at Low-A, where he got off to a very slow start but caught fire in mid-June, slashing .320/.358/.680 over a 14-game span during which he racked up 16 hits, 11 of which went for extra bases. During that hot streak, he only walked 3.8% of the time against a K-rate inching toward 30%, however. His season was interrupted in early July when he took an inside pitch off his helmet and was shut down for six weeks to recover. Upon being reactivated, Simmons spent a week in the Complex League before returning to Low-A, where his slugging decreased compared to his pre-injury tear but his walks nearly quadrupled. The trick will be combining the slugging and the pitch recognition so that he’s firing on both cylinders simultaneously.

Baylor’s ability to rotate with ferocity took a leap sometime between his showcase summer and his senior spring. Teams were not in agreement about where he fit defensively, and some bailed on him entirely early in the process because he didn’t look great with the bat during his pre-draft summer, perhaps due to a lingering arm injury. He went bonkers as a senior, not just clubbing bad pitching but looking more explosive to the eye. He was the sort of prospect for whom short season ball is the right developmental temperature, and he didn’t get that in 2020 or ’21. He still looked sushi raw as of 2020 instructs and struck out 30% of the time on the complex in ’21, but Baylor has also shown rare power for a potential middle infielder and was given a new swing this year, with which he hit .303/.436/.584. The strikeouts, an unsustainably high BABIP, and Baylor’s groundball rate (51%) all indicate that some amount of regression is coming, and he’s a level behind Logan Simmons, who is the same age and also has hit-tool-related flags.

Originally slated to sign in 2019, Garcia instead had to wait a year due to age misrepresentation and put pen to paper in March of ’20. He then had to wait another year to get into games since he couldn’t come to the US for any baseball activity due to travel restrictions, keeping him from instructs. Garcia struggled in 2021, which is perhaps unsurprising for a young hitter who had endured such a long layoff; he slashed a concerning .229/.299/.271 with Low-A Clearwater. Garcia can really fly, and his swing is fairly short back to the ball, but he lacks any real strength and has to round mechanical corners to get the bat around with any sort of authority. He is sinewy and cut and has a very promising athletic foundation on which to build strength, but he desperately needs to build it or else we’re talking about a fifth outfielder at best, and only then if Garcia develops into a defensive vacuum. Given the context of the look — fraud perpetrated by adults in his orbit and a prolonged global pandemic cost him multiple seasons — we’re not ready to pull all the way off Garcia, though he’s not the sort of prospect a team would be interested in acquiring right now. He remains a developmental prospect of extreme variance.

Acquired from Tampa Bay in exchange for Curtis Mead, Sánchez has spent most of the last two years at Lehigh Valley even while Philly’s major league staff needed reinforcements. He finally debuted with the big league squad in 2021, working 12.1 innings out of the bullpen and making a rocky start in which he gave up four runs on three hits and recorded only one out. Sánchez has a history of throwing about an average rate of strikes, but regressed in 2021. His long arm action, theoretically more difficult to maintain, may be a cause. We like Sánchez’s arm strength (would he sit 95-plus if he was ‘penned full-time?) and his changeup (he boasted a 54.2% whiff rate with the change, albeit in a small sample) out of the bullpen, but given the state of the Phillies’ upper-level pitching depth, he’s arguably the best spot-starting option in the org right now and will probably be in the mix with a group of NRI’s during the spring.

Jones is a lumbering lefty who creates a unique angle with his delivery that allows his fastball to play above its mid-90s velocity. Given his troubling command and limited repertoire, it was no surprise when he was moved to a bullpen role in 2021. He was up and down several times during the season without appearing, and finally had a brief major-league debut in August, facing three batters and recording an out, a hit, and a walk before exiting the game. If he can locate his slider to his glove side consistently (he did in 2019), he’ll be a middle-inning bullpen piece, but his current control puts him more in the up/down bucket. Of the many wild upper-level relievers the Phillies have had over the last few years, Jones is the only homegrown one to make the 40-man roster.

The switch-hitting Sanchez has two simple, good-looking swings, he’s tough to beat in the strike zone, and he can sneak up on you with decent pop to his pull side. Early statistical returns (just 28 games in 2021) indicate he may also have plus plate discipline, as both his walk and strikeout rate was better than the Low-A average, though the sample is quite small (because of the strike-calling situation in Southeast, it’s a helpful rule of thumb to comp K%/BB% to league averages rather than the kinds of rates you’re used to seeing baseball-wide). Sanchez slashed .297/.373/.446 over the course of July until a COVID outbreak in the Clearwater training facility resulted in the cancellation of a handful of games. Shortly thereafter came an IL stint, effectively ending Sanchez’s season. He picked up reps in the Puerto RIcan Winter League, where his surface-level performance was poor, but he looked pretty good from a scouting standpoint. There aren’t big tools here, but Sanchez is a well-rounded young player with a very short supporting statistical track record.

Schultz had surgery late in the summer of 2020 but his TJ and Nicoly Pina’s don’t appear in teams’ systems until May of 2021, so we’re unclear exactly when these two went down and had their procedures. Schultz is the first of several injured/rehabbing arm-strength guys in this tier, largely because he seems to be the furthest along in his rehab and because when healthy he was the hardest throwing pitcher in this entire system, sitting 96-99 mph. He walked a batter per inning in college and has a very long, tough-to-repeat arm action that affects his control and slider quality, but that might change coming out of rehab. He has late-inning arm strength but needs to find mechanical consistency to be anything at all. He’s a less imminent contributor than Damon Jones but has more long-term ceiling.

An undrafted free agent from 2020, Brown is a velo monster (sitting 96 mph) with two different breaking balls. This velo is relatively new, as Brown’s arm strength exploded just before and throughout the 2020 season and layoff. He held his upper-90s heat during 40 innings of pro ball and looks like a fast-track relief prospect.

Baker sits 96 mph and has an absolute yacker curveball. He continued the Phillies’ annual tradition of drafting a high-upside junior college pitcher but badly needs to rein in his control.

Marcano sits 92-93 mph with flat angle and has a good curveball. The Phillies deployed him as both a starter and a long reliever, often alternating the two. If Marcano was used solely in single-inning relief, we wonder if he would enjoy a velo spike and suddenly end up with two above-average pitches from the left side, putting him in the up/down relief mix.

The big-framed Pipkin has grown into the sort of velocity hoped of him when he was an amateur prospect, and he sat mostly 94-96 mph when healthy in 2021. He’s had trouble developing dynamic secondary stuff (though his relatively new mid-80s slider looked pretty good in its early stages) and staying healthy, dealing with shoulder inflammation during his career. Still notable due to his frame, velocity, on-paper performance (when healthy), and the new hope for a second out-pitch, Pipkin enters his 40-man evaluation year without a starter’s innings foundation, having never worked more than 71 innings in a season. It pushes his forecast toward the bullpen.

Cabrera is an arm strength and body projection sleeper who sat 93-94 mph in the 2021 DSL. He is long and lanky, much taller than his listed height of an even 6-feet. Cabrera also has a low-80s slider and changeup, both of which are behind the developmental curve for a 20-year-old prospect, but 2021 was Cabrera’s first year in pro ball and his combination of arm strength and physical projection is enough to put him on our radar.

Much like Spencer Howard, it felt like the Phillies might have drafted a player who was just scratching the surface when they took junior college reliever Mayer, whose age and frame created exciting velocity projection. So far Mayer’s arm strength has remained in the 90-94 mph range. There is big fastball spin here and Mayer’s secondary stuff had improved considerably in just a short time in the system, then fell off in 2021 as his breaking ball spin tanked about 300 rpm. Due to injury and a COVID outbreak in Clearwater, Mayer hasn’t had many reps, but he’s missed lots of bats when healthy. He’s now more of a bounce-back sleeper than a true arrow-up prospect.

Pena is a very physical righty from Tampa Prep who has been into the mid-90s with a plus-flashing curveball and the occasional average changeup, though both secondaries are inconsistent at present. He’s less physically projectable than most high school draftees, but there’s rare arm strength athleticism here.

Philly drafts a big college first baseman like this most years, a guy with huge power who has performed at a bigger school, and Radcliff fits the bill, having reached base at a .400 clip and slugged over .500 during his time at Georgia Tech. He struggled to make consistent contact at the plate in 2021, but he walked a ton (21.3% on the season), including a four-game stretch during which he was issued 13 free passes. Those walks buoyed otherwise lackluster stats to make for an above-league-average season, but without the slugging, it’s harder to see him maintaining a first base profile.

Back in 2019, Pina was sitting 93-96 mph and tossing in a work-in-progress breaking ball as a 19-year-old. He’s missed the last two seasons due to the pandemic and Tommy John rehab, but was throwing off a mound later in 2021. He’s a potential late-blooming power relief prospect who clubs need to touch base with early in 2022.

Castillo underwent season-ending Tommy John surgery in June, so not only did he lose the back half of 2021, he’ll also likely miss most of this season with rehab. Before his UCL tear, he pitched 20.2 innings at Low-A with 20 strikeouts and a 1.31 WHIP, sitting about 92-94 mph. His fastball was touching 97 when the maxed-out Castillo was 15 years old, and he received one of the highest bonuses of the 2018 July 2 class, but things had settled into this average velo range long before the stretch immediately preceding his surgery. Already tracking more like a power reliever or backend starter, Castillo is now a wait-and-see prospect in the midst of what will effectively be two lost seasons.

Lee Sang’s comfort in the box improved throughout 2021. He started the season in the Complex League and steadily improved over the course of the rest of the season, bringing his strikeouts down, increasing his walks, and making more consistent contact, with occasional power. He has a sweet lefty stroke, runs well enough to give center field a try, and has a plus arm. There’s some skill-based projection here, too, as Lee Sang was a two-way high schooler who missed what would have been his first full pro season due to the pandemic. He’s a fair late-bloomer candidate.