Fangraphs gives their top ten Phillies prospects

Fangraphs has released their top prospects in the Phillies system, their list going 41 deep. It’s well worth reading the entirety of the article as they usually put a fair amount of research into it. Without spoiling the entire list, I’ll just put top ten here.

1. Mick Abel
2. Bryson Stott
3. Johan Rojas
4. Andrew Painter
5. Matt Vierling
6. Logan O’Hoppe
7. Ethan Wilson
8. Hans Crouse
9. Luis Garcia
10. Griff McGarry

There are some highlights here to read about, so we’ll point out just a few here:

• On Abel:

“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.”

• On Stott:

“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.”

• If those two points don’t excite you about the top prospects in the system, I’m not sure what else will. Does that make them untradeable? Not really, but it does mean that if the team wants to go out and get someone elite on the market - Bryan Reynolds, Cedric Mullins - they have some ammunition to do so.
• Having Rojas over Painter is probably going to be something you don’t see much of, but it also shouldn’t be surprising. Our friend Matt Winkelman and our prospect guy Alex Carr have been all over him for a few years now, so perhaps this is the industry catching up to what people who see Rojas every day are seeing.
• On Mickey Moniak:

“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.”

For most of us, we have long moved on from the idea that Moniak was going to develop into a player worthy of carrying the “1:1 draft pick” mantle. However, that last part of the quote makes me feel a little bit better in the defending the Phillies’ decision to draft him at that spot in the first place. If the entire industry was projecting an above-average or more hit tool, taking Moniak with the top pick was defensible. They were trying to save money in that draft to follow the old Astros model of spending that savings on a tougher sign later in the draft, but the team was unfortunate in that both picks (Moniak and Kevin Gowdy) now look like huge whiffs. That doesn’t explain everything about the situation, but at the very least we can kind of throttle back on the criticism of the team for taking Moniak first overall a bit.

There is a lot of good information here in this article, well worth your time. We can discuss any of the prospects you want to here.