Phillies Interest in Prospects from 1997 Continues

Remember when we finally locked down Matt Anderson to a minor league deal?  Well, he wasn’t the only 1997 Major League hopeful the Phillies are scheming after this off season, 14 years later.His name is Jason Grilli.  His stats are unimpressive.

He’s .500 for his career as a right-handed pitcher, 18 wins and 18 losses.  He’s given up 4.74 worth of runs, with a 5.32 ERA in 2009 tugging it the hardest in a bad direction, before being DFA’d close to death by the Rockies.  2010 was an absentee year for him due to a horrific knee injury.  Hooray!

But it’s not all upper level ERAs and shattered bones with Jason.  He holds the single game strikeout record for the entire Big East Conference, pushing Charles Nagy’s performance with UConn aside to K 18 guys while attending Seton Hall.  He is also the offspring of Steve Grilli.  Yes, the Steve Grilli.

For those of you too ignorant to know who that is, Steve pitched in the longest pro baseball game on record in 1981 for the Rochester Red Wings, and [eventually] lost.

And if this season doesn’t go spectacularly for some reason for Jason, he has a fall back plan:  video phones.  Jason owns and runs a marketing company called Perfect Pitch Marketing, the website of which is currently being hastily reassembled.

Ruben and co. are always hunting for further arms with which to flood that 5th ranked farm system, and Jason certainly has one.