Baseball America Sighs, Rolls Eyes, Ranks Phillies Prospects for Another Year
By Justin Klugh
It’s that time of year again; Baseball America has taken the limitless number of humans scrambling in the Phillies farm system and ranked them according to skill.
They are, and I quote:
- Jesse Biddle, lhp
- Roman Quinn, ss
- Tommy Joseph, c
- Jon Pettibone, rhp
- Adam Morgan, lhp
- Ethan Martin, rhp
- Cody Asche, 3b
- Maikel Franco, 3b
- Darin Ruf, 1b/of
- Carlos Tocci, of
The winter Youth Harvest has begun!
H. Darr Beiser-USA TODAY Sports
Already, the wringing of Ruben Amaro’s hands can be assumed, probably in the sleeves of a blood red cloak, probably definitely as he monitors all of their progress via a wall of impossibly intimate television screens.
The list includes only two teenagers this year, in Quinn and Tocci. Shorstop Quinn is the NY-Penn third-best player of the year, of whom we’ve spoken of with dense enthusiasm, drafted in the same collection as slug-bot Larry Greene (absent from the list, tragically). Tocci is a relative new name for those tracking the movement of our younglings, probably bumped up due to the departure of such prospects as Trevor May.
He is a 17-year-old outfielder from Venezuela whom Jim Salisbury has commented could become better with both the bat and the glove, which is to say, we don’t know too much about him, but he is quite talented.
Meanwhile, old friends like local boy Biddle, AFL-masher Asche, home run king Ruf, and he of the close-but-no-perfecto Morgan assemble in predictable placement. Joseph and Martin are dealed-over returns from Pence and Victorino sales, with Martin being considered as a potential starter of the future, and Joseph underperforming all the way through the Arizona Fall League (but being such a darling of the press core that he got voted to the All-Star Game anyway, with a sub-.200 batting average).
That leaves Pettibone, one of a dwindling number of astronomically pressured “baby aces,” and Maikel Franco, an infielder with what Mickey Morandini called a “middle of the order, RBI” bat who is in a constant state of proving himself.
One encouraging statistic from the listing is that the Phillies are currently employing seven of their BA to prospects from the last ten years. Of course three of those seven are Domonic Brown, but still.