PHILADELPHIA — A lot of scouting directors will roll their eyes when you talk about Top 100 prospects. There’s a good reason for that. Back when Baseball America first popularized the genre, an organization could mostly take pride whenever one of its minor league hopefuls earned national accolades. It was a carrot for scouts, a stick for career-minded executives, a headline for ticket sellers.
Now?
It’s still all of those things. But it can also be a curse. In our transaction-mad and comprehensively aggregated world, the annual Top 100 lists have become a shorthand for scouting success. At some point, “Top 100″ came to mean both “relevant” and “can’t miss.” The only prospects who mattered were the ones on that list. And the ones who were on that list were ones whom fans could pencil into their lineups and rotations for the next decade.
Part of the problem with that is the historical rate of return on such prospects. More often than not, today’s scouting successes are tomorrow’s development failures. The math dictates as much. In 2022, there were exactly 100 major leaguers who qualified for the batting title and posted a league-average OPS+. Every year, there are 100 “top prospects.” Even if half of those are pitchers, the point stands.
And yet …
I come here not to bury the Top 100, but to invoke it. For all their faults, these lists do give us some form of qualitative measure we can use when assessing pedigree. Look at that 2022 big league hitter leaderboard and you’ll find the overwhelming majority earned a Top 100 designation at some point in their journeys. That matters when you start to look at the Phillies lineup for the upcoming season. Specifically, when you look at the bottom third.
Bryson Stott. Alec Bohm. Brandon Marsh. Seven-eight-nine. Nine-eight-seven. Eight-seven-nine. A lot depends on who is pitching and who is leading off. All three will enter the year at age 26 or younger. All three are less than three years removed from a time when they were each considered one of the Top 100 prospects in the game. All three are coming off stretch-run performances when they showed flashes of outhitting their projected batting-order position. Whatever the lineup, the ceiling for the Phillies’ 2023 lineup can be found in the cellar.
The floor for this offense is high. That’s the one thing I think we can reasonably conclude. The postseason is a petri dish, and the Phillies’ one-month experiment with high-stakes baseball showed us three important things. One, Bohm has become an adequate big league third baseman who won’t need to hit nearly as well as we thought he would to justify his glove. Two, Marsh’s defense in center field can stand on its own for the bottom of the order. Three, Stott is at worst some combination of the two. Combine those three with the addition of Trea Turner and you have a defense that is much stronger up the middle and far less uncertain at the hot corner than it was a year ago. You have an offense in which Turner’s bat can make up for a half-season without Bryce Harper’s. At that point, even a modest improvement from Nick Castellanos will leave the Phillies with a drastically improved starting nine.
The big question is the ceiling. Turner and Castellanos will play a role in that. Same goes for whoever holds down the fort at designated hitter. But the real potential lies in those three young bats at the bottom. Because all of the three have shown that they may still yet grow.
Let’s start with Stott. The postseason wasn’t great. He finished the postseason hitless in his last 14 at-bats and was 6-for-44 with seven walks overall (.482 OPS), but it’s easy to forget that he was a rookie. By the end of November he’d played 178 games in little over a calendar year when you factor in the 26 games he played in the Arizona Fall League last year. Let’s look instead at how he finished the regular season.
— Stott’s first 82 games: 20 extra-base hits, 329 plate appearances, .692 OPS.
— Stott’s last 70 games:23 extra-base hits, 269 plate appearances, .756 OPS.
— Stott’s last 50 games: 16 extra-base hits, 193 plate appearances, .770 OPS.
That’s an encouraging trend.
Same goes for Bohm. The big news was his defense, but the smaller headline was how his offense followed suit. In his last 84 games of the regular season, the 26-year-old hit .301 with a .335 on-base percentage and a .445 slugging percentage. In the postseason, he had six extra-base hits in 65 plate appearances. Combined, that’s an extra-base hit in 7.6% of plate appearances, a 50% improvement over his 2021 numbers and right around the big league average.
That’s an encouraging trend.
Marsh is a little bit different than Stott or Bohm. The strikeout and walk numbers and struggles against lefties leave you wondering if he’ll ever be more than a boom-or-bust at-bat. But we saw enough boom after the Phillies acquired him to think that it will be more than enough to make him a longtime asset in center field.
Two sets of numbers:
— Marsh vs. RHP with Angels:241 PA, 17 XBH, 83 SO, 17 BB
— Marsh vs. RHP with Phillies:115 PA, 13 XBH, 31 SO, 6 BB
That’s a 7.1% extra-base hit rate with the Angels vs. 11.3 with the Phillies. The strikeouts dropped from 34.4% to 26.9%. The walk rate declined from 7.1% to 5.2%.
Take them as a trio, and there is plenty of potential. That’s important, because the potential has always been there. More than anything, this past postseason showed us that each is a good enough all-around player to give his bat the opportunity to continue to grow. That growth is where you’ll find the Phillies’ upside.
