When I presented my top 20 Philadelphia Phillies prospects rankings a year ago, the feature came with a promise to release an updated list each January. So, I’m off by a couple days. I also alluded to 20 prospects and presented that many in prior years. You’re getting a few less this time.

In those January 2023 rankings, pitcher Andrew Painter was at the top of my list. At the age of 19, the right-hander was being discussed as potentially making his big-league debut in that coming season as a member of the starting rotation for the defending National League champions.

Unfortunately, Painter would sprain his UCL during spring training. What followed was a months-long process of rest and evaluation with the hope that surgery could be avoided. That turned out to be the far-too-optimistic delay to inevitability that many of us believed it to be in the first place.

In late July, Painter finally underwent Tommy John surgery. He soon returned to Clearwater, Florida to begin the rehabilitation process. Painter is now six months into what is normally a 15-18 month timetable for a return to the mound at full strength. He will miss the entire 2024 campaign and should be 100% ready to go a year from now.

Painter’s talent is at such an elite level that he remains highly ranked by all of the major evaluation services still today. Just two weeks ago, Baseball America released their 2024 Top 100 Prospects list and ranked him at #12 overall. At around the same time, Baseball Prospectus ranked him at #19 on their list. MLB Pipeline ranked him at #27 in their list released earlier this week.

As an organization, the Phillies have been consistently ranked in the low-mid 20’s among the 30 clubs in Major League Baseball over the last few years where their group of minor league prospects are concerned. Fangraphs now has them at #19 overall and Baseball Prospectus at #18 in their most recent rankings.

While Painter remains at the top of my list this time around, there are a number of new faces dotting the current Phillies top prospects group. As always, the piece is being shared with my @PhilliesBell feed on X/Twitter as well as a number of Phillies fan groups on Facebook. Would love to hear your opinions. You can respond right here at the website as well as at those social media feeds.

Philadelphia Phillies 2024 Top Prospects

  1. Andrew Painter, SP: The 6’7″ righty missed all of last year and will miss all of the 2024 season as he recovers from the TJ surgery which he underwent last July. However, he will turn just 21 years of age in April and his recovery appears on schedule. Painter should be able to return ready to go with no limitations during next year’s spring training. While he would likely begin the 2025 campaign with a minor league stint, showing that he is healthy and has returned to the previous level of his abilities would put him in line for a role in the Phillies’ rotation sometime early next season. ETA 2025
  2. Aidan Miller, 3B: The club’s first round draft choice at 27th overall last summer out of high school in Florida won’t turn 20 until early this coming June. He played in his first 18 professional games after signing, appearing in nine games with both the Phillies’ rookie-level team in the Florida Complex League and with Low-A Clearwater. In all 18 of those games, Miller played shortstop. But his own toolset combined with other talent in the minor league system should eventually move Miller to either the hot corner or a corner outfield spot. At third base, his strong arm and powerful bat should enable Miller to follow in the footsteps of Hall of Famers Mike Schmidt and Scott Rolen as a complete player, impacting the game with his glove and at the plate. While I am not saying that Miller will become another HOFer, I am saying that he just might be the steal of the 2023 MLB Draft. ETA 2026
  3. Justin Crawford, OF: The 17th overall pick in the first round of the 2022 MLB Draft out of high school in Nevada, Crawford hopes to one day join his fellow Las Vegas natives Bryce Harper and Bryson Stott in the Phillies’ lineup. The son of former big league All-Star and Gold Glover Carl Crawford has a similar toolset to his dad, showing elite speed and moderate pop. They key to reaching dad’s impact levels will be trying to approximate the half-dozen .300+ batting average seasons that dad produced over his 15-year career. Last year, the younger Crawford hit .344 across 308 plate appearances in 69 games at Low-A Clearwater and ended the year with 18 games at High-A Jersey Shore. The lefty hitter has a legitimate chance to become the Phils’ center fielder of the future, but he only turned 20 in early January. Whether and how fast he can get to Philly is yet to be determined. ETA 2026
  4. Mick Abel, SP: There is no reason that Abel should not reach Philadelphia at some point this season. The 22-year-old righty was the club’s first round pick at 15th overall back in 2020 out of high school in Oregon. Over the last three summers he has progressed incrementally through the farm system, reaching Triple-A Lehigh Valley for one final start in the 2023 campaign. For most of the summer, 22 starts worth, Abel pitched at Double-A Reading where he demonstrated both his tantalizing strengths and frustrating weaknesses. Over 108.2 IP with the Fightin’ Phils he allowed just 73 hits and struck out 126 batters. However, he also walked 62 men. After a less-than-desirable 4.2/9 walk rate in 2022 at the lower levels, Abel bumped that up to an even less desirable 5.2 level a year ago. That walk rate is unacceptable. Simply not going to work if he wants to have real big league success. The key to Abel actually reaching Philly this summer – short of injury emergencies with the Phillies’ staff – will be getting his walk rate under control. ETA 2024
  5. Orion Kerkering, RP: Phillies fans have already seen the right-hander come trotting out of the bullpen at Citizens Bank Park. He appeared for a cup of coffee in three late September games last season and then got into seven postseason contests as well. Over those 10 games, Kerkering allowed three earned runs and 10 hits across 8.1 innings with an 11.5 K:BB ratio. It wasn’t a bad debut for a kid who was essentially thrown to the wolves at crunch time. Kerkering will turn 23 just as the coming season gets underway. Barring a disastrous spring, his dominating slider is a genuine weapon that should help out the Phillies’ bullpen mix now and for many years to come. He has closer potential, and how soon he gets that shot is likely just a question of gaining a bit more confidence in facing big league hitters. ETA 2023 (already here)
  6. Griff McGarry, SP/RP: Okay, I’m still higher on the now 24-year-old than most. But the fact remains that the right-hander has one of the best fastball-slider combinations in the minor leagues. By age, professional experience, and team need, McGarry perhaps should have debuted a year ago and begun making himself an integral part of the Phillies’ pen mix. The problem? An even worse strike-throwing problem than Abel’s – much worse. McGarry, who was the club’s fifth rounder out of the University of Virginia back in 2021, had a disastrous 7.5 BB/9 rate over 60 innings across three levels last season. On the plus side, he allowed just 40 hits and struck out 81 batters. Groomed as a starter, all signs are pointing towards McGarry becoming a hard-throwing reliever. He will begin 2024 with Lehigh Valley. If he can show any significant control, McGarry will end the year 65 miles south at Citizens Bank Park. ETA 2024
  7. Wen Hui Pan, RP: This is where things are going to start getting real dicey and downright speculative when anyone covering the Phillies tries to give you a write-up and evaluation of their minors prospects. That I put Pan here as what I project to be another righty reliever shows just how far this system still needs to come in order to rank among the best in the sport. The club signed the 21-year-old as an international free agent from Taiwan last January. He then dominated over 27 games at Clearwater before getting tuned up over a six-game stint with High-A Jersey Shore to finish his first season in America. Pan has a nice three-pitch mix with a heater that has touched triple digits, a tremendous splitter, and a solid slider. There is talk of stretching him out to start, and his long-term role remains nebulous. I’m calling it a bullpen arm, but it could be a valuable one in the end. ETA: 2026
  8. Alex McFarlane, SP: Here we have a little bit of Painter and a little bit of McGarry. With this right-hander who turns 22 years of age in June, it’s for all the wrong reasons on both. McFarlane needed Tommy John surgery back in the fall and, like Painter, will miss the entire 2024 season. He also had an atrocious 6.8 BB/9 over 50.1 innings with Low-A Clearwater before getting shut down last August, the same strike-throwing problems exhibited by McGarry. A 2022 fourth rounder, he should return to the mound in 2025 looking to hone command of secondaries that would work with an effective two-seam fastball. Like McGarry, I’m more bullish on him than most. But then, I’m always more bullish on pitchers in their low-20’s who have legit weapons than teenage infielders with undemonstrated or limited offensive tools. Which is where we head next. ETA 2026
  9. Starlyn Caba, SS: Last January, the Phils signed Caba for $3 million as a 17-year-old international free agent out of the Dominican Republic. When he played last summer, Caba showed why they did so. He emerged as one of the top prospects in the Dominican Summer League, displaying an outstanding glove while also demonstrating an ability to hit for contact, albeit with very little power to show. Right now, Caba is listed generously at 5’10” and 160 lbs. He still has some growing to do, and his ability to drive the ball as he ages and moves up the minor league ladder will determine Caba’s ultimate true value. Me? As anyone who follows regularly knows, I’m skeptical on these teenage internationals until they can prove themselves more stateside. He’s just too far away and inexperienced to judge fairly yet. But hey, I have Caba as a top 10 prospect in the organization. If he can rake and keep on fielding well, he is sure to move up by this time next year. ETA 2028
  10. Carlos De La Cruz: Among remaining Phillies prospects, I begin to wonder if any will ever make even a slight impact at the big league level. De La Cruz by name sounds like he would have been an international free agent signing, but he wasn’t. After he went undrafted out of high school in New York back in 2017, the club signed him because of his one carrying tool – prodigious power. The 24-year-old outfielder stands a full 6’8″ and when he makes contact, well, let’s just say the ball travels. Trouble is, he doesn’t make contact nearly enough to get to that power often enough to make him a viable big league performer. And while his 24 homers last year sound nice, they came while playing his home games in the notoriously friendly confines of Reading’s FirstEnergy Stadium. Meanwhile, De La Cruz also struck out over 27% of the time, fanning 160 times over 582 plate appearances. Maybe that power gets him a cup of coffee at some point, but I wouldn’t bet on it. ETA 2025

As I mentioned, I had originally promised a Phillies top 20 prospects list. I’m not going to do that for one simple reason. Neither myself nor anyone else who presents this type of list would do anything other than provide you with pure speculation on the order in which to rank kids who are way too young and who right now show no traits of becoming an impact big leaguer.

Both Baseball America (8) and Baseball Prospectus (7) rank 19-year-old shortstop William Bergolla within their own Phillies organizational top ten. Each service also ranks 17-year-old catcher Eduardo Tait (BA 9, BP 10) within their top ten Phillies prospect lists. There is just no way that I am putting Bergolla, who is essentially Caba-Lite, or a wholly unproven kid catcher from the DR who hasn’t played stateside like Tait, on my own list.

A couple names to watch for possible inclusion on 2025’s list include outfielders Gabriel Rincones Jr, the club’s third round draft pick in 2022 who turns 23 in early March, and TJayy Walton, the club’s fourth rounder in 2023 who just turned 19 last month. The Phillies will also select 27th in the first round of the 2024 MLB Draft this coming summer. That selection will hopefully rank highly when next year’s list comes out.

The club’s first round draft picks in 2019 and 2018, Stott and Alec Bohm, are already starters on a contending ball club. Abel (2020) and Painter (2021) were also first rounders. And then Crawford (2022) and Miller (2023) arrived as first rounders the last two years.

The organization does seem to be getting better in selecting at the top of the draft. With an aging core on the current championship-caliber roster, they need these players and more to become legitimate impact contributors over the next few years.

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