Philadelphia Phillies draft pick reflects offensive woes

The Philadelphia Phillies 2018 MLB draft first round draft pick reflects their current offensive woes with the selection of Alec Bohm.

The Philadelphia Phillies first selection in this season’s amateur MLB Draft quite clearly reflects current realities of their nearly rebuilt team. They need to stockpile offensive pieces because a team never really knows how expectations about young players will pan out.

The third overall selection of Wichita State third baseman Alec Bohm specifically calls to mind three realities about the Phillies. First, a current team-wide slump that has seen them hit around .230 as a team for about a month; second, recent, fairly weak, early draft picks (welcome to Pressure, Alec), and third, Maikel Franco, a.k.a., not the next Mike Schmidt.

Bohm, who hit .339 this past season, will surely get a few months and maybe as much as two years, to become part of the remedy for all these ailments. Size-wise he calls to mind Kris Bryant, and Phillies fans are now a bit impatient for a young player who can be as impactful as Bryant offensively, or as impactful as their own Aaron Nola has been as a pitcher.

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At a statistical first glance, Bohm seems to also suggest left fielder Rhys Hoskins. He has an excellent current season strikeout to walk ratio (1:1.39) in addition to his fine BA, but as everyone has seen, Hoskins has gone cold and less precise in his pitch selection for a number of weeks.

Therefore, let’s take a closer look at the young man as part of a line of Phillies first draft picks. Maybe he can help Phillies fans forget the slow-motion disappointments of recent first round picks like Cornelius Randolph (tenth in 2015) and Mickey Moniak (first in 2016).

These two selections may still develop into useful players (Moniak is only 20), but they are both reminders you can never tell about even highly touted players. Phillies fans need to hear Bohm has also demonstrated, say, some maturity about conditioning, and how about another eye-popping stat?

OK, as Matt Breen notes, Bohm lost 20 pounds during his college career, and before he put up this season’s excellent numbers for Wichita State, he hit .351 in the wooden-bat, high-level Cape Cod League last summer.

He seems promising, but then so did Adam Haseley, another high-level college hitter taken by the Phillies eighth overall last year, as Bob Brookover points out. Haseley is hitting .290 at this juncture, and higher than that in recent weeks, but only at the High-A level. No matter how much Bohm now appears to be built like Kris Bryant, players like Bryant, who jumped into MLB within two years of being drafted, are few and far between.

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Maybe, however, Bohm will be one of the exceptional ones. (Call to the Pen editor Neil Harrington has seen him play often and calls him “a great pick.”) Phillies fans hope so because Maikel Franco, once considered one of the dangerous young hitters in baseball, has now cooled after a hot start this season and therefore reminds everyone that his career MLB slash line after 3-plus years is a reasonably pedestrian .248/.299/.426 with 71 home runs.