Paul Owens Awards indict Philadelphia Phillies judgement
Each year the Philadelphia Phillies honor their best minor leaguers with an award named for a long-time employee. These selections help indicate the team’s problems.
The recent announcement of the Philadelphia Phillies winners of this year’s Paul Owens Awards prompted some thought about the plight of the team that spent nearly half a billion dollars last off-season and may end up in fourth place in their division by Sept. 29 at roughly 6:15 p.m., the scheduled end of their season.
An extra-innings game notwithstanding.
Maybe with a winning record. In fourth place!
Those three fragments are necessary. Or…maybe the second is more so than the first. If the first occurs, though, the extra innings may be played in front of 16 fans. Phillies fans are not happy, currently. They really haven’t been for more than two months.
Anyway, I digress. The Paul Owens Award is given annually to the two best players in the Phillies minor league system, including one pitcher. It honors Paul Owens, a 48-year employee of the Phillies in various mostly important positions, including manager and general manager. This year’s winners are at the ends of the two lists below.
And let’s be clear here: All of these players were (or are) great MiLB players – professionals.
The winners of what might be called the position player Owens Award have been, since 2010: Domonic Brown, Freddy Galvis, Darin Ruf, Maikel Franco, J.P. Crawford, Andrew Knapp, Dylan Cozens and Rhys Hoskins (co-winners in 2016), Scott Kingery, Austin Listi, and Alec Bohm.
The winners of the pitching awards have been: Scott Mathieson, Trevor May, Tyler Cloyd, Severino Gonzalez, Luis Garcia, Ricardo Pinto, Ben Lively, Tom Eshelman, David Parkinson, and Ethan Lindow.
I have purposely hyperlinked only those players who have played in 100 MLB games, hit at least .250, and have OPS figures over .700, or for the pitchers, who have winning pitching records after 40 MLB games, or WHIPS below 1.300, or who have at least ten saves. Obviously, hitting .250 in the majors is harder than doing that against Little League pitching, but it’s still not a very good average.
I think you should be able to see the problem in black and blue. These are supposedly the best minor leaguers the Phillies have been developing in the last ten years.
Youth Is Not Served
Obviously, this isn’t terribly fair to the recent awardees since they’re still working through the minor leagues, but – well, too bad – youth is not served in this article. Aaron Nola got to the major leagues pretty quickly, so quickly he didn’t even win a Paul Owens Award, but that miss is a related story for another day.
Many of the players who won the awards here in the beginning of the decade reached two out of three of the liberal parameters for hitters, usually for MLB games played and OPS, and at least one of these players, Freddy Galvis, has been snubbed for the Gold Glove award unfairly.
Galvis leads all these players with nearly a thousand MLB games played, and he’s likely to get another thousand. Since the time I saw him in Williamsport, PA as a teen, he has become a player with a seven-figure salary.
However, the only batter who meets what might be called the parameters of mediocrity, Maikel Franco, just barely meets them, scraping in with a lifetime batting average of .250 before play Sept. 14, when the Phillies will next play. Along with that average, Franco has played in 644 MLB games and posted a .735 OPS.
These figures and the player’s resistance to coaching have all but guaranteed that his tenure with the Phillies will end when this season does.
The players most likely to eventually reach all three batting parameters here are Hoskins and Kingery, who are seven and six points short of the batting average goal, respectively. Both are good young hitters; both have some power (in Hoskins’ case, considerable power). Hoskins also walks quite a bit, and so his not hitting .250 yet is not such a big deal.
But that two of the Phillies foundational building blocks are not hitting .250 in over 600 games between them is actually not a very good thing.
The Pitchers
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Worse, the pitching pipeline of Owens Award winners seems less promising than the pipe carrying the batters. While eight of the 11 batters involved here have played in at least 100 MLB games, the pitching awardees are struggling mightily to reach even one of the three goals suggested for them.
Two of them, the most recent awardees – Parkinson and Lindow – have reached two of the parameter goals, but in the minor leagues. Both have MiLB WHIPs well below 1.300 in at least 40 games.
Beyond that promise, though, not much has been delivered by these two young players’ predecessors. The only goal of the three either-or choices suggested here was reached by Trevor May, who has pitched in 184 MLB games and currently has a 22-21 record. Luis Garcia has pitched in 310 games, but is 14-15 at this point.
Moreover, neither of these pitchers is still in the Phillies organization.
What all this suggests pretty clearly is that, as an organization for the last 15 years, the Philadelphia Phillies have done a wonderful job of identifying players who may do very well at the minor league level, but at minimum, take at least several years to become successful major league players.
One of the last 21 Owens Awardees – Rhys Hoskins – has finished among the top five in the Rookie of the Year vote, and one of them –
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Domonic Brown – has been an All-Star in one year. And you had better not bring up Brown’s name in any room full of Phillies fans.