Philadelphia Phillies: 2020 MLB Draft could cause issues

Major League Baseball has cut its 2020 Draft down to just five rounds, which presents challenges for most every team, including the Philadelphia Phillies.

You can certainly understand why Major League Baseball has decided to shorten its 2020 Draft from 40 rounds down to only 5 rounds. We don’t know when we’ll see baseball again, so financial resources are completely up in the air at this point in time. And even though the major leagues are aiming to return this summer, minor league baseball has no current timeline, so the normal influx of drafted players seemingly wouldn’t have anywhere to play for the time being.

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But, if I’m the Philadelphia Phillies, having the draft slashed down to such a skeleton of itself really hurts. Even though it makes sense on the surface, it throws a wrench into long-term planning. It causes the same problems for many teams, of course, but the Phillies have a couple of issues to contend with here.

The state of the farm system is the most pressing concern, as the Phillies were recently ranked 19th in all of baseball by MLB.com. That’s not terrible, but obviously there is a lot of room for improvement there. Factor in that Alec Bohm and Spencer Howard are both nearing an MLB debut, and you can see that there is a disturbing lack of depth behind them. Any draft gives an organization a chance to bring in a boatload of raw potential and then use its evaluation skills to weed out the best of this group. I don’t want to say “quantity over quality”, but enough quantity will yield at least some quality, right? That won’t be the case in 2020.

For the scant five rounds of the draft, you have to think that the Phillies will need to go with the guys who they view as the surest things available when they select. These would be players who safely project as organizational depth or complementary pieces, rather than boom/bust prospects, as taking too many of those in such a short draft could really cripple you.

After the five rounds are up, teams will have a ridiculously large pool of undrafted players to wade through, with $20,000 per player at teams’ disposal to sign as many players as they’d like. That’s basically chicken feed compared to what these players could have gotten if the draft were its normal length. And this really hurts the Phillies.

No player who is still eligible to return to college is going to agree to that rather than returning to school and increasing their payday exponentially when next year’s draft presumably goes back to something more normal. The Phillies, like all teams, will then have to target college seniors who are out of options. This plays right into the hands of teams like the Atlanta Braves, who find themselves in baseball hotbeds, areas of the country where all of the top college baseball teams and players seem to reside. Let’s not discount the fact that, given equal money offered from multiple teams, players could very well choose based on geographical proximity or who they’ve rooted for growing up. For the Phillies, then, this could be a struggle.

On top of this, I think we all need to have some skepticism about how this will affect the team’s revamped scouting department. Like the rest of MLB, they have been planning all year for a standard-sized draft. They had a rough idea of what players would go where, even hundreds of players deep. But now they’ll have to be judicious about which players (or types of players) to target, knowing full well that they can’t just pick them and have their rights, but will have to fight other clubs for them. It’s not going to be pleasant.

Lastly, I have even less confidence in the Phillies when it comes to the international market. They have had very little success there over the years, and I believe this alternative avenue isn’t enough to make up for the smaller crop of players who will be coming into the system this year.

This draft is pretty bonkers, but it had to be this way. We’ve all needed to adjust, with the Phillies and everyone else doing their best in a bad situation until things get back to resembling what we’re used to. It’s a tenuous situation for the Phils, but at least the rest of the league is in the same predicament, and it will be fascinating to see how it all shakes out.