Dynasty Days of Christmas: Two Turtle Doves (A Pair Of Prospects We Love)

Recently at Pitcher List, we have been releasing a bunch of dynasty and prospect content because we know that side of fantasy baseball never rests! With the Holiday season now upon us, we thought it would be fun to put together a dynasty series based on the 12 days of Christmas. We close with the second day, “two turtle doves.” These birds are known to find a mate and stick with them, so we identified a couple of prospects within the City of Brotherly Love to discuss. Let’s begin!

Prospects are incredibly easy to love. Every year brings a new draft. Every draft brings a new name to become starry-eyed over. There’s an incredible amount of promise and hope in every one of the names which grace your minor league roster.  As we approach Christmas day and a new year, we would like to offer you two names to unwrap and fawn over. We hope they fill your heart with hope and your roster with promise in the new year.

Alec Bohm (3B, Philadelphia Phillies) Age: 22, Level: A-

Move over, Nick Senzel of the Cincinnati Reds organization and meet my new flame occupying the hot corner. Polished college bats drafted in the highest rounds are my jam. More often than not they’re fast-tracked into the major leagues and you know what you have early on.  Drafting someone like Los Angeles Dodgers OF prospect Starling Heredia in dynasty leagues is fun and it’s a long, slow burn, but if they bust early, you’ve found yourself wasting 4 years over nothing.  It’s nice to dream, but I don’t particularly care of a Rip Van Winkle type slumber.

Because people find this exercise to be fun, let’s take a look at a few recently drafted 3B college bats during their junior year for comparison:

Player	AVG	OBP	SLG	OPS
Player A	.339	.436	.625	1.061
Player B	.352	.456	.495	1.051
Player C	.312	.412	.498	.910

These are some pretty nice numbers and each one of them should have made you sit up in your seat when scouring stat lines for the next big bat. Player A is Bohm, Player B is Senzel, and Player C is new MLB hot commodity 3B Matt Chapman of the Oakland Athletics.

This primer on college stats is all to say, don’t freak out about Bohm’s 2018 struggles.  His raw power, which Baseball Prospectus marks at a 7, is truly elite despite the fact he prefers contact over power.  Again, not all good things. He’s going to figure it out and likely in short order.

The concern is his long-term viability at third. Standing 6-foot-5 240 pounds, Chicago Cubs 3B Kris Bryant is the only contemporary that tall at the hot corner.  Reports are that he shades more towards the Rafael Devers defensive approach as opposed to a more aesthetically pleasing Nolan Gorman. While he’s committed to making it work and reasonable minds can assume his focus during the debut was to improve his weaknesses as opposed to his strengths.

Right now, I have Bohm listed as the #3 3B prospect and #15 overall 3B. This speaks more to the immense depth currently at the position more so than the player himself. Still, the risk when it comes to prospect valuation is low. In less than 2 years, I would assume he’ll assert himself firmly within the top 10 for the 5-7 years.

Adonis Medina (SP, Philadelphia Phillies) Age: 21, Level: A+

For all intents and purposes, there’s not been a lot of substantive development during the 2018 campaign for the 21-year-old Dominican righty. That’s not a bad thing! He still possesses the same mid-90’s fastball coupled with a plus changeup that has intrigued scouts over the last 3 years. He also mixes in a slider that flashes above-average but lacks consistency and a get me over curveball. The repertoire and solid control contributed to an impressive 18.4% K-BB ratio over 111 IP. This ranked 2nd best in the Florida State League last year which somewhat disputes the reports of trouble repeating delivery and maintaining focus.

Still, it’s important to focus on what’s in between the lines of this post. Namely, he didn’t grow over the last year. His core and peripheral numbers were almost identical. His lack of viable third pitch is still concerning as he has failed to find consistency with anything yet by most accounts.  He didn’t drop his walk rates or increase his innings pitched.  He would get himself into trouble when the off-speed offering wasn’t working.

A 4+ ERA/DRA isn’t exactly inspiring and while the K rate is nice for High-A, unless he develops the third pitch, he’s going to wind up in the pen. The risk is high.  A make or break year for a prospect is the worst type of player to have in your dynasty prospect pool. You deal Medina, he clicks, his value takes off. You keep Medina, he falters, and his value plummets. Complicating matters is that his value will be buoyed by a 2019 ETA now that he’s a part of the 40 man roster.  In these situations, I tend to move on and re-acquire down the road after keeping a close eye on field reports.

(Graphic by Justin Paradis)