I mean, who else is it going to be?
The 2025 season is upon us. We’ll preview the upcoming year by going around the diamond and look at how the Phillies are stacking up both at the major league level and down on the farm.
We’ve written about Eduardo Tait a lot lately. You, the readers, have voted him the Phillies’ 4th best prospect. It’s not difficult to see why. The Fangraphs write up about his talents was great, but the Baseball Prospectus write up is good too:
Tait played most of the 2024 season as a 17-year-old and made it to Low-A for his last 28 games, where he posted a 104.5-mph 90th-percentile exit velocity that’s representative of his overall batted ball data. He’s been posting grown adult level exits since he was 16 in the DSL, which makes his future power potential quite exciting; while he’s a physically mature kid, that cohort usually keeps adding power as they age and grow too. He does take a very healthy cut geared to lift and pull, and that does lead to swing-and-miss. But his in-zone miss rates actually improved to about league-average coming over stateside, and if he stays within shouting distance of that, he makes more than enough contact.
There are two distinct drawbacks to Tait’s profile that are preventing us from absolutely stuffing him right now: His swing decisions and his future defensive home…[w]hether or not he can stick behind the dish is a very open question as well; he throws well but he doesn’t always look comfortable back there, and trying to figure out whether any 18-year-old catcher will be a good enough 27-year-old catcher is an extremely tough call.
When the last time the Phillies had a catching prospect in their farm system that was this exciting, I do not recall. Mike Lieberthal was a first round pick and an All-Star. Carlos Ruiz was an unheralded prospect before getting to the majors and becoming an anchor for a World Series winning team. But when has there been a catching prospect the team has had that has gotten people whispering as much as Tait?
I will tolerate no jokes about the team having a hitting prospect this heralded, let alone a catching prospect…
The key to Tait’s development is going to come down to one word: patience. As the scouting report above said, he’s likely going to hit as he climbs the ladder. He makes contact and does so loudly, so he’ll continue to have that going for him. The ability to hit quality pitches looks like it will settle into a good enough space as well. Where the team will need to be patient is with his defense. We know that an automated strike zone is coming, at the very least one that involves replay, so the framing aspect of catching defense will likely diminish in importance, if not become obsolete altogether. It’ll be the other parts of his defensive game that will need polishing on the way up. He’ll need to learn the position and play it at a major league quality – throwing out basestealers, blocking pitches that skitter into the dirt, calling a quality game behind the plate.
The team needs to be patient with that.
Yes, J.T. Realmuto is a free agent after this current season. Yes, Tait would look like a natural candidate to take over….were he not so far away. If he’s going to play this season as an 18 year old in Clearwater or Lakewood, there is virtually no chance he sees major league time even in 2026. The team will either extend Realmuto or bring in someone else to take over in the however long interim until such a time that Tait is deemed ready. There’s nothing wrong with either option.
But when Tait is ready, and if he can maintain himself to be even an average backstop defensively, the team looks like they have a true steal on their hands.