Other than you know who
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.
When you think of Phillies pitching prospects that will potentially impact the immediate 2025 team, the obvious name is going to be Andrew Painter. He is the best, the closest and highest probably impact arm the team has on the farm.
But that’s the cheater’s way out. Easy street. Instead, let’s talk about one of those pitchers that might come up and make a spot start or two in case an injury does happen to come around.
First, though, let’s acknowledge how difficult that will be. We’re still not sure at this point what the plan is for Taijuan Walker and whether or not they will keep him on as a reliever/rotation depth. If that happens, the team is six deep before they even get to Painter. So, should an injury actually happen before Painter arrives, it’s going to be hard for someone to crack the rotation even in a spot start situation. However, we can look at the 40-man roster and see a few arms that have the whiff of prospectdom and focus on one guy, Jean Cabrera.
Cabrera, as we wrote earlier in the prospect list series, has given the Phillies something they haven’t had in quite a while: young rotation depth. However, since he’s still go that new prospect smell about him, he might find himself constantly auditioning for other teams whenever he does take the mound. He’s one of the better prospects the team has, yet thanks to the strength of the current rotation, might be best served as a trade chip around the deadline.
Seeing what he could do should be just fine. The write ups on him are at least a bit encouraging. From MLB Pipeline:
Cabrera took a big step forward in 2024, starting with showing he can be durable with an increased workload despite his slight frame. He also has tweaked his arsenal to give him more weapons behind his two- and four-seamer, a heater that averaged almost 94 mph and topped out at around 96 last year. His 81-82 mph sweeper improved, missing bats at a 36 percent rate and grades out nearly as well as his plus changeup, averaging 86.6 mph last year while eliciting a 49 percent miss rate. He added a shorter, harder cutter, up into the upper 80s.
From Baseball Prospectus:
Added to the 40-man roster last month, Cabrera has one of the better changeups in the system: a firm, deceptive, heavy-break offering he typically throws 86-88 mph that gets even more chase than Graves’ and nearly as much whiff. Unfortunately, he throws it less than his fastball, which is not ideal. His four-seam fastball has some velocity to it, sitting around 95, but it has severe dead-zone movement issues that reduce its effectiveness, and his sinker is barely distinguishable from the four-seam. His sweeper is perfectly fine, in the low 80s with decent movement, but he should not be using that pitch more than his changeup either. With no pitch design adjustments, Cabrera projects as a back-end starter or leverage reliever, but there’s some obvious low-hanging possibilities present in ramping the changeup usage and new hard pitch shapes, such as a bridge cutter.
Since he was added to the 40-man this offseason, there is a chance he sees some time in the majors. The team does like to bring in their own before they decide to scour the waiver wire when it comes to injury replacements, so that puts Cabrera up near the top of the heap in terms of players that could be called upon. Yet, while those reports are nice, they don’t really feel like someone the team would want to put into their rotation any time soon. The reports sound like someone that could give the team someone to dangle for a reliever in July.
Should Cabrera needs to spend copious amounts of time in the majors this season, something bad had to have happened to a rotation member. That’s not what we’d like to see. What would help would be if the team helped him take a step forward in his development to possibly get that last trade piece needed at the deadline. That development would likely help the team the most this season since they aren’t exactly flush with trade candidates.