Philly hopeful for another successful Draft

This story was excerpted from Todd Zolecki’s Phillies Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

It looks like the Phillies got a steal with the 27th overall pick in the 2023 Draft, when they selected Aidan Miller.

Miller has become one of baseball’s top prospects. He is playing Saturday in the All-Star Futures Game.

The Phillies would love to repeat that success with the 27th overall pick in the 2024 Draft, which begins Sunday night. Maybe somebody they love falls their way again, and they snatch him up and celebrate their good fortune.

“There were points in time last year, during our initial meetings, where there was maybe some assumption on our end that he wasn’t going to have a chance to get there,” Phillies assistant general manager of amateur scouting Brian Barber said. “You sit there and you try to go over every scenario. And even once you get the board lined up the way you think it might go, you still go over every potential scenario. So it was like, ‘All right, there are some things working against him that there is a possibility.”

MLB.com’s recent mock Drafts have had the Phillies selecting everybody from Louisiana State third baseman Tommy White to Stanford catcher Malcolm Moore to York (Elmhurst, Ill.) High School pitcher Ryan Sloan.

Maybe they get one of those three.

Or maybe somebody the Phillies never could have imagined falls their way.

“On a personal level, you’d love to be able to draft higher,” Barber said. “But on a big scale, we want to draft at the bottom of the first round every year, because that means the big league team is doing well. Our hope every year is that we’re picking 30th overall because we won the World Series.

“The things that you learn by drafting later is you just have to be prepared for so many different eventualities. If you draft higher or even in the middle of the first round, you know the pool is smaller. So one of the things that we learned last year is that anybody can fall to you, and you have to be prepared for a lot of situations. You have to be prepared that you're picking the 27th best player on the board, with the hope that somebody that you have evaluated at a higher level happens to fall down to you.

"And if they do fall down, then you have to be prepared to be able to take that player, and you've done all the work there as well.”