The cupboard is pretty bare for the Philadelphia Phillies farm system but there are still a couple of decent prospects that bear following. AA Reading SP Carlos Carrasco is one of them. Carrasco has been rated as the Phillies top prospect for the past two seasons and with good reason. The young Venezuelan possesses 4 pitches and he is starting to turn the corner this season for the Reading Phillies. Carrasco throws a plus fastball and a plus changeup as well as a slider and curveball. Both the slider and curve are more of show-me pitches at the moment and they sometimes merge into a slurve but his fastball has good velocity (93-95 mph). His change is his out-pitch and it works best when its thrown hard in the low to mid 80's. When his control is on, he is a very tough pitcher to beat. So far this season, he has really gotten a handle on his control. He has shown drastic improvement from last season and he is looking more and more like the #2/#3 pitcher he was projected to be when he signed with the organization at age 18.
So far this year he is off to a very good start in Reading posting an impressive 3.64 ERA in his first 14 starts. His record is a more modest 5-6 but that is more an illustration of poor run support than anything else. Impressively he has struck out 89 batters in 94 IP while walking just 35. This is a vast improvement over his 2007 numbers as seen below:
2007 (AA): 70.1 IP, 49 K (6.27 K/9), 46 BB (5.89 BB/9), 1.07 K/BB
2008 (AA): 94.0 IP, 89 K (8.52 K/9), 35 BB (3.35 BB/9), 2.54 K/BB
You can clearly see huge upswing in his numbers from last year to this season. Carrasco is demonstrating that he is very close to being ready for The Show. Considering the huge holes in the Phillies rotation, that is not a bad thing.
Carrasco just turned 21 this March and he clearly has lots of room to grow. However, considering the poor performances by some of the Phillies rotation, he may have to learn on the job as Kyle Kendrick did last season. I will not be surprised to see him in a Phillies uniform sometime in the second half of the season and almost definitely no later than Spring Training 2009. For now he will continue to polish his game in AA and wait for the Phillies to call.
No comments:
Post a Comment