Phillies 2025 Draft Notebook
Early last week the Phillies welcomed in their 2025 draft class. While this post is not necessarily meant to provide a scouting report on all twenty players selected, there’s a few players and interesting trends I’ll highlight. Much of the available information on these players comes from various public scouting departments at MLB, Baseball America, and Fangraphs. I unfortunately am not able to scout each player individually due to time constraints, although that is the goal someday.
Gage Wood (RHP Arkansas)
Age: 21.5 (College junior)
Ceiling: Middle of the rotation starter or late-inning bullpen arm
Floor: Late inning reliever
Wood is one of the players in the draft I’ve had the chance to watch multiple times, either due to work or spare time when his team was on national television. Most pitchers either fall into one of two categories: very calm and straight-faced on the mound (think Zack Wheeler) or, to put it bluntly, insane (Scherzer/most late-inning relievers). Wood falls more into the second category upon watching the tape. He pitches with an emotion and passion that jumps off the screen, firing up the team and fan base around him. While some may see that as more of a reliever trait where you can use that adrenaline to be a one-inning flamethrower, it’s worked for Wood thus far and has worked for some MLB starters.
The actual stuff matches his personality very well. The right-hander has a fastball sitting 95-97 mph that has incredible riding action, making it look like it can defy gravity and rise on a hitter. He does this through a lower release angle and gets an astonishing amount of whiffs on both fastballs in and out of the zone. On a typical scouting grade system (20-80 scale), both MLB Pipeline and Baseball America have the fastball as a 70 grade pitch. Scouts don’t just hand those kinds of numbers out easily. A low-mid 80s curveball is his second-best pitch, and it has a strong north-south bite to it without a ton of horizontal sweeping movement. Those two pitches would make him a weapon in a bullpen role as many have suggested. However, according to Phillies lead scout Brian Barber’s post-draft interviews, the team plans to develop him as a starter.
As much as the Phillies twittersphere may want him in red pinstripes right away as a bullpen piece (and it still could happen), teams just don’t draft guys in the first round with the intention of keeping them as full-time bullpen pieces.
Looking at it from a dollars per WAR (wins above replacement) perspective, starting pitchers are more valuable than the vast majority of relievers. Contract-wise, this makes sense as only a few closers are making above $10 million, and even fewer are signed to long-term contracts once they hit free agency. There are plenty of first-rounders who have turned into relievers, but only after teams exhausted most routes to developing them into a starting pitcher during their minor league journey.
Garrett Crochet is a notable and intriguing exception to this, where the White Sox actually brought him up immediately as a reliever in 2020 and then didn’t turn him into a full-time starter until 2024. The comparison is not the best because Crochet had better stuff than Wood does at present, and 2020 was a very unique draft (and season).
My current guess is that the Phillies start him at either High-A Jersey Shore or Double-A Reading in early August. They could keep him in a starting role but limit his pitch and innings count due to injury concerns (more on this later). This would effectively give him starting reps to develop his secondary pitches while also allowing the team to evaluate him as a potential bullpen piece for later September. If he looks dominant against Double-A hitters, then the Phillies could get aggressive and give him some run as a reliever during the last month of the season to see if he can be a piece for this team in October. Either way, I expect the Phillies to continue his development in 2026 as a starter.
More Notes:
Gage Wood was limited to start the year due to a shoulder injury. This may lead the Phillies to be more cautious with him as he begins.
Wood was part of an overall trend of smaller pitchers. The Phillies took several college pitchers listed at right around 6’0”, which is slightly shorter than average for an MLB pitcher.
The big carrying trait for the top pitchers on the Phillies draft board is a low arm slot fastball that has good riding action and makes it look like the pitch is rising out of the hand. Cody Bowker (3rd rd Vanderbilt) and Cade Obermuller (2nd rd Iowa) fit this mold well.
Only 6 of 20 picks were used on position players. The organization didn’t have a lot of starting pitching depth at the lower levels behind Mick Abel and Andrew Painter.
Matthew Fisher (RHP) is a very interesting arm that was projected to the Phillies in the first round a few times leading up to the draft, but the Phillies were able to get him in the 7th round (pick 221 overall). They signed him for $1.25 million, which is equivalent to the slot for the 68th overall pick.
This signing is around $1 million over the pick value ($257,700), which helped to sign Fisher away from his commitment to Indiana University. The dollar amount shows that the Phillies (and possibly other teams) valued Fisher as one of the best high school pitchers in the draft class.
Fisher’s fastball sits in the low 90s and has trended up according to scouts. His breaking balls show high spin rates and are seemingly surprisingly well developed for a high school arm.
Two of the position player draft picks were high school shortstops from New Jersey. Matthew Ferrara (9th rd committed to Pitt) was ranked by Perfect Game as one of the top high school players in the Garden State.
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