Philly Front Office

We have news!!! I can’t say it’s great news or bad news, so let’s just go with news. The Phillies have signed outfielder Max Kepler to a 1 year, $10m contract.

Kepler has spent his whole career in Minnesota. In his ten years as a big leaguer, he has been a solid player with 2-3 good years. One of those good years was not last year, unfortunately. Injuries to both legs forced him to miss time and caused ineffectiveness when he did play. He is left-handed so not very good against lefties, not Brandon-Marsh-bad but not good.

So, what are we doing here? They have to see him as a platoon player. In the outfield we have Nick Castellanos and two solid options against righties…but nothing against lefties (somehow righty Rojas was even worse against southpaws). We NEED to find a buy-low right-handed outfielder. Desperately.

I don’t mind having another professional on the team, but the deal is the problem. $10m for a platoon bat does not seem ideal. Who was banging down the door to give Kepler $9m? Even $5m? Evaluators have him generally in the “honorable mention” section of their free agent rankings. Michael Conforto was in the back end of most top 50s and received a 1 year, $17m contract. Alex Verdugo is a comparable (but much worse last season) player. I guess we will have to wait and see what he gets before really judging the value here (I’m not bullish).

That $10m used on Kepler brings the Phillies to about $299m for luxury tax purposes (the only purposes we really care about). The next tax threshold is $301m. I expect them to go over that number by a little bit, but don’t expect anything major. Currently, the Phillies are set to pay about $40m in luxury tax. Almost everything else they spend will be taxed at 1.1:1. Basically, double any other contracts signed.

The sky is not falling and this isn’t the crazy bad signing the internet wants it to be. They just need to do more and I don’t know if their financial situation will let them (I think Dombrowski convinces the purse strings to loosen a bit). We still need a right-handed outfielder and a good reliever.