Spring Training can mean different things to different people. For baseball fans, it means the season is near and there is still hope that your team can win a division title (unless you are a fan of the Pirates – then you have no hope).

For the veteran baseball players, it is a chance to work on their timing at the plate or a new pitch while basically getting the body ready for the season. Young players, however, use spring training to prove they should make the jump from the minors to the big leagues or that a disappointing 2021 season wasn’t a fluke. Alec Bohm, Mickey Moniak and Bryson Stott fell into the young players group.

Bohm starred at Wichita State University and was the third overall pick in the 2018 draft by Philadelphia. He appeared in the 2019 Futures Games and entered the 2020 season ranked as the 28th best prospect by BA  and 30th by MLB . He proved those rankings were pretty solid as he finished second in the 2020 NL Rookie of the Year voting in 2020 after slashing .338/.400/.481 with four homers and 23 RBI in 44 games.

Moniak joined the Phillies organization in 2016 after being the top overall pick in the 2016 draft out of La Costa Canyon High School. Ahead of the 2017 season he was ranked the #17 overall prospect by Baseball America (BA) and #19 by MLB Pipeline (MLB), but fell out of the BA rankings ahead of 2018 and dropped to #88 by MLB. Moniak also struggled in two stints with the Phillies, leaving him on the outside looking in when it came to having a spot on the Opening Day roster this year.

Stott was drafted by the Phillies with the 14th overall pick in 2019 out of UNLV. After playing in the Futures Game last year, he entered this season ranked as the 67th best prospect by BA and 45th by MLB.

A Bad Break

Moniak suffered a bad break, both literally and figuratively, at the end of the spring training. In the final spring game, Moniak was hit in the hand by a pitch. Initial X-Rays were negative, but subsequent X-Rays showed a hairline fracture. In the blink of an eye, Moniak went from being the Opending Day starter in center field for the Phillies to being sidelined for six weeks.

On the fantasy front, it is bad news for players in redraft leagues. But in keeper leagues with limits on the number of player you can keep, there should be an interest in examining Moniak in addition to Bohm and Stott to determine who may be the best keeper down the line.

So let’s take a look at the Philadelphia trio.