The transaction ledger at the end of business on July 31 will show the Philadelphia Phillies having added two players who will play a role in their pursuit of the 2025 World Series.
In separate acquisitions from the Minnesota Twins, Jhoan Duran and Harrison Bader fill obvious positions of need. It constitutes a job done by Dave Dombrowski and his team, identifying the few holes in a front-running roster and dutifully plugging them.
But absent an earth-shattering move on the market, the Phillies’ chance to break the inertia of backsliding playoff results the last three years will have to come from within. And that looks a lot like the two names that stayed at the deadline despite copious interest: Andrew Painter and Justin Crawford.
The Triple-A duo is part of the elite collection of assets the Phillies counted on at this deadline to augment a 61-47 roster. They could have been cashed in for immediate help, as Mick Abel was. Or Dombrowski could’ve kept them and let the club’s investment in them compound.
Now that the deadline dust settled, the reality of the next two months is that neither fits an immediate area of need, barring injuries. But both can help win baseball games in the major leagues right now. The Phillies need to devise a creative way to deploy them and extract that value in the present.
Painter’s name, reportedly and repeatedly, came up in trade discussions. Tends to happen when you’re the No. 8 prospect in baseball on a veteran-laden, win-now roster. But Dombrowski held firm in his faith that even after Tommy John surgery, the 22-year-old projects as an elite starting pitcher.
Crawford, a first-round pick in 2022, is hitting .325 and reaching base at a .411 clip at Triple A. He’s batted .319 with 132 stolen bases over 296 minor league games. He’s a major leaguer. The transactions just haven’t caught up to him yet.
Dombrowski’s actions in the trade market indicated that he values both as near-term contributors. His words Thursday were more noncommittal in the possibility that either will be headed down the Northeast Extension anytime soon.
“I guess there’s always a possibility,” Dombrowski said on Painter. “That decision, by no means, have we discussed it much further. I think first thing you have to do is get through the trading deadline, see how your club looks. We know that he has thrown well. He’s thrown the ball better and better. … I’m not really sure what’s going to happen.”
And on Crawford: “No decisions have been made. We think he’s ready to play at the big league level. We could bring him up. If we do bring him up, he needs to play a lot. I’m not sure that we’re in a position to do that at this point today, but he’s not somebody that we would hesitate to bring up if we decide that was the right thing to do.”
Painter has struggled, to be expected given that it had been two years since he last pitched in a game.
He’s 3-3 with a 4.50 ERA in 14 starts and 68 innings at Lehigh Valley, with 79 total innings thrown this year. He’s been better of late, allowing six runs in his last three starts over 17.1 innings and hitting the crucial barrier of 100 pitches in an outing in his last start.
Crawford projects as plus or higher in batting average, speed and defense. His power is minimal, and his groundball-to-flyball ratio with a pronounced downward swing is historically atypical.
“Justin’s got elite talents,” Dombrowski said. “He’s a good outfielder. He can fly. He really runs well. He’s got good bat-to-ball skills. He’s aggressive on the bases. He makes a lot of contact. He’s got an unusual type of batting style in that he gets a lot more balls on the ground, which in his case, I don’t think is really bad. And also he gets a lot of balls to the opposite field. He gets the ball deep in the zone, so he hits a lot of balls to left field. But he also has the speed to beat those out. He’s an exciting type of player.”
Neither player has a clear pathway to the kind of schedule they’ve been used to in the minors. The Phillies don’t need a starter, with four established, Aaron Nola on the road to recovery and Taijuan Walker pitching well. Painter’s recovery has been immensely regimented and scripted this year.
The Phils have five outfielders on the roster with Bader. They’ve have made clear they don’t want to bring up Crawford to do what Johan Rojas has done, at less than two plate appearances per team game.
But the name of the game is winning baseball games, first to contend with a Mets team that also aggressively improved at the deadline for the National League East title, then to add a first World Championship flag to Citizens Bank Park for the first time since 2008. Or, if you’d prefer, since the year that pitcher Geremy Villoria, one of the prospects traded for Bader, was born.
The Phillies have massively rebuilt the bullpen with David Robertson and Duran, repairing the right-handed deficit not addressed in the offseason and rectifying the errors made in betting on Jordan Romano and Joe Ross. The roster was a right-handed outfield bat short to start the season. Bader plugs that hole. All of which gets the Phillies back to where many thought they should have been in April.
But at some point in the next three months, a situation will arise where Rojas is at the plate or Walker is on the mound with a chance to decide a game that may well decide much more. The Phillies owe it to their multi-year investment in this project to make sure that they’ve thought long and hard as to whether they’d be better off having Crawford or Painter in those spots.
With great talent comes a great challenge. Dombrowski said before the trade deadline — partly to temper expectations, partly because it’s true — that much of the offensive improvement the team is looking for must come from within, from regulars performing better.
It’s also true in the larger picture.
The Phillies kept Painter and Crawford for a reason. Their time horizon is primarily beyond this season. But the Phillies can turn a good deadline into a great one if they figure out how to get those potential impact players in Philadelphia on the order of months, not years.
Contact Matthew De George at mdegeorge@delcotimes.com.
Source: Berkshire mont
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