Andrew Painter was honored for his ‘historic’ season. Is a spot in the Phillies’ rotation next?

When Phillies farm director Preston Mattingly sat down to vote for MLB Pipeline’s annual team executives poll, he had a clear idea of who he would pencil in for the best pitching prospect in 2022.

Andrew Painter, a hard-throwing right-handed pitcher who will likely break camp with the Phillies in 2023, jumped from single A to double A and dominated at each level in his first full minor-league season. He finished the year with a 1.56 ERA and 155 strikeouts, doing it all at age 19.

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What Mattingly didn’t realize was how many other executives across the sport agreed with him. In the poll, a group of general managers, farm directors, scouting directors and analytics specialists voted Painter the No. 1 pitching prospect in baseball, ahead of Orioles prospect Grayson Rodríguez, Marlins prospect Eury Pérez, and Royals prospect Bobby Miller.

“I think what that shows is just how historic his season was and how great of a season he had,” Mattingly said. “Being a kid coming out of his first year out of high school, you don’t usually see guys perform the way he did, at the level he got to. I think we’re going to look back in years to come and just realize how special a season it really was.”

Now, the focus is on getting Painter through his first full big-league season. He’s spent the offseason at Cressey Sports Performance, building durability. Mattingly said that while there won’t be an innings limit on Painter, per se, the Phillies will monitor him closely.

President of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski has said the Phillies will reserve a spot in their 2023 rotation for a younger pitcher, and there is good reason to believe Painter will earn that spot. It’s a unique situation, one that doesn’t have much precedent. Painter has logged only 109⅔ minor-league innings, none of them approaching the amount of stress he’ll experience in the big leagues. But the Phillies believe Painter is a talent worth that risk.

“We have a lot of smart people who have a lot of good information,” Mattingly said. “I think nowadays, we don’t necessarily go by innings limits. It’s more just tracking the data. And we have baseline numbers for Andy, and for all of our players. We can tell when the stress comes in. We don’t want to put him at risk, obviously, so we will track his data to make sure it’s all trending in the right direction. If it is, I think they’ll continue to let him keep logging more innings.

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“We have so much stuff from the analytics side, whether that’s release heights or extensions or the spin on his pitches — everything that goes into his metrics. We have that and we can track it throughout the year. So, if his release height is dropping, for example, we know something’s going on with his lower half right or his shoulder.”

Mattingly said monitoring Painter’s progress will not be a one-man job. It will be a group effort from trainers, strength and conditioning coaches, pitching coaches, front office members, and more. It’s hard to know what to expect from a pitcher who is just barely out of high school. But the Phillies see something special — and it appears they’re not alone.