The Phillies signed pitcher Drake Fellows to a minor league contract yesterday – May 20 – and they are already putting him to work. The Phillies assigned Fellows to Lehigh Valley and the IronPigs needed a starter for tonight’s game against Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, so Fellows gets the call.
Here is our scouting report for Fellows, who has been through a lot and is still fighting to be a major leaguer:
Drake Fellows was a standout prospect from a young age, and the prep scouting reports on him were glowing. At the high school level, Fellows showed an athletic 6′ 5″, 205-pound frame that scouts described as a prototypical pitcher’s build, with long limbs, proportional strength, and plenty of room for continued physical development. Even then, he was working with three pitches he could throw for strikes, including a fastball with arm-side run and a slider that showed sharp bite with occasional two-plane break. He committed to Vanderbilt early, which was a strong signal of just how highly evaluated he was coming out of high school.
College Career at Vanderbilt
Fellows played college baseball for the Vanderbilt Commodores and was part of the team that won the 2019 College World Series in Omaha. Over his college career, Fellows appeared in 51 games and started 45 of them from 2017 to 2019. In those three years at Vanderbilt, he went 23 wins and 9 losses with a 3.85 ERA, compiling a 1.23 WHIP with 3.2 walks per nine innings and 10.1 strikeouts per nine innings, pitching mostly as a starter.
He was considered one of the more durable and experienced arms in the Southeastern Conference. Fellows finished his final regular season with the fifth-most strikeouts in the SEC as Vanderbilt’s Friday night starter, a role he handled for two full years. Scouts at the time praised his ability to take the ball every week in one of the toughest conferences in college baseball, which spoke to both his competitiveness and his physical durability — at least before the hardships to come.
MLB Draft
Fellows was selected by the San Diego Padres in the sixth round of the 2019 MLB Draft, 173rd overall. For a Vanderbilt Friday starter with his pedigree and track record in the SEC, the sixth round represented a somewhat modest placement, and it reflected the concerns scouts had about his stuff. While his slider was regarded as his calling card, evaluators noted that his fastball was often hittable because he struggled to hit his spots, and his changeup was considered fringe-average at best. There was also a red flag around command overall, as he led the SEC in wild pitches and hit-by-pitches. Still, the combination of a legitimate swing-and-miss slider and a long track record of starting in a top-tier conference gave him a meaningful floor as a pro prospect.
Medical Hardships and Their Impact on Development
This is where Fellows’ story becomes one of the more remarkable ones in the minor leagues. What should have been a smooth transition into pro ball quickly turned into a multi-year medical ordeal.
About a month after being drafted and joining the Padres organization, Fellows was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphatic system that starts in white blood cells. He underwent treatment, and the Padres covered the full cost of his cancer treatments. He described the diagnosis as “shocking,” noting that as a healthy, in-shape 21-year-old he never expected it to be cancer and that the news was overwhelming for him and his family. He went into remission in January 2020. That meant that even before he threw a single professional pitch, Fellows had already lost an entire year of development.
Then, just as he was set to begin his pro career in earnest, the 2020 minor league season was cancelled due to COVID-19. So Fellows entered 2021 having still never faced professional competition.
He made his professional debut in 2021 with the Florida Complex League Pirates and Single-A Bradenton Marauders, but pitched only 11 and two-thirds innings due to an elbow injury, and ultimately underwent Tommy John surgery. That surgery cost him the entire 2022 season. By the time he had gotten through cancer, a pandemic shutdown, and Tommy John surgery, Fellows had used up three years of development time before really pitching in pro ball at all.
His recovery from Tommy John apparently did not go smoothly either, as he started 2023 on the 60-day injured list. When he finally did return to the mound later that year, he was operating under a strict pitch limit of around 30 pitches per outing. Those constraints showed in the numbers — he struggled considerably, posting an 8.25 ERA across 12 innings while dealing with persistent command issues. The walks were a problem, though as one Pittsburgh-focused analyst noted, he wasn’t blowing his spots by a wide margin; he was just missing by a little bit, repeatedly.
Pitch Mix and Velocity
Fellows is a right-handed pitcher who works primarily with three pitches. The fastball is his primary pitch and features sinking action, which is one of its better attributes since it generates some ground balls when he locates it properly. His fastball sits at 89-93 mph, though he does not command it consistently. The fastball gets some sink but is often hittable because he struggles to hit his spots. Velocity-wise, it is a functional pitch in the minor leagues but is nothing that overwhelms hitters on its own.
The slider is unquestionably his best pitch and the primary reason he generates strikeouts. His plus slider is what will likely be his calling card in pro ball, and it gives him a reasonable fallback option as a reliever if his fastball command and fringe-average changeup do not improve. Even going back to his amateur reports, scouts described the slider as capable of being a premium out-pitch, ranging between 78-83 mph, with sharp bite and two-plane break. The pitch has remained his most consistent swing-and-miss offering throughout his professional career.
The changeup rounds out his arsenal and has generally been viewed as the weakest of his three pitches. The changeup flashes some late sink and sits a few miles per hour below the slider, but it has not developed into a consistently reliable offering. His ability to use it against left-handed hitters in particular has been an ongoing challenge.
Minor League Statistics and Sabermetric Profile
The story of Fellows in the minor leagues is essentially one of a player trying to make up for years of lost time at an age when most prospects at his level are much younger. He did not throw more than 12 professional innings in a season until 2024.
When he finally stayed healthy in 2024, he logged 74 and two-thirds innings split across High-A Greensboro, Double-A Altoona, and Triple-A Indianapolis. The bulk of that time came with Altoona, where his performance was uneven — a 5.74 ERA paired with a 1.46 WHIP. His walk and strikeout rates were mediocre at 4.4 walks per nine and 8.3 strikeouts per nine innings. One of the more troubling indicators that season was his significant platoon split — left-handed hitters put up an .869 OPS against him compared to .672 by right-handed batters. This is a meaningful red flag for a right-handed pitcher, suggesting that his arsenal does not play as well against batters who can pick up the ball from the same side.
His 2025 season at Triple-A Indianapolis represented the best stretch of his professional career from a durability and innings standpoint. He led the Indianapolis staff with 112 and one-third innings across 33 appearances, including 19 starts during the second half. He finished with a 4.41 ERA, a 1.39 WHIP, and 94 strikeouts, though his strikeout rate slipped to 7.9 per nine innings. The platoon problem persisted — left-handed hitters accounted for ten of the 11 home runs he allowed and posted an .846 OPS against him, compared to just .607 by right-handed batters.
From a sabermetric standpoint, the FIP and xFIP numbers suggest that Fellows’ ERA in 2025 was close to what his true talent level deserved — FanGraphs pegged his FIP at 4.46, very close to his actual ERA of 4.41, meaning there was not much underlying performance being hidden or obscured by luck or defense. His strikeout-to-walk ratio improved meaningfully in 2025, as his walk rate dropped to a more acceptable 3.7 per nine innings, which is the most encouraging trend in his profile. His ground ball rate hovering around 42 percent is reasonable but not exceptional, and combined with a home run rate that trends slightly elevated, it paints the picture of a pitcher who is functional but not dominant at the Triple-A level.
Current Status and Outlook
Fellows elected free agency following the 2025 season and on December 12, 2025, signed a minor league contract with the New York Yankees. The signing drew attention from baseball insiders, with one prominent reporter noting his big strikeout rate with the slider as the key selling point for New York. Unfortunately for Fellows, the Yankees released him during Spring Training. He went unsigned until the Phillies added him on Wednesday.
Projections for the 2026 season were modest but not dismissive. The ZiPS projection system envisions something close to a 5.10 ERA over roughly 90 innings with a positive but minimal contribution, reflecting the reality that he is a 28-year-old who has never pitched in the major leagues and who carries real question marks about his secondary offerings and platoon vulnerability. That said, he has never had a full, uninterrupted stretch of development, and the fact that he has now strung together two consecutive healthy seasons is genuinely encouraging. There is no real major league record to evaluate, which means he remains, in every sense, an unknown quantity at the highest level.
What is not in question is the character of the pitcher. Fellows battled through a cancer diagnosis, a global pandemic, and Tommy John surgery before throwing more than a handful of professional innings. The fact that he has continued to pursue a major league career after all of that says something about who he is, and the Yankees are clearly betting that his slider and his resilience give him a real chance.
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