2026 International Prospect Rankings and Scouting Reports

Today is the first day of the new international signing period, so it’s time for me to share updated evaluations and bonus information for the players in this class. An overview of the rules that govern signing international amateurs can be found in MLB’s glossary here, while more thorough and detailed information can be found starting on page 316 of the Collective Bargaining Agreement and page 38 of the Official Professional Baseball Rules Book. Players have until December 15 to agree to terms before this signing period closes.

Short scouting reports, tool grades, and projected signing teams for 59 players from the 2026 class can now be viewed over on The Board. The table below includes team and bonus projections for all players my sources indicate will receive $1 million or more, as well as a handful of six-figure sleepers who emerged during compilation. Below, I’ll remind you of my process for building this list, and then discuss some storylines coloring this year’s signing period.

How Is This Information Compiled?
As I’ve noted in the past, my first step is to source rumored bonuses of $1 million or more from international scouts and executives; this generally gives me a list of about 50 players. Despite it being against the rules, most teams enter into verbal agreements with players and their trainers/agents many months, and sometimes as many as three or four years, before their actual signing day. When a team and a player come to a verbal agreement and commit to a bonus, other teams are alerted to the agreement, usually by the player’s trainer. Teams keep track of rival clubs’ bonus allocations in order to gauge the market and assess the total amount of money still available around the league, as well as to determine how much money each team has promised to players. This is the network of communication I’m tapping into to efficiently collect bonus information, a process that takes place in fits and starts over the course of a couple of years.

As the bonuses trickle in, I start to collect biographical data such as a player’s position, date of birth, handedness, and measurables, with the measurables likely to involve some amount of error because of how much players this age can physically change in a short period of time. Players who agree to deals during the early part of the calendar also often stop showcasing for other teams, and as it can be a few years between when a player was last seen by rival clubs and when he signs, there’s huge variance in terms of the accuracy of the evaluations in this market.

Once I have a fairly complete picture of the players expected to garner meaningful bonuses, I start to make more scouting- and evaluation-centric calls to augment the initial bonus-based foundation of the list. I combine all of that with my in-person notes (rare in this space) and supplementary video analysis (more common than ever thanks to encrypted file sharing and players’ social media), and take one last pass at all the bonuses to try to make those as accurate as possible, and then things are fully baked.

How Reliable Is This Information?
Sourcing objective information like players’ bonus amounts and biographical information is its own journalistic exercise and, aside from the caveats I mention throughout this piece, the information you’ll see here pretty reliable. However, the scouting analysis and forecasts are more subjective and, according to my sources, increasingly less reliable. As volatile as this market has been over the years, there was generally a correlation between the players’ bonus amounts and their big league outcomes, indicating that the industry was still successfully picking out a lot of the best players and giving them some of the bigger bonuses in the class. But I’ve had several folks in scouting tell me that that correlation has weakened more recently. It seems that, even though a growing number of teams are more frequently tracking various forms of data in this market, the industry as a whole has gotten worse at scouting it.

It’s possible that other changes to player development are contributing to this perception. For instance, I know scouts who think that the elimination of short-season ball during the most recent round of minor league contraction has had a negative impact on the development of Latin American players, who are now forced to go straight from the complex to full-season ball. Something like that further downstream of the scouting process itself may help to explain the supposed dip in bonus correlation. But it’s also possible that the way some teams have tried to get ahead in this market — agreeing to the biggest deals earlier and earlier with younger (and therefore more volatile) prospects — has lowered the industry’s hit rate on the big bonus players.

As you interpret the information below, a useful barometer for new readers: It might be helpful to think about the Future Value grades here in terms of theoretical draft position. Scouting and comparing international players’ tools and athleticism to those of recent and upcoming domestic amateurs helps me triangulate approximately where they’d go in a given draft, and assign them a Future Value based on that approximation. Players with a 50 FV tend to be top-five picks in a draft, while a 45+ FV tends to go in the top 10, a 45 FV in the first round, a 40+ FV in the second-to-third round, and a 40 FV in rounds three through five; a 35+ FV and below is a sleeper type.

Here is the table of players with projected teams and bonus amounts for everyone getting a million dollars or more, plus a couple six-figure signees my sources like. The expected bonus amounts have been sourced from scouts and executives and then cross-checked in the lead-up to publication. There are a couple of bonus amounts below where my sources were not in exact agreement. In cases where the gap is less $200,000, I tended to split the difference and give readers an average that should, at most, be $100,000 off the actual amount. In the few instances where the gaps were bigger, sometimes as much as $700,000, I’ve gone with the amount provided by the majority of my sources. The Washington Nationals’ bonus amounts were the ones with the greatest variance, which my sources attribute to the changes made at the top of the organization’s front office in the last little while. I’ll put official bonuses on The Board when they’re announced.

Now let’s go through some of the dynamics unique to this year’s market.

Uncertainty in Venezuela
Every year, there are market concerns beyond the players themselves that affect how the signing period unfolds, whether it’s a weird corner case like Roki Sasaki’s posting, talk of an international draft, or even an outright scandal. This year features a particularly grave geopolitical situation, as team personnel have had to navigate the fallout of U.S. military action in Venezuela, which included airstrikes in the capital city of Caracas and the capture of president Nicolás Maduro and his wife. There are hundreds of Venezuelan players throughout the various levels of affiliated baseball, a great many of whom return home for the offseason. Some play in the Venezuelan Winter League, which suspended play in the immediate aftermath of the airstrikes, though games have since resumed. Several of my contacts in baseball operations spent the days following the U.S. military action scrambling to assess the safety of their players and other personnel in Venezuela and get them out of the country, including their upcoming amateur signing class.

In part because Maduro’s governance led to persistent humanitarian crises, Venezuela has presented logistical and safety challenges for baseball for a while, which is why all of the Venezuelan academies have been shuttered, the Venezuelan Summer League shut down, and many showcase workouts for Venezuelan players take place in Colombia, where MLB scouts feel freer to travel. Venezuelan players signing new contracts usually do so at their team’s academy in the Dominican Republic and then begin training there. Some teams have been housing and training soon-to-sign Venezuelan players in the D.R. all offseason, though many players, including some multi-million-dollar bonus recipients, were still in Venezuela when the military action occurred and had to be extracted in the aftermath amid periods of inconsistently open airspace.

Some teams began to plan for potential complications late in the fall amidst the Trump administration’s strikes against civilian boats in the Caribbean and escalating rhetoric, and by the Winter Meetings, the possibility for danger was a real concern among some of my contacts. But foresight did not necessarily ensure smooth sailing. One source from a team that I consider very aware and prepared told me that their players were literally en route to Caracas as a precursor to travel to the D.R. and Florida when the airstrikes occurred; they had to reschedule flights for everyone multiple times when later attempts to leave were cancelled due to airspace restrictions. For now, it thankfully seems like no harm has befallen any individual player, and for the most part, teams have their new kids safely in the D.R. ready to sign. But teams are on their guard, as future destabilization and military violence could continue to impact travel for players and scouts, imperil their families, and alter the country’s participation in international competition in baseball and other sports.

Yankees Instability
The other notable topic of discussion this year is what has happened with the Yankees’ international scouting department and their upcoming signing classes. At the end of last season, the Yankees chose not to renew the contract of longtime international scouting director Donny Rowland. In the weeks following his dismissal, the team’s future verbal commitments, including ones for the 2026 signing period, unraveled, and as of Tuesday evening, my sources indicated to me that the team only has a few lower-bonus players to sign. Several of my sources also say that the Yankees’ future high-dollar commitments, some of which go out as far as 2030, are known to have returned to the open market, with some of those players already committed to new deals.

The highest profile and most consequential player to find a new team is Dominican shortstop Wandy Asigen, who changed his commitment from the Yankees to the Mets a few weeks after Rowland was fired, as first reported by independent Cuban journalist Francys Romero back in December. Because the Yankees had committed so much of their pool to Asigen, who is arguably the most talented player in this class, the sheer number of players they were set to sign this year was relatively small. The Yankees still have almost their entire bonus pool to spend and will likely put it to some use once they hire a replacement for Rowland, a process that is currently underway, but they’ll be starting nearly from scratch in a talent pool where the highest-profile players have already put pen to paper with other teams.

Despite his long tenure — he served as the club’s international director for 15 years and was with the club for 23 — and past success, Rowland’s dismissal doesn’t come as a complete surprise. Since MLB adopted its current international signing format, the Yankees’ strategy has often been to pay just a couple of players, and sometimes just one guy, a huge chunk of their annual bonus pool. That approach makes it important for the high-dollar signees to pan out, or else you’ve whiffed on an entire class in a talent-rich market, and in the Yankees’ case, they’ve failed to hit on those guys too often of late, as Brendan Kuty of The Athletic details here.

When the head of an international department is fired or replaced, it’s common for some of their commitments to players to either change or fall through entirely. The team doesn’t want the person they felt the need to fire to essentially be making several more years’ worth of multi-million-dollar decisions for the ballclub, nor do they want their new director to have to wait several years before actually impacting the organization. Sometimes teams decide it’s best to maintain their pending agreements, but the players or their reps decide to seek a new deal. The player’s camp might realize they can command a better bonus if they re-enter the market, as was the case with Asigen, who is getting $3.8 million from the Mets, a few hundred thousand more than he was originally going to.

While the mechanics of what is happening here are pretty common, both the magnitude (it involves so much of their signing class, including one of the top players on the market) and the timing (so close to signing day) are abnormal. The optics of having an international department in this kind of disarray, and of barely having anyone to sign when the period opens, are pretty bad.

Mets Dominoes
The Mets only had the space to add Asigen to their class because another player with whom they had a multi-million-dollar agreement reportedly failed his age/identity verification, voiding his deal. The Mets were also supposed to sign Venezuelan hitter Cleiner Ramirez to a $1.6 million deal, a top-25 bonus across all of baseball, but with Asigen now part of their class, they don’t have the pool space to sign them both without trading for more. Sources have told me the teams with the most uncommitted pool space at this stage include the Guardians, Diamondbacks, Cardinals, and (suddenly) the Yankees. The Mets could trade with any of those teams (or make multiple deals with a few teams) for the pool space required to sign Ramirez for the amount they already agreed upon; remember that Cleveland attached Myles Straw’s contract to pool space in a trade with Toronto last year. Ramirez could also decide to work out for teams in the near future and see if he can get more money. It’s pretty common for teams to add pool space and none of my sources thinks Ramirez’s departure from the Mets class is imminent, though all of them are prepared in the event that he decides to showcase.