A Small Top 100 Prospects Update, Headlined by Ethan Salas and Andrew Abbott

Let’s dive right into a few incremental changes to the Top 100 prospects list, as well as a couple of non-Top 100 additions.

Cardinals lefty Matthew Liberatore has had a velo spike — he’s frequently reaching back for 96 and 97 when he wants, and his fastball is averaging 94.5 mph. That’s up about a tick and a half from his average in 2022, when he ran an ERA well north of 5.00 across about 150 combined innings split mostly between Triple-A and seven big league starts. Libby has had frequent enough velocity fluctuations during his time as a prospect to anticipate it will be a thing he deals with throughout his career, but his repertoire depth and the long-haul projection for his command will enable him to compete even when he doesn’t have his peak stuff. That’s largely why he was kept on the Top 100 this past offseason even though he had a poor 2022.

His FV isn’t changing in light of the spike (again, it’s fair to bet Liberatore’s peak velo will continue to yo-yo), but his report has been updated and he’s sliding up about 20 spots, from the very back of the list (where he sat with other bounce-back candidates) into the part of it that includes the other major league ready fourth starters. He’s probably better than Jake Woodford is right now, but St. Louis would be burning Woodford’s last option to swap them one-for-one. Woodford was effective in relief last year and could shift into that role again while a current ‘pen occupant is sent down instead, but the Cardinals don’t have an obvious candidate for that, as their big league relievers are largely either pitching well or are out of options.

It was quickly obvious during spring training that Padres catching prospect Ethan Salas belonged on the Top 100, it just wasn’t clear exactly where. He’s been seen by scouts in minor league and extended spring training games for the last six weeks, while I’ve seen him five or six times during that stretch, and I now feel like I’ve got a pretty firm handle on where he belongs on the overall list. Salas just signed in January (he was the top-ranked player in this international class), so why should his evaluation be any different in April? Well, part of what dictates the FV grade of amateur players is their distance from the big leagues and the risk that they actually aren’t good. Even college and well-traveled high school players who generate a fair amount of data are inherently more volatile than players who have performed for a few years in the minor leagues, and this is especially true for international signees, who only generate data like, say, swing-and-miss rates — none of which is publicly available, and which teams keep guarded because only some teams keep track of statistics in the international space — if teams track it manually.

There have been many high-profile, well-regarded amateur players who arrive in pro ball and seem so lost and overmatched that you know pretty quickly that, at best, things are going to take a while to pan out and, at worst, won’t pan out at all. Athletics prospect Robert Puason and Royals prospect Erick Peña are two recent examples of this. After they were seen facing pro pitching for a little while, even in settings like extended spring training where stats aren’t kept, there was alarm that neither was going to hit at all. Kevin Maitan, meanwhile, looked noticeably bigger during his first Instructional League, with the arrow pointing down pretty quickly. And while I certainly didn’t bury him after seeing him that first fall, it turned out to be a relevant data point.

Salas is the polar opposite of this, and in addition to me having seen him do some ridiculous things in person, the stories about his individual exploits have traveled like wildfire through the contingent of scouts who have had complex-level coverage this spring. He would often play in minor league spring training games multiple levels above his teenage peers (for instance, in a Double-A game with some players nearly 10 years older than him) and still perform. Last Thursday, during my most recent look, he swung over top of a back-foot breaking ball before making an adjustment on the next one, dropping the bat head to scoop the ball into the right field corner and legging out a triple. Two at-bats later, he flattened his path to get on top of a 95-mph fastball, which he didn’t get all of but still drove to just shy of the warning track in dead center field. I watched Lourdes Gurriel Jr. do almost the exact same thing in the local big league game later that night, and he’s 13 years older than Salas.

The physical tools and frame projection from Salas’ amateur report are all as advertised, and confidence in his hit tool has been reinforced by his look during the very early stages of his pro career. He’s somewhat raw as a receiver, but that’s typical of a teenage catching prospect, especially one getting his first consistent exposure to pro-quality stuff. Salas does everything else well already. He’s hitting and hitting for power to all fields, and he has a big arm and exceptional lateral agility that should make him a ball-blocking wall over time.

Salas presents two conundrums. First, how do you line up a soon-to-be-17-year-old prospect on a continuum of players that includes guys who are eight years older than he is? If we’re looking for an apples-to-apples way to triangulate where a player like this belongs on a universal prospect list, it’s logical to look toward the draft. Salas will turn 17 in June, making him younger at the time of the draft than even Cam Collier was when the Reds selected him 18th overall last year. Still, if we’re comparing his tools and athletic projection with the 2023 class, you can make a pretty coherent argument that Salas would come off the board second after LSU outfielder Dylan Crews. He doesn’t have the same statistical performance track record of a Max Clark or a Walker Jenkins, but he has more typical physical projection than either of them and plays a more meaningful position. Once-in-a-blue-moon draft prospects, like a Crews or an Adley Rutschman, tend to end up in the 60 FV tier by draft day, while Salas feels like he belongs a tier below that due to the relative lack of track record.

It’s tough to argue that Salas should rank ahead of Diego Cartaya, Endy Rodriguez, Tyler Soderstrom and the other catchers in the 55 FV and above tier because while Salas is as talented as that group, the others have a performance track record you can really sink your teeth into. Even Miguel Bleis has a year of huge on-paper performance to hang one’s hat on. And so Salas slides in at the very back of the 55 FV tier. I’ve updated his report on The Board.

Now, about the second conundrum Salas creates. Even as “offline” as I am anymore, I’m mindful of the pressure that hype and expectations can put on young athletes, and how immediate and intimate their access to those expectations can be since they carry the key to them around in their pockets and scroll through them during the idle parts of their day. I think it’s important to tell you how good this professional baseball player might be, but I also don’t want the relatively thoughtless, snowballing, 280-character knock-on effects from saying so to impact Salas’ young personhood or his career outcome in a negative way.

Whether they’re dealing with online hate or overbearing autograph hounds at their affiliate, to be a really good baseball prospect (or an athletic wunderkind of any kind) is a much different experience now than it was when I started doing this. You can look across sports, from women’s tennis to the NBA, and probably produce examples off the top of your head of young athletes who seem to have been negatively affected simply by having the experience of being a promising young athlete. I don’t think ignoring prodigies is the answer to this issue, and because so much of the toxicity seems to be generated by and accessed on the internet, I’m not sure there is one — our culture may just start naturally selecting for people who can either handle anti-social interactions or (gulp) thrive by participating in them — but I hope FanGraphs readers bear the negative ripple effects in mind as we monitor Salas’ performance.

Anyway, speaking of conundrums, the final Top 100 update pertains to Reds lefty Andrew Abbott, who was so dominant during his first three starts at Double-A Chattanooga this year that he posted a negative FIP; he’s since been promoted to Triple-A Louisville, where he made his first start last night. Abbott has 43 strikeouts in 20.2 innings so far this season and, after talking to a scout who has seen Abbott this year and a couple of in-office analysts looking at data, I’m ready to re-evaluate Abbott, though not without a key caveat.

Abbott has had a velo spike (everything is up about 1.5 ticks across the board) and upped his changeup usage (it’s nearly doubled, up to 14% from 8% so far this year per Synergy), and like a lot of other pitchers, he’s altered his breaking ball shape to include more sweep at the cost of downward, vertical drop. It’s possible he has added a completely new, second breaker to complement his curveball, which would be a welcome development, though it’s not obvious on paper whether he’s just altering the shape of one breaking ball when he wants to land it in the zone or if he’s using an entirely separate grip. Either way, each of Abbott’s pitches has improved by at least half a grade from his offseason Reds writeup and he has a long enough track record of strike-throwing in pro ball to start to ignore his amateur track record as a reliever. Remember, Abbott was completely passed over in the shortened 2020 draft because of his strike throwing at Virginia (he went in the second round in 2021), and the mere fact that he’s now more than a full year removed from Charlottesville is probably reason enough to believe he’s gotten better as a pitcher.

Here’s the caveat: as Yahoo’s Hannah Keyser reported at the beginning of the month, MLB is experimenting with a tacked baseball in the Southern League, where Abbott’s first three starts took place. Is this having an impact on his (and everyone else’s) performance? Here again I have a combination of anecdotal evidence from a scout whose org was curious about this, as well as a front office member who looked into it at my request. The average fastball in the Southern League currently has three more inches of induced vertical break (about 20 inches) than is typical across pro baseball (about 17 inches). Abbott himself experienced a four-inch induced vertical break increase when compared to his 20 Double-A starts last year. Abbott’s fastball, like a lot of the short, vertical arm stroke lefties in the Clayton Kershaw mechanical mold, has always punched above its weight due to its riding vertical action and carry, which is part of why he was an interesting college prospect even when he was sitting 90-92 mph. It’s fair to conclude that a pitch like Abbott’s fastball might be especially aided by the impacts of the tacked baseball when other aspects of his delivery and fastball shape help actualize all that extra movement. The velo uptick and breaking ball alterations have occurred independently of the baseball’s tack, and Abbott is a better pitcher now than he was a year ago, but I don’t think his Double-A dominance is precisely indicative of his new skill level; his vertical break wasn’t as good in his first Triple-A start. He now projects as a playoff team’s fourth starter.

Next, I have a couple of other Reds changes to highlight as I work to fight entropy across the prospect lists that have been completed. First, 23-year-old righty Lyon Richardson is returning from Tommy John surgery with huge arm strength, as he’s been sitting 95-99 mph during his first four starts, all of which have lasted three innings. Richardson has shown this sort of velocity for spurts before, but he hasn’t been able to hold it for a starter’s load of innings because of the pandemic and the TJ. He’s been fastball-heavy so far during his return. Secondary pitch quality and performance is the primary thing standing between Richardson and the Top 100 list, and ideally we’ll see him hold this velo as his innings count grows. He’s been promoted to Double-A and is on the 40-man roster, but while his pitch grades and scouting report have been updated, I haven’t touched his ETA as I still think it’s more likely that a post-surgery innings count will keep him from getting anything more than a cup of coffee this season. Additionally, 18-year-old infielder Carlos Sanchez has been added to the Reds list. You can check out his and Richardson’s full scouting reports on the Reds list over on The Board.

In non-Reds/Top 100 tweaks, Braves righty Jared Johnson has touched 99 mph in the time since our Braves prospect list published, so he’s been pushed to their list (he was previously an honorable mention) and has an updated report on The Board. I’ve also added all three late-20s Padres rookies — Brett Sullivan, Brent Honeywell Jr. (yes, he’s still a rookie, I forgot too), and Ray Kerr — to The Board since Sully and Kerr are both officially on the taxi squad to and from San Diego now.

Our next full prospect list will be the Tigers (I’m in Florida right now in part to see Lakeland and their extended spring group), while the Angels’ (the last team to start playing extended spring training games) and Cubs’ imminent big leaguers will also roll out soon.