Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Philadelphia Phillies. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the sixth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

The burners of the hot stove have been simmering across baseball since Kyle Tucker’s signing, and on Thursday, the Washington Nationals added their ingredients to the pot, trading two years of MacKenzie Gore’s services to the Texas Rangers for a five-player prospect package (Ben Clemens wrote about Gore’s fit with the Rangers here). This marks the second significant trade of the Paul Toboni era in Washington (Harry Ford for Jose A. Ferrer was the other) as he and the new members of the front office look to put their fingerprints on the org. The deal includes Texas’ 2025 first rounder Gavin Fien, injured former top pitching prospect Alejandro Rosario, 2025 rookie-level breakout bat Devin Fitz-Gerald, 23-year-old 1B/RF masher Abimelec Ortiz, and 20-year-old outfielder Yeremy Cabrera.

In contrast with yesterday’s Freddy Peralta trade, the Gore return is about a combination of depth and potential ceiling, rather than the proximity and more concrete upside of the two-player Peralta package. Reasonable minds could consider any of Fien, Rosario, or Fitz-Gerald as the headliner of this deal. Each of those guys has the physical talent to be an everyday big leaguer, though each also comes with a measure of uncertainty too great to consider any of them a Top 100 prospect right now. I’ll walk you through the players who are joining Washington’s farm system, then we’ll take a step back and examine the state of the organization’s direction under new leadership.

There are folks in baseball who love Fien, the 12th overall pick in last year’s draft who signed for nearly $5 million to eschew a commitment to the University of Texas. Fien swings hard, he has impressive power for his age, and he was one of the top performers on the high school showcase circuit, with a 1.045 OPS in events tracked by Synergy Sports from 2023 to 2024. The scouts and clubs who liked Fien the most before the draft considered him a mid-first round prospect, and one of the best couple of high school hitters in the class. I was (and am) personally a fair bit lower on Fien, and had him ranked 34th. The length and awkward look of his swing gave me pre-draft pause about his ability to match pro velocity, and I think Fien’s infield actions will at least force him to third base, if not to right field (where his arm would be weapon). The combination of strikeout risk and a corner fit, at least in my eyes, relegated him more to the comp round despite his power. His look in pro ball after the draft — a 10-game sample at Low-A Hickory plus Instructional League activity in Arizona — reinforced these notions. This is the player in the deal where you’re likely to get the widest range of opinions, and my personal take happens to be on the lower end of that continuum.

Before he got hurt, the opposite was true of Rosario, who I thought had become one of the best couple of pitching prospects in baseball in 2024. But that was before he blew out and things got (and remain) complicated. A very famous prospect since his high school underclass days, Rosario’s mid-to-upper-90s fastball used to miss frustratingly few bats because of its shape. He ran an ERA over 7.00 during both his sophomore and junior years at the University of Miami despite sitting 95-96 mph with a plus slider and splitter. The Rangers quickly overhauled Rosario’s delivery, most notably his arm slot, which became much more vertical than when he was an amateur. It totally changed the way his fastball played without sacrificing his arm strength or the quality of either secondary pitch, and it also improved his command, as his line to the plate became much more direct and comfortable-looking than when he was in college. In a 2024 split evenly between Low- and High-A, he posted a 36.9% strikeout rate, a 3.7% (!) walk rate, and a 2.24 ERA across 88.1 innings. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

On Saturday, the eve of his posting window’s closure, 29-year-old Japanese third baseman Kazuma Okamoto agreed to a four-year, $60 million contract with the reigning American League champion Toronto Blue Jays. Okamoto, who made his NPB debut as a teenager, is a career .277/.361/.521 hitter with Tokyo’s Yomiuri Giants. He had a power-hitting breakout in 2018, his age-22 campaign, beginning a six-year streak in which he hit 30 or more annual home runs, including a 2023 season in which he cracked 41 of them. He ranks second in all of NPB with 214 homers since 2019, our first year of NPB data tracking here at FanGraphs. During his 2025 platform year, Okamoto posted an incredible .327/.416/.598 line and career-best 11% strikeout rate, albeit in only 77 games because he sprained his left elbow in an on-field collision that caused him to miss roughly half the season.

Dangerous from top to bottom, lineup depth was the bedrock of a Toronto team that came within inches of winning a World Series, and Okamoto’s balanced contact/power hitting style fits in with the Blue Jays’ baton-passing attack. Pre-existing defensive versatility on their roster — namely, incumbent second baseman Andrés Giménez’s ability to play shortstop — gave them the flexibility to pursue players of virtually any position as a means of replacing free agent shortstop Bo Bichette. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, the New York Post’s Jon Heyman reported that Japanese pitcher Tatsuya Imai has agreed to a three-year, $54 million pact with the Houston Astros (ESPN’s Jesse Rogers had the length). The deal includes opt outs after each of the first two years, essentially a “prove it” contract that gives Imai the opportunity to re-enter free agency should he quickly demonstrate that he’s better than the open market seemed to think he was during this posting period. Speaking of the posting system, note that the Astros will also pay Imai’s Japanese club, the Seibu Lions, just shy of $10 million under the current MLB/NPB posting agreement’s formula (20% of the contract’s first $25 million, 17.5% of the next $25 million, and 15% of anything over $50 million). The deal also features $9 million in escalator clauses that kick in as Imai approaches and crosses the 100-inning threshold during his first two seasons, bringing Houston’s total potential expenditure to roughly $73 million.

This deal is shorter and less lucrative than was generally expected by pundits (including yours truly) when it became known that Imai would be posted; Ben Clemens forecast a five-year, $100 million deal, while our median crowdsource estimate was for four years and $64 million before the posting fee. Imai is 27-years-old, he’s coming off of his best pro season after multiple consecutive years of improved strike-throwing, and he checks several of the visual scouting and data analytics boxes you want from a mid-rotation starter. What could be the reason(s) for the discrepancy between our collective expectations and Imai’s actual payday, and where does he fit into Houston’s rotation?

Let’s revisit the background on Imai. He was the Seibu Lions’ 2016 first round pick out of a high school in Utsunomiya City, a metro roughly the size of Tucson that’s about 80 miles north of Tokyo. He spent a year in the minors and then hopped right into the Lions rotation as a 20-year-old in 2018. Throughout his early and mid-20s, Imai was a walk-prone (but effective) starter. He dealt with multiple ailments in 2022 (including a right adductor injury), then took a step forward as a strike-thrower and an innings-eater in each of the next three seasons, becoming one of NPB’s best arms. Across the 2022-25 seasons, Imai halved his walk rate (from the 14% area to 7%), expanded his repertoire, and improved his fastball velocity even as his innings count grew to north of 160 frames. He’s had four consecutive seasons with an ERA under 2.50 (even while he was wild), and in 2025, he posted a 1.92 ERA and 2.01 FIP. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Cincinnati Reds. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the sixth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

Orioles fans have had “Frontline Starter” on their Christmas list since the departure of Corbin Burnes, and though Friday’s acquisition of Shane Baz is perhaps the gift equivalent of asking for a Ferrari and getting an Acura, it adds a proven element to the middle of an Orioles rotation that still feels like it will be anchored by Kyle Bradish and Trevor Rogers.

To acquire the 26-year-old Baz, who is coming off a 2-WAR season, the Orioles had to part with a prospect potpourri made up of a pair of 2025 draftees (Coastal Carolina catcher Caden Bodine and high school outfielder Slater de Brun), a Competitive Balance Round A pick in next year’s draft, upper-level starting pitcher prospect Michael Forret, and speedy 22-year-old outfielder Austin Overn. It’s an enormous, high-volume return for one player and helps the roots of the Chris Archer trade tree anchor deeper into the game’s soil. I’ll talk more about each prospect, the comp pick, and the way this trade impacts both clubs’ farm systems later in the post. But let’s start with the most immediately consequential piece of the deal: Shane Baz.

Baz has been famous since his junior year of high school, when he emerged as one of the better pitching prospects in the 2017 draft. He was selected by Pittsburgh in the middle of the first round and traded as the Player to be Named in the Archer deal a little over a year later. The pandemic and persistent injuries (there were some near-misses as well) slowed Baz’s ascent through the minors and prevented him from working more than 81 innings in any single season until literally 2025. The Rays doggedly deployed him as a starter despite his injuries and early-career command woes, and they were rewarded with something of a breakout this year, as Baz ate 166.1 innings across 31 starts. He posted a 4.87 ERA, but hurricane damage to Tropicana Field meant that he pitched his home games in a minor league park with the hitter-friendly dimensions of Yankee Stadium; his xERA, which controls for defense, quality of contact, and the hitting environment, was 3.86. Read the rest of this entry »