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The 2026 MLB Draft begins tomorrow. Dreams will come true, and the course of baseball history will be altered not just by the talent of the players, but by the collective decisions of hundreds of hard-working people with teams and agencies who have been preparing for this since long before last year’s draft even began. Even though the current CBA negotiations and the owners’ proposal to maim the draft’s current format casts something of a shadow on this year’s event, it’s an exciting time for everyone, myself included. I not only get to learn about this class of players and share opinions about their baseball futures with our readers, I also get to highlight the strategies teams might use to maximize the talent they come away with. The bonus pool system, and the ways that teams, players, and their representatives navigate the “game” of the draft, is one of the things that separates baseball’s selection meeting from those of other sports. It rewards strategy, creativity and the cultivation of information that has nothing to do with hard baseball data. In this post, I’ll talk about the makeup and quality of this year’s class, take you through the pockets of players that pose difficult questions for clubs, and discuss a couple potential draft strategies, as well as which teams might best be able to execute them.

You’ll find the scouting reports and tool grades of 146 players over on The Board. Of that group, the 75 with a 40+ FV or above grade have an ordinal ranking, with the balance grouped by demographic. Brendan and I may still pepper that space with additional players between now and the draft, but they’ll be guys who fall lower on the list. The hard-ranked players are the ones who we’re most excited about. Read the rest of this entry »

Here is my first mock draft of the year, compiled with rumors sourced from scouts, executives, agents, and sometimes educated guesses based on team/personnel tendencies from the recent past. If there is enough new information between now and the draft (there usually is), I’ll publish an updated mock on Saturday morning, before things fire off. You can find updated scouting reports and tool grades for over 100 players on The Board, including all of the players mocked below. I’ve hard-ranked all of the 40+ FV and above players, with the others currently grouped by demographic. Later this week, I’ll offer my thoughts on the class as a whole; we’ll also release our final rankings. Brendan and I are working on expanding and augmenting the draft rankings for players likely to go in the middle rounds, so aspects of that part of the website might have an “under construction” look at times during the next few days as we shuffle things around and fold the demographic groups into a final ordinal ranking.

1. Chicago White Sox
Pick: Grady Emerson, SS, Fort Worth Christian (TX)
The top tier of this draft is generally seen as three players deep: Texas high school shortstop Grady Emerson, UCLA shortstop Roch Cholowsky, and Georgia Tech catcher Vahn Lackey. Teams picking behind the top three believe the most likely scenario is that those guys will come off the board in some order, with Roch and Emerson having been mentioned up top with Chicago, while Lackey has not been. The White Sox attempted to sign Cholowsky out of high school and no doubt like him, but everyone has the same question about Roch: Will his swing work in pro ball as well as it has so far? There really aren’t questions like that about Emerson. We might learn pretty quickly that Cholowsky is going to strike out more than we want him to, whereas that seems unlikely for Emerson. Conversely, Emerson might surprise us and get stronger than we expect, at which point he’d pretty clearly have the best ceiling of this trio, and you can’t really say that about the college guys, who can either meet our expectations or fall short of them.

2. Tampa Bay Rays
Pick: Vahn Lackey, C, Georgia Tech
This seems like a match made in heaven for both player and team. The Rays have been looking for their catcher of the future for a long time, and they value the things Lackey does well (like throw and play defense) as highly as any team. He’d move quickly and aid a perpetually competitive roster, and perhaps exorcise the Buster Posey/Tim Beckham demons. If the Rays want to cut an under-slot deal, Tyler Bell is the player I would both recommend and predict the Rays do it with given that they drafted him coming out of high school. Read the rest of this entry »

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Tampa Bay Rays. 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 »

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Pittsburgh Pirates. 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 »