Today is the first day of the 2025 college baseball season, and to celebrate, we’re cutting the ribbon on our 2025 Draft prospect rankings and scouting reports. They’re now live on The Board, so head over there for all these players’ tool grades and reports. In this piece, I’ll touch on several individual players who I think are among this year’s best and most interesting prospects, and discuss the class as a whole from a talent standpoint, as well as which teams are in position to have a huge draft.

First, some quick housekeeping on the rankings. I’ve got just shy of 100 players on The Board right now. I’ve hard-ranked the players with a 40+ FV and above, while the 40 FV players are clustered by demographic below them. At this stage in the draft process, players are more in “neighborhoods” or clusters. It’s too early to have hundreds of players ordinally ranked, because the deeper you go, the more those rankings will change between now and draft day. On this update, I’ve tried to include players who have the best chance to take a leap during this season and climb The Board. This is definitely a ceiling-heavy list at this stage, in part because so many of the higher-floored players tend to reveal themselves during the college season. New prospect contributor David Gerth, whose debut piece will run later today, helped produce the reports on the players in the Big Ten conference. Obviously, there will be much more to come in the next few months as guys separate themselves from their peers, and new standouts emerge. Read the rest of this entry »

Now that the dust has settled on teams’ pursuit of Roki Sasaki, and clubs have signed most of their 2025 international prospects, it is time to turn our attention to the international pros whose 2025 seasons will soon get underway and to the tippy top of the 2026 international amateur class. All of my top 2025 international prospects have now signed. Twins outfielder Carlos Taveras was the last from that group to put pen to paper, signing a couple of days ago for a shade over $1 million. The players and rankings from that class have been archived on their own page of The Board, including the couple of Japanese pros who came over from NPB this offseason. Remaining on the active International Players page (which you’re going to want to open in a new tab) are the foreign pros I think readers should know about and follow for this season and beyond, as well as a couple of amateur players from the upcoming 2026 class (more on those lads in a few paragraphs). Read the rest of this entry »

I was hired as FanGraphs’ Lead Prospect Analyst just after the 2016 draft and took my first run at evaluating the entirety of the minor leagues on my own the following winter. Enough time has now passed that many of the players from that era of prospecting have had big league careers unfold (or not). Hindsight allows me to have a pretty definitive idea of whether my call on a player was right or wrong in a binary sense, and gauge any gap that may exist between my evaluation and what the player ultimately became. Looking back allows me to assess my approach to grading and ranking players so that I might begin to establish some baselines of self-assessment and see how I perform compared to my peers at other publications. Last offseason, I began compiling the various Top 100 prospect rankings from seven years ago for the purposes of such a self-assessment, an exercise that culminated in the “How’s My Driving?” piece that ran during Prospect Week 2024. This winter, I turned my attention to the 2018 Top 100, which I co-authored with Kiley McDaniel. Below are the results of that audit and my thoughts on them.

Before we get to a couple of big, fun tables and my notes, I want to quickly go over why I’ve taken the approach I have here and discuss its flaws. There are absolutely deeper avenues of retrospective analysis that can be done with prospect lists than what I have attempted below, approaches that could educate us about prospects themselves, and probably also about prospect writers. (Last year, in the first edition of this piece, I proposed a few such potential methods of evaluation and included my thoughts on their limitations. For the sake of brevity, I’ve cut that discussion from this year’s edition, but if you’re curious about that stuff specifically, you’ll want to go back and read the paragraph that begins, “Eventually, someone could pool the lists…”) Read the rest of this entry »

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the New York Yankees. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the fifth 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 »

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 fifth 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 »

Major League Baseball had its “Kevin Durant is a Warrior” moment on Friday, when 23-year-old Japanese phenom Roki Sasaki agreed to sign with the defending World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers for $6.5 million. Sasaki himself announced his decision via his Instagram, while his bonus was reported on X by The Athletic’s Fabian Ardaya and Alden González of ESPN.

If he can stay healthy, Sasaki is a likely front-of-the-rotation arm who has the talent to win Cy Young Awards. When he’s been fully operational, his fastball has averaged nearly 99 mph, he has an elite splitter, and his slider became a useable weapon in 2022. He joins a loaded Dodgers roster that has five or six other players who either have won a Cy Young or MVP (Freddie Freeman, Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, Blake Snell), or could conceivably do so in their best season (Tyler Glasnow and maybe Yoshinobu Yamamoto). One and a half of those players weren’t even on last year’s Dodgers title team. As I’m writing this, the Dodgers have not yet announced the signing. Though Sasaki’s contract is technically a minor league deal, and he isn’t yet on the 40-man roster, he is overwhelmingly likely to break camp with the Dodgers’ big league club and be part of their squad that opens the season against the Cubs in Japan on March 18-19. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the San Francisco Giants. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the fifth 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 »