Once again, we’ve done a refresh of all of our draft rankings. They get tweaked multiple times per week in subtle ways, but every few weeks they need a larger overhaul when there are over a dozen guys who have moved around in the key spots. That’s what happened this weekend. We reset the trend arrows a few days ago to clean things up a bit visually. Here are some notes on where we stand now:

• There is now a level of comfort amongst scouts with the hierarchy of college pitching in this year’s draft. TCU LHP Nick Lodolo is the consensus number one, West Virginia RHP Alek Manoah is the consensus number two, and Elon RHP George Kirby is most scouts’ third choice. Some scouts have Kentucky LHP Zack Thompson third, but he’s had durability issues dating back to high school, so when his medicals come out, he could go anywhere from 10th to 40th.
• As for high school pitching, it’s a big more muddled. I’m heading out tonight to see the guy who most feel is the best prep pitcher in the draft, Florida prep RHP Matthew Allan. Behind him, most scouts have another Florida prep RHP (whom I’ll see Friday), Brennan Malone. Illinois prep RHP Quinn Priester’s area kicks off a bit later than the Sunshine State but some scouts had him up to 97 mph in his last start, so he may jump into that top tier with Allan and Malone after another couple starts. New Jersey prep RHP (and son of Al) Jack Leiter was good in front of lots of heat last week at NHSI, and he’s probably next in the pecking order, with months of speculation that it’ll take $3 million or more to keep him from going to Vanderbilt. This, along with the varied rankings of prep pitching from team to team, likely makes him a target for an overslot bonus later in the first round by a club with multiple picks (similar to how the Cardinals landed Jack Flaherty).
• Some preferences in the early picks are becoming clearer. It still seems like Adley Rutschman at one (Orioles) and Andrew Vaughn at two (Royals) are the two easier ones to project with what we know at this point (the full draft order and slots can be found here). Rutschman’s lead at the top spot is still significant, so it would take a major injury or an uglier-than-expected medical to make Vaughn a real option at the first pick for Baltimore. The buzz is that the White Sox are leaning heavily to college prospects for the third pick, with Nick Lodolo in the mix along with the next tier of college hitters, which can be ranked any way at this point (UNLV SS Bryson Stott, North Carolina 1B Michael Busch, Vanderbilt RF J.J. Bleday, Arizona State LF Hunter Bishop, Missouri RF Kameron Misner is the way we have them lined up right now). There’s similar buzz that Miami is also looking hard at college options and that Lodolo is in their mix. Things get a bit hazier beyond that and also depend on the picks at three and four. The general feeling is that this top 10 isn’t strong enough to make every club just take the best player available, so there’s some chatter that clubs picking outside the top five may take a money saver with the first pick and move that money to float a prep prospect to their second pick. That strategy may be more fraught than normal this year with Arizona in possession of a $16 million bonus pool and set to pick 16th, 26th, 33rd, and 34th.
• We’re up to 271 total players in the 2019 list now and we’re adding to the 2020 and 2021 lists weekly. We also have a handful of 2022 prep names ready for when the unsigned 2019 prep players join that class as college players. I’m starting a Florida swing this week and should see all of the potential first rounders in the state along with a couple Florida State League games. Last weekend, I saw Nasim Nunez, Louisville/Clemson, UNC/Georgia Tech, UNC Wilmington/Kennesaw State, Georgia/Vanderbilt, and a Triple-A game between the Braves and Orioles affiliates. Eric is running around the Pacific Northwest and he’s always bouncing around the backfields and local amateur games back in Arizona. We’ve got new Sony high speed cameras, so stay tuned to the FanGraphs Youtube page (Mackenzie Gore or Ryan Jensen) and Instagram account (Austin Riley or Michael Busch) to see what we’ve been seeing on the pro and amateur end of things, likely at 960 frames per second.
• Georgia has seemed like it was on the verge of being a top tier program for decades, with all kinds of built-in advantages, and now it appears to be coming together. The 2020 group is strong, headlined by the top two pitchers in the class (RHP Emerson Hancock and Cole Wilcox) along with the Saturday starter (LHP C.J. Smith), and the 2019 class also has a potential first day headliner (3B Aaron Schunk) along with solid day two depth pieces (RHPs Tony Locey and Tim Elliott, SS Cam Shepherd). The top tier SEC programs (LSU, Vanderbilt, Florida have been the top tier recently) often have more than a half dozen top 5-7 round prospects for the next two drafts, a strong freshman class, and a strong high school senior crop. Georgia is joining a number of other strong programs (Arkansas, Mississippi State, Texas A&M, Ole Miss, Auburn) in challenging for an extended stay in the top tier, and some would argue a few of those already have.
• Along those lines, Miami hasn’t broken through yet, but has a very strong 2020 class with five players (SS Freddy Zamora, 3B Raymond Gil, 1B Alex Toral, RHPs Slade Cecconi and Chris McMahon) on THE BOARD, while only being slated to lose one player who’s on the 2019 list (RHP Evan McKendry).

It’s not as significant as the Week One update, but we have about another dozen or so players that have moved around since we last updated THE BOARD. Here are some quick notes covering the most notable movers in the 2019 list, with trend arrows for all of these names and more available on THE BOARD:

• Texas Tech 3B Josh Jung and Vanderbilt RF J.J. Bleday both have some buzz in the industry as being in the mix to be the third-best college bat behind Oregon State C Adley Rutschman and Cal 1B Andrew Vaughn (both recent risers themselves); Jung and Bleday have moved up to reflect this. Bleday is off to a quick start and looks more athletic than he has in the past, while Jung is a hit-first type who could improve considerably with more loft in his swing in pro ball, but compares favorably to some recent top-10 overall college bats. Others college bats in that mix are UNLV SS Bryson Stott, North Carolina LF Michael Busch, and the big riser in the last update, Missouri RF Kameron Misner.
• North Carolina State SS Will Wilson is also a rising player, as a potential 5 hit, 5 power middle infielder who likely ends up at second base. Some scouts see plus makeup and versatility with a chance that he may end up catching in pro ball and being an Austin Barnes or Will Smith type who can play every position on the field. Wilson’s polish, performance, and fit in today’s game could push him into the top 15 picks.
• Clemson SS Logan Davidson and UNC-Wilmington SS Greg Jones each face questions about their hit tool, but Jones stays slightly ahead of Davidson because his upside is still much higher. On the flip side, Arizona State LF Hunter Bishop has 7 raw power and 6 speed and is hitting much better this year, so he’s rising until further notice.
• Duke LHP Graeme Stinson looked like the clear top pitcher in the class when the college season was set to start, with scouts having confidence that his mid-90s fastball and 70 slider could transition to starting full-time. He’s performed well, but the velocity has kept creeping down — he was into the 80s this weekend — to the point where scouts are openly questioning if there’s an arm problem or if Stinson simply can’t start and needs to be seen as a reliever going forward. Even a worst-case scenario still has him in the top 30 picks or so, but his stock has dipped a good bit.

There was further movement lower in the rankings, and some light changes in the 2020 and 2021 classes. A few fun notes on those future classes — for instance, fourth-ranked 2020 prospect Georgia RHP Cole Wilcox was 95-99 mph this weekend after a tough college debut, Florida State 2021 RF Robby Martin has really impressed scouts early, and 2020 Mississippi State RHP J.T. Ginn is showing more starter traits than he did in high school — have been folded into the rankings, as well.

We’ve updated our 2019 MLB Draft rankings in a big way, moving a couple dozen players after two weeks of games, expanding to list 200 players total, and adding trend arrows. We also made some slight tweaks to the 2020 and 2021 rankings. Here’s a quick rundown of what we saw and heard over the last few weeks to prompt us to move some players into the top half of the first round on the 2019 list:

1. Adley Rutschman, C, Oregon State
After Eric watched him go off again this weekend, we’ve upgraded him to a 60 FV and would have him right behind Keibert Ruiz at 16 on the Top 100. He’s creating more distance between himself and the field for the top pick.

2. C.J. Abrams, SS, Blessed Trinity HS (GA)
The next couple players behind Rutschman are still pretty tightly packed, but Abrams looks stronger (55 present raw power) and is still a 70 runner, though scouts are still split on his best long-term positional fit. He appears to be solidly in every club’s top five, and is now the industry consensus for the Royals at pick number two.

9. Kameron Misner, RF, Missouri
We had Misner in a “wait and see” bucket after he skipped the summer, and the early returns are very positive. Scouts who generally hadn’t seen him other than in scrimmage looks in the fall are dropping 70 raw power grades on him, and think he’ll work his way into the conversation for the best college bat behind Rutschman, with some clubs in the top 10 rumored to have him on their shortlist already, including the White Sox at three.

12. Shea Langliers, C, Baylor
Langliers broke his hamate bone and will miss a few weeks. He likely won’t show much game power before the draft, so he may slide even lower than this after the prospects rising behind him have a chance to string together a month of performance at their new levels.

14. George Kirby, RHP, Elon
Kirby dealt in his first outing, delivering on the first round rumors we heard entering the spring. The stuff is above to plus and there are starter traits present.

15. Matthew Allan, RHP, Seminole HS (FL)
We noted last week in print and on the podcast that Allan was up to 97 and flashed a plus curveball in his season debut.

Other Movers

Jackson Rutledge and Alek Manoah both look more starter-ish and have maintained their plus stuff. Graeme Stinson’s velo was down in his starting debut and scouts are concerned. Logan Davidson’s hit tool has always been a question and it still is. Michael Toglia was too passive in Kiley’s look this weekend and his righty swing leaves a lot to be desired. J.J. Bleday looks more athletic than some expected. Hunter Barco has a higher slot and firmer stuff. Seth Johnson was up to 98 mph in his season debut and many think he can start. Carter Stewart had a really rough start after a couple that were fine. J.J. Goss has had better velocity and consistency than teammate Matthew Thompson.

Hunter Bishop, Brett Baty and Rece Hinds have all hit more than expected and all have huge power; one likely ends up in the first round. Hunter Gaddis is generating buzz early, showing both above average stuff and feel. Brandon Williamson and Drey Jamison were mentioned last week in Eric’s Arizona looks as deserving of the Top 100; Grant Gambrell was the top new arm he saw this week. Tyler Dyson and Ryan Zeferjahn have both come out of the gate slowly; Dyson is joined in that regard by teammates Austin Langworthy and Wil Dalton. JuCo righty Orlando Ribalta has been up to 97 and shown starter traits, gaining steam with scouts despite not pitching last season.

With the 2019 NCAA Baseball season set to begin on Friday, we have updated our draft prospect rankings for this year, as well as the two drafts that follow. Each class can be found via this link to THE BOARD.

So what has changed since we last updated our rankings in the fall? There were more high school showcases throughout the autumn months, and college teams held fall practices and scrimmages, during which it was clear that some players had changed since the end of the previous season. Some January high school tournaments took place in warmer locales, and the junior college season began several weeks ago. We expect all of these rankings to change as the draft approaches, though our focus will be on the 2019 class for obvious reasons. The 2021 class rankings are mostly comprised of unsigned high school players from the 2018 draft, as well as a handful of high school players who have been identified early.

Does the 2019 class have any overarching themes, and how does it compare to other recent drafts?
It’s hard not to note the lack of exciting college pitching, though it’s also worth remembering that at this time last year, soon-to-be No. 1 overall pick Casey Mize was nowhere near the runaway, best-in-class arm he’d eventually become. We expect to have higher opinions of several college arms come June, but the list of guys who we’d bet on rising up our board is also just shorter than usual.

That’s not to say the entire class is bad. It currently appears well-stocked with college hitters (arguably the most widely-desired demographic by major league clubs), particularly college hitters who have a chance to stay up the middle.

Just how good is Adley Rutschman?
Rutschman, the Oregon State catcher, is currently our top prospect for the 2019 draft. At this point in the process, it’s natural for readers to ask if there’s a generational talent in this class, or if this year’s top prospect is better than past top picks. He’s better right now, for us and the scouts we talk to, than 2018 Georgia Tech catcher/Giants second overall pick Joey Bart, who is obviously an easier direct comparison than Mize, despite Mize going first overall last year. We have Rutschman as the only 55 FV player in this draft class; Bart was a 50 FV on our 2018 draft rankings, with the main difference being Rutschman’s superior hit tool. The rest of the tools are about the same. As you’ll see on our overall rankings later this week, Mize is at the lower end of the 55 FV tier, and we’d have Rutschman slightly above him, but sandwiched between the top catching prospect in the minor leagues (the Dodgers’ Keibert Ruiz) and the second one (Bart), which would slot Rutschman in the 21-40 overall range of a top 100, were he eligible.

Also, because the draft order is totally set, we can officially lay to rest the #PlayBadlyForAdley hashtag.

Will we have another Kyler Murray/Jordyn Adams situation?
It may not be as dramatic as the Murray soap opera has turned out to be, but there’s a good chance that we have two two-sport athletes with signability questions. High schoolers Maurice Hampton (No. 19 overall on THE BOARD, and a 4-star LSU WR recruit) and Jerrion Ealy (No. 38 for us, and a 5-star Ole Miss RB commit) are both premium two-sport talents whose signability major league teams will need to properly gauge and feel comfortable with if they’re going to take them, the way the Angels did with Adams last year and Oakland seemingly did not do with Murray.

Ealy’s narrative has already been quite dramatic, as he was once an Ole Miss commit before de-committing to consider other schools, including Alabama and Clemson. It was thought throughout the industry that if Ealy ended up in Clemson or Tuscaloosa, baseball would have no shot at him. He re-committed to Ole Miss last week; both he and Hampton are considered signable in the first round, at least.

What about two-way players?
Two of the names we find most intriguing as two-way possibilities are SoCal high school LHP/1B Spencer Jones and Houston-area MIF/CF/RHP Sanson Faltine III, also known as Trey Faltine. They’re both plus athletes with terrific breaking balls and presently fringy velocity (lots of 88-92), but they’re different hitters. Jones is a power projection bat while Faltine is more compact and speedy.

What about the next two classes?
2020 looks solid, led by two pitchers from the Georgia Bulldogs (right-handers Cole Wilcox and Emerson Hancock), and we’ve already identified about half of the top tier of talent (50 or better FV) that’s standard for a draft class. This class is also pretty balanced, with a solid mix of hitting and pitching, and prep and college talent, though the college talent leans heavily toward players from the SEC, ACC, and this summer’s collegiate Team USA. It seemed unusual this summer that there were so many 2020, and one 2021, prep pitchers getting into the mid-90s, but perhaps 15- and 16-year-olds hitting 95 mph is just normal now. 2021 is obviously leaning toward college talent at the moment, as many of the high school prospects are 15 years old today, so just a handful have emerged as elite talents (Brady House, Luke Leto, Nick Bitsko, Roc Riggio (!), Braylon Bishop, and Blaze Jordan).

Who has risen since the last rankings?
Missouri center fielder Kameron Misner was in the 90 to 100 area for us in the early fall, as he was a known tools type with injury issues who didn’t play over the summer, then started rising with a loud fall. San Jacinto JC (TX) right-hander Jackson Rutledge transferred from Arkansas and was in the mid-90s, touching 97 in the pen for the Razorbacks, but took a step forward at San Jac. He was solidly in the top 100 for us weeks ago until his season debut, when scouts told us it was a Nate Pearson starter kit, into the high-90s once again with two plus breaking balls and some starter traits, cementing his position further. TCU lefty Nick Lodolo finally had the velo bump in the fall we’ve been waiting years for. Florida righty Tyler Dyson started showing first round stuff in the fall as his rollercoaster is headed back up. Elon righty George Kirby is showing two pluses at times with some starter traits, and Campbell righty Seth Johnson is also in that general area, at another smaller North Carolina college.

On the prep side, Jacksonville-area third baseman Tyler Callihan slimmed down in the fall and got a little more athletic while also not looking bad in a short stint as a catcher, so his power bat is now in day one contention. Pennsylvania prep player, and younger brother of Reds center fielder Mike Siani, Sammy Siani also went from a solid follow to a real prospect with a loud showing in Jupiter in October.

How about all these Diamondbacks picks?
Because the Dbacks did not sign Matt McLain last year, got picks for losing Patrick Corbin and A.J. Pollock, and received a pick back from St. Louis in the Paul Goldschmidt deal, they’ll pick 16th, 26th, 33rd, 34th, 57th, 75th, 78th, and 94th in the upcoming draft. Not only does this mean Arizona will likely add eight 40 or better FV prospects to their farm system, it also means they have a ton of financial flexibility because their bonus pool size will be so large. Except for perhaps Atlanta, which also picks twice (at nine because they failed to sign Carter Stewart, and 21 as their normal pick), it could prove virtually impossible for teams to try to move over-slot high schoolers back to their second round picks, because the Dbacks will just be able to take them and meet their asking price if they want.

Will the current labor climate have any impact on the draft?
Amateur players get hosed by CBA negotiations because they don’t have a seat at the bargaining table, and the MLBPA (made up of players who have already been drafted and won’t ever have to be again) has continuously traded amateur players’ rights for its members’ own benefits, albeit insufficient ones. The lack of current free agent movement may begin to impact the decisions of high school athletes choosing between entering pro baseball now or waiting through three years of D-I college baseball before they re-enter the draft. If a college player is drafted at age 21 or 22 and takes two to three years to reach the Majors, their six-year service time clock will start when they’re 23-25 and they’ll hit the open market when they’re 29-31. The current state of free agency signals that those players may never have a big payday.

Mets first baseman Peter Alonso is a great example. He has done nothing but mash since he was a teen, but is the sort of prospect who doesn’t get paid out of high school, with clubs preferring to see less athletic corner types perform in college rather than take their prep versions in the first few rounds. Alonso kept hitting and now will be a 31-year-old R/R first baseman when he becomes a free agent. If 26-year-old superstars are struggling to get a fair shake in free agency, what kind of market can Alonso expect to have? We don’t know if this will impact the decision-making process of elite high school prospects, and perhaps a new CBA will soon make this a moot point. But it’s something we think players might start to consider.

Who could move up this spring?
We both picked a few guys we think will move up. Good luck to all the teams and players this spring.
Eric: J.J. Goss, Faltine, Gunnar Henderson, Kyren Paris, Tanner Morris
Kiley: Jackson Rutledge, Hunter Barco, Jack Kochanowicz, Kirby, Seth Johnson

The summer, rich with relevant amateur baseball, has ended. With it ends an important stretch on the player-evaluation calendar, one that is being weighed more heavily with each passing draft. We consider this checkpoint to be a sensible time to revisit our draft prospect rankings and make a sweeping update to the amateur wing of THE BOARD. A link to the 2019 draft board is here, but it can also be accessed through our brand new prospect landing page, which encompasses all of our content (shout-out to Sean Dolinar!) here.

Below we’ve attempted to anticipate some questions readers might have and to answer them as well as possible.

Q. Why is the summer so important for draft evaluation?

A. The high concentration of talent in collegiate wood-bat leagues and in scout-run high-school showcase events (which are designed to be evaluation-friendly) more closely approximates the talent environment of pro baseball. It’s hard to know if a high-school hitter facing a lot of suburban varsity, upper-70s fastballs is actually any good, but watch a prep hitter face Division I breaking balls and 90-plus mph fastballs for eight weeks, and you’re going to learn a lot about him.

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Notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Luc Rennie, RHP, New York Mets (Profile)
Level: Low-A   Age: 24   Org Rank: NR   FV: 30
Line: 7 IP, 4 H, 0 BB, 0 R, 14 K

Notes
Rennie is four appearances deep into his first year back in affiliated ball since 2015, when he was with Baltimore. He’s spent the last several seasons with Evansville in the independent Frontier League and was injured for a portion of that time. He was dominant for the Otters this spring and signed with the Mets earlier this month. Last night he pitched the game of his life and struck out 14 hitters, a Columbia franchise record, with most of them coming on a plus upper-70s 12-6 curveball. Rennie has five pitches. His fastball has natural cut, he has a two-seamer, an average mid-80s slider, that curveball, and a below-average changeup. He’ll run the fastball up to 95 but sits 90-92 and mixes his breaking balls well. Rennie is carrying a 0.83 ERA through 21.1 innings at Low-A.

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The 2018 MLB Draft’s signing deadline passed last week, and more teams failed to sign their early picks than is typical. Ultimately, four of the top 36 selections opted not to enter professional ball, all from the prep ranks. Those players are as follows: RHP Carter Stewart (Atlanta’s pick at No. 8), SS Matt McLain (Arizona at No. 25), RHP J.T. Ginn (Dodgers at No. 30), and Gunnar Hoglund (Pirates at No. 36). Scouting details on those individuals can be found on THE BOARD.

This has left those teams with one fewer prospect in their system than anticipated (all four teams get a compensation pick in next year’s draft), but more significantly, it moves a handful of premium talent into future draft classes. This year’s crop of unsigned high schoolers now serves as a preview of the college talent pool for the 2021 draft, but there are also a few 2020 prospects who are eligible early because they’re old for their class. There’s also a possibility that some could find their way into the 2019 draft class if they opt to attend junior college. We’ll reclassify players on THE BOARD as they change.

With that in mind, we thought it reasonable to present snapshots of each of the next three draft classes based on how we have the players graded right now. The industry’s evaluation of the 2019 class is already underway in earnest (Team USA, Cape Cod, and prep showcases are all occurring as we speak), and we’ve lined up a short list of the class’s top names thus far over on THE BOARD. Our 2020 list is mostly composed of the players we regarded as the best college freshmen this year, though we know of a few high schoolers who look like early first-round talents, too. The 2021 list is just a ranking of the high schoolers who didn’t sign in this year’s draft, exactly as they appeared on our 2018 draft board. We’re skeptical of prep players who have popped up this early because it’s often the result of physical maturity, but we don’t think that’s the case for Pennsylvania high school RHP Kevin Bitsko, whom we have evaluated similarly to the lean projection arms who are 40 FVs on the July 2 list.

We’re still too early in the process to make conclusive statements about the talent level of the 2019 draft class as a whole, much less the 2020 or 2021 varieties, so all this could change. As it stands now, however, the 2019 class collectively appears to lack the depth of the 2018 crop. By this time last year, we had a rough idea of how deep the high-school pitching was and knew that the Southeast had an overwhelming volume of talent. College hitting is the strength of next year’s draft class, and there’s lots of depth to the college crop in general, but the prep class lacks the quantity of players who are regarded as in-a-vacuum first rounders that one customarily sees at this point. Moreover, the college pitching class lacks a guy who looks like a top-five or -10 selection right now, though Casey Mize didn’t fit that criteria last summer and then ended up going first overall to Detroit in June.

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Since it’s always draft-evaluation season, I thought it might make sense to start this post-draft notes column with some names for future draft classes. It’s too early to really rank these guys with any depth since we (and scouts) will be seeing all these players over the next couple months, so they will shuffle themselves a good bit this summer, but we definitely have a sense of who the top tier of talent is in the amateur ranks. These names are all in order of preference within the group in which they are identified.

2019 MLB Draft

For the 2019 class, there is a top tier of five prep standouts, while the college side is very deep in hitters. College pitching is very shallow at this early juncture, however. On the prep side, we have SS C.J. Abrams (Georgia), SS Bobby Witt, Jr. (Texas), LHP Hunter Barco (Florida), 3B Rece Hinds (Florida), and RHP Brennan Malone (North Carolina).

Atop the very deep college hitter class, we have SS Bryson Stott (UNLV), C Adley Rutschman (Oregon State), SS Logan Davidson (Clemson), C Shea Langliers (Baylor), SS Greg Jones (UNC Wilmington), RF Michael Toglia (UCLA), 3B Josh Jung (Texas Tech), RF Michael Busch (North Carolina), RF Matt Wallner (Southern Miss), and SS Braden Shewmake (Texas A&M).

As for that second tier of college bats, we have 3B Drew Mendoza (Florida State), 1B Andrew Vaughn (Cal), SS Will Holland (Auburn), CF Kam Misner (Missouri), 2B Chase Strumpf (UCLA), CF Wil Dalton (Florida), SS Will Wilson (North Carolina State), 1B Spencer Brickhouse (East Carolina), and 2B Nick Quintana (Arizona). All of those college hitters have top-two-round type profiles and the depth of the class means Team USA and the Cape will be deep with bats to watch this summer. There isn’t a clear top college pitcher, and none project for the top 15 picks at this point.

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It’s been a little while since I emptied my scouting notebook of the draft prospects I’ve scouted, so I’ve split it into college and high-school portions. Below are all of the notable college draft prospects I’ve scouted in the last month, with thoughts on what I saw from them and how the industry views them. First, I’ll break down the prospects projected for the top two rounds, with embedded video. For reference, here are Eric and my preseason draft rankings, which will be updated soon. Below the likely first- and second-rounders are potential third- through sixth-rounds picks. Below that group is a collection of possible first- and second-rounders for the 2019 and 2020 drafts, the most recent rankings for which are available here.

Rounds One and Two

Alec Bohm, 3B, Wichita State

Bohm was seen by most scouts before the season as a first-rounder but also the second-best prospect on his own team behind Greyson Jenista (below). This spring, Bohm has clearly overtaken his teammate and had some scouts whispering that he did some things like Kris Bryant the night I saw him against ECU. To be clear, Bohm isn’t seen as that level of a prospect just yet, but he isn’t as far away as you may think. He has 70 raw power and, even at 6-foot-4, 205 pounds, does a great job at the plate keeping his hands tucked in and limiting his hand load to keep his stroke short. Even with with that, he still can do things like hit an opposite-field home run with a flick of the wrist, as you can see in the above video.

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To answer your first question: no, there isn’t a slam-dunk, generational talent among the prospects ranked below. We’ll have to wait a little longer, it seems, for the next Bryce Harper to emerge. Nevertheless, the 2018 draft class is generally seen as deep and strong, particularly in prep pitching. There isn’t a player yet on whom we’d currently put a 55 FV (that is, the lowest grade received by the first 42 prospects on the recently published top-100 list), but almost every draft class ends up with a couple of those, and obviously these names will shift around during the season.

For reference, last year’s draft ended up with one low 60 FV and five players with 55 FV grades by the time the offseason arrived. So expecting three to five of the following prospects to emerge in the top 50 of next year’s Top 100 seems reasonable. As you might guess, the top 10-15 prospects are pretty tightly packed. With most of the early-season action occurring in Arizona, Florida, and SoCal, we’ll both be out to get lots of early looks this spring to quickly start sorting more out.

It’s too early to do a mock draft that would amount to anything much greater than a collection of guesses (here’s the draft order, for reference), but something to monitor is the presence of those clubs that lean risk-averse/analytic/etc. in the top half of the first round. In light of certain trends within the game — and, in particular, what appears to be a greater interest in near-ready, low-end-regular types — this could push college players (and, specifically, college bats) up into the high first round. Both Oregon State and Missouri State have TrackMan units at their home parks, so clubs will have multiple years of data on Madrigal and Eierman to aid their evaluations. Hitters from Virginia have benefited in much the same way from strong, large-sample TrackMan data in recent drafts.

Just as the recent minor-league top-100 list prominently featured the sons of Dante Bichette, Vladimir Guerrero, and Fernando Tatis, the lists that follow also feature quite a bit in the way of bloodlines. We have the sons of Jeff Conine, Troy Percival, David Weathers, and Bobby Witt, along with the younger brothers of Pirates Triple-A RHP Nick Kingham, Rays Double-A 1B/LF Joe McCarthy, Padres Double-A 1B Josh Naylor, and Blue Jays Triple-A CF Dalton Pompey. Kumar Rocker’s father, meanwhile, is Tracy Rocker, a former NFL defensive tackle and current defensive line coach for Tennessee.

We could have ranked more players or included more names for each list (especially projectable high-school arms), but we chose to limit ourselves in this preseason installment. Things will obviously expand as we get more information. We’ll have a slightly different presentation of the list than in years past, to more closely resemble the sort of information at what clubs are looking in draft rooms. We’ll both be at games starting this week and will keep you guys updates with tweets and InstaGraphs posts (along with longer posts when warranted) and updated rankings a couple more times leading up to the draft.

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