Ranked and briefly analyzed below are the prospects who have been traded during the loosely defined “2026 deadline season,” which for simplicity’s sake we consider all of July. Most of the deals these prospects were a part of have been analyzed at length on this site. An index of those pieces can be found here; you can also click the hyperlink in the “Trade” column below, which will take you to the relevant article. We’ve moved all of the 35+ FV and above players listed here to their new orgs over on The Board, so you can click through to see where they rank among their new teammates and read their full scouting reports. You can also view all of the traded prospects on the 2026 Trade Deadline tab. The Farm System Rankings, which update live, also reflect these changes, so you can see where teams’ systems stack up following the draft and the deadline. Read the rest of this entry »

As we analyzed what various teams were likely to do at the deadline, the Orioles were one of the toughest teams to peg. Just a few games under .500 and within shouting distance of the final American League Wild Card spot, Baltimore had a lot of ways to approach the rest of their season. While the Dean Kremer and Taylor Ward deals signaled the club’s intention to sell, the decision to trade Adley Rutschman to Boston not only confirmed Baltimore’s direction for the rest of this season, but also arguably changed the course of the franchise. It’s the end of an era, and a bitter pill to swallow for a fan base barely a half decade removed from “playing badly for Adley.” Not surprisingly, Elias’s claim from exactly four years ago that the competitive window was open in Baltimore (“it’s liftoff from here“) has made the rounds again on social media today.

If it’s any consolation for O’s fans, the prospect package from the Red Sox is quite a haul. In exchange for Rutschman (along with catcher Jake Rogers and cash), the Orioles have acquired prospects Anthony Eyanson, Enddy Azocar, and Kyson Witherspoon, along with catcher Carlos Narváez and a player to be named later or cash. That’s two Top 100 prospects, including a guy in the top 30, and a pitcher who could enter that orbit as well. Let’s touch on each of them individually and then muse a bit about what this means for Baltimore’s system and the franchise overall. Read the rest of this entry »

Something about the the gut-wrenching way Tarik Skubal’s final Tigers start ended — with Detroit coughing up a big lead as it desperately clung to its playoff hopes — made it easier both to accept that he’d be traded and to understand that dealing him would probably be the right move.

Indeed, it was a sobering microcosm of the team’s season for Skubal’s final inning to end awkwardly rather than in triumph, and then for things to go sideways in unexpected fashion. Like a lot of us, I picked the Tigers to make a deep postseason run. For several reasons, including so that I might look smart (not dumb, like they say, but smart), I hoped during the last several weeks that the Tigers would stay hot enough for it to make sense for them to keep Skubal. As the schedule reached this weekend’s checkpoint, and Detroit stumbled deeper into a very crowded AL Wild Card field, it became clearer what the front office had to do. Late on Saturday night, the Tigers traded Skubal to the Dodgers for Triple-A starting pitcher River Ryan, Double-A outfielder Zyhir Hope, and Low-A pitcher Brady Smith. Read the rest of this entry »

As August 3 draws closer, we’re continuing to update the farm systems of some of the clubs we expect to be buyers at the trade deadline. These teams are both contending for a playoff berth and in clear need of a significant upgrade, the kind that will likely require parting with a top farmhand or two. Today, we’re evaluating the Texas Rangers. The new list accounts for the graduations of Gavin Collyer and Robby Ahlstrom, includes the team’s new draftees, and reflects some of the biggest developments down in the minors this season.

It hasn’t been a great year for most of the upper-level pitchers on our offseason Rangers list, but there are a couple arrow-up hitters in the mid-minors and some very intriguing talent blossoming on the complexes. It’s a farm in flux, packed with eye-of-the-beholder players, which makes this a particularly interesting org for prospect heads to monitor at the deadline.

The Situation

Aging, banged up, and barely playing .500 ball, the Rangers nonetheless find themselves atop the AL West. Though they’re two games up on the Astros and 2.5 up on the Mariners, our Playoff odds only very recently tilted their divisional chances above pre-season favorite Seattle’s. Right now, we estimate that they’re about a 50/50 shot to win the division, and their chances of reaching the playoffs at all are up around 67%. That isn’t normally the résumé of a big deadline buyer, particularly since this isn’t a case of a talented squad weathering an unexpected rough patch: Coming into the year, we pegged the Rangers as a .500 team.

And yet, there’s a strong case to make that Texas should act aggressively because this era of Rangers baseball is drawing to a close. Corey Seager is 32, recovering from an abdominal injury, and showing signs of decline amidst the worst year of his career. Brandon Nimmo is 33. Jacob deGrom is 38 and Nathan Eovaldi is 36. Josh Jung feels young and vaguely prospect-ey still, but he’s actually 28 and his injury history is nearly as checkered as Seager’s. MacKenzie Gore is only around for one more year. This core will never be better than it is right now.

Needs: Starting Pitcher, Bullpen Depth, Catcher

There are two kinds of players you can trade for at the deadline: guys who can help you get to October, and guys who can help you win in October. While the latter are the better, more desirable players in practically every circumstance, they’re also rarer and more difficult to obtain. Conveniently for Texas, players in the former category would do quite a bit of good here.

This is perhaps clearest when evaluating the Rangers rotation. Even the 2026 versions of deGrom, Eovaldi, and Gore are compelling playoff starters. Texas would obviously benefit from a luxury addition like Reid Detmers, but what the club really needs is a better fifth starter than Cal Quantrill. There aren’t many internal candidates on the horizon: Jack Leiter is recovering from ankle surgery and theoretically should be available later this summer, but that shouldn’t reassure anybody. Cody Bradford is on the mend, but he’s still working in fairly short stints in his rehab assignment. Winston Santos and David Davalillo, good options on paper at the outset of the year, do not seem ready to contribute meaningfully. Even the generic no. 4/5 starters on the market look like a real upgrade.

A similar sentiment applies in the bullpen. Jacob Latz has been great as a closer — the Rangers won’t be desperate to find this year’s version of Jhoan Duran or Mason Miller — but it’s hard to imagine them making a run through October with Peyton Gray and Jakob Junis as their top setup men. Even if you mostly trust those guys, there’s precious little depth behind them. As a unit, Texas’ bullpen is 15th in FIP, 27th in groundball rate, and 26th in strikeout rate. Those last two in particular look like a dicey combo in the playoffs.

The Rangers are also in the unenviable position of needing to find a catcher midseason. This didn’t look like a glaring weakness until very recently, but Danny Jansen hurt his elbow and is considering undergoing season-ending surgery, while Kyle Higashioka is also out indefinitely with a flexor strain. We don’t know if the Rockies would seriously consider moving Hunter Goodman, but Texas, arguably more than any team, should be kicking the tires in Denver. The same applies to Ryan Jeffers and really anything resembling an everyday catcher not nailed down on other clubs.

The Rangers’ needs are otherwise less acute on this side of the ball. There isn’t a replacement out there that offers more than what a healthy Seager and Jung can provide, and so the front office is mostly left to cross its fingers and hope they return as the most potent versions of themselves. Squint and you can see an average regular or better everywhere else.

State of the Farm

The arrow is down a little here relative to the offseason. The Rangers had five prospects on our February Top 100 list, and a baker’s dozen received a 40+ FV grade or better, but the pitchers in that tier haven’t progressed much. Caden Scarborough deserves a lot of grace for his uneven 2026 season — it feels wrong to fret much about a guy’s fastball velocity when he’s returning from cancer treatment — and he held his place on our midseason update. But while the rest of the crew — Davalillo, Santos, Jose Corniell, Leandro Lopez, and Marc Church — all looked poised to contribute this year, they’ve combined to throw all of six innings in Arlington.

The reasons why read like a failure to launch manual. Davalillo’s control fell completely apart in Triple-A, and he’s sprinkled in a lot of 91s and 92s on the gun in recent outings, a combination troubling enough that we dropped him from the Top 100. Santos fell off the list as well, in large part because he’s not getting results. He’s long been a personal favorite, and I still like his athleticism, arm strength, and changeup. At some point, though, you have to get hitters out, and it was untenable to keep a pitcher with a high-minors ERA north of 6.00 in that kind of orbit. Corniell’s stuff, which looked crisp in his return from injury last year, has backed up and he’s again on the IL. Lopez started giving up homers for the first time in his career this spring, and he too is on the shelf. Church’s grade was an aggressive projection on a reliever with good stuff; he’s continued to battle injuries and the strike zone, and was outrighted off of the 40-man earlier this year.

Meanwhile, the two hitters who ranked above the 40+ FV tier this offseason have also missed a lot of time. Sebastian Walcott has only played in 10 games this year, though he recently made his triumphant return from a UCL tear a little ahead of schedule, and has wasted no time reminding us why he’s one of the game’s best prospects. Paxton Kling has been out since mid-June with a wrist injury; before getting hurt, he’d put up decent surface-level numbers, albeit with more swing and miss and less power growth than I’d anticipated. There’s enough uncertainty here to slide him.

The positive energy in this system is mostly coming from the kids. Yolfran Castillo remains a stand out, as he’s hitting in Low-A and looks like an above-average defensive shortstop. His measurable power is up only slightly year over year, but he’s making a ton of contact and, more importantly, he has one of the most projectable frames in the low minors. His teammate, Paulino Santana, remains on the 40+ track, as he’s managed to hit for power in Low-A while slightly improving some of his scary contact metrics. He’s also physically projectable and could grow into real thump.

Arguably the two most interesting players in the system spent the summer in Surprise. The two-way guys both had productive years and, delightfully, we’re not much closer to seeing where on the field Seong-Jun Kim fits best long-term. He looks like a no. 4 pitching prospect, sitting 92-96 with impressive command for his age, particularly for a guy splitting his attention. On the other side of the ball, he still projects as a contact hitter and long-term fit at shortstop. I remain skeptical that he has the physicality to pull off double duty over the long haul, but for the time being, the game hasn’t told him to pick a lane just yet.

Josh Owens, meanwhile, has the physicality but might not have the contact skill. The power is legit, but he’s whiffing 35% of the time on the complex, and precious few hitters have missed that often at that level and gone on to have any kind of career. His fastball/slider mix looks pretty darn good on the mound, though, and it’s starting to look like that’s where his future lies. I’m already itching to see what kind of strides he can make as a pitcher — he isn’t yet throwing a change in games — if or when that becomes his full-time job.

The ACL club had a couple of other pleasant developments. Jay McQueen, a 20th-round, $280,000 flier out of a Mississippi high school in the 2025 draft, joins the list. While raw at the plate, McQueen has average power, he made a viable amount of contact on the complex and he showed some ability to move the bat head up and down. He’s a high-variance fourth outfielder prospect. Jacob Johnson gets some of the longest tail on a two-seamer I’ve encountered, and he pairs it with a slider that flashes above average. While he’ll need a beat to harness his fastball, he’s already got uncommonly good feel for locating the bender. After sneaking onto the main section of the offseason list, his arrow is up a little bit as well; like McQueen, he was recently promoted to Low-A Hickory.

For those who really like a sleeper, there’s Breyner Figuereo. He signed with the Cubs as an outfielder in the 2025 international class but was released after one season. The Rangers signed him, put him on the mound, and now he’s touching 98 with good feel for spin from the left side down in the DSL. He’s been aggressively fast-tracked onto the main section.

In the mid-minors, a couple of honorable mention bats have taken big steps forward. I’ve worn a hole in my shoe kicking myself for not listing Rafe Perich on the main section this spring. I liked him on the backfields in March of 2025, but lost my nerve after he posted pedestrian numbers as an older player in Low-A. He’s gone nuts at two levels in 2026, and his age (he’s 24) no longer looks so scary now that he’s giving Texas League arms a rough ride. A switch-hitter with plus raw power, he’s hit 10 homers in 44 games since a midseason promotion, with a barely a dip in his ability to make contact. We gave him a look as we built our recent Top 100 update and didn’t quite see a fit there, in part because he’s no more than a fringy defender at third, where he has a long, slow release and tends to scatter his throws. Still, if he can offer power off the bench and fill in at a couple of spots, that’s a big win for the Rangers amateur and dev groups.

Hector Osorio also slots in. He’s a hitterish outfielder who has suddenly bashed 21 homers out of nowhere. While I think some of the league and ball contexts explain a good deal of the power surge, you still have to pull the fly balls, which Osorio is proving that he can do.

Texas prioritized intriguing, risk/reward players in the draft. They also spent big early: Their first three draftees received bonuses north of $2 million, and then only one other guy in the entire class signed for more than $200,000. Gio Rojas was the best high school pitcher in the class and a potential no. 2/3 starter, though his delivery is more violent than you normally see out of a high school pitcher. Connor Comeau, who had committed to Texas A&M, has big lefty power projection, but less promising feel for contact. Brody Bumila is hurt and will have elbow surgery in Texas after his signs. He’s a spring pop-up arm with triple digit heat, freakish size, a precocious changeup, and a breaking ball that needs some pitch design love; we’ll see if this is the right org for him. Hudson Calhoun is a walk-prone reliever with a bat-missing fastball; he tucks in at the very end of the updated list.

A couple of other minor notes: Aidan Curry goes from the bottom of the 40 FV tier to near the top, as he’s throwing more strikes while working deeper into games in Double-A. Rotation mate Dalton Pence climbs with him. I was a little too bearish on the lefty’s command projection and chances to start in the spring, and in any case he alleviated some of the concerns I had about the moving parts in his delivery by making his motion more fluid and compact. If his slider continues to play like a plus pitch (I’m a little skeptical), Texas will really have something here.

Finally, a quick word on three recent early-round picks. AJ Russell, Malcolm Moore, and Dylan Dreiling are all holding steady. Russell looks ever more like a reliever, as he’s still heavily reliant on his fastball and prone to missing badly even with that pitch; he also hasn’t yet completed the fourth inning in any of his starts. Dreiling’s surface numbers have jumped considerably at Double-A this year, but once you adjust for context and take a look under the hood, he’s still tracking like a fourth outfielder. Moore, meanwhile, has struggled since a midseason promotion to Frisco, where his chase and strikeout rates have climbed markedly. Here are the players graded as 40 FVs and above on the updated list:

The team’s full list, complete with scouting reports and tool grades, can be found on The Board.

It’s rare, though not necessarily tricky, to find a backstop midseason. Contending teams don’t like to do it, as they’d understandably prefer not to have their starting catcher acquaint himself with a brand new pitching staff in the heat of a pennant race. The Rangers have to do that anyway, though, so they might as well see if they can find an everyday regular for the job. Clubs with catching to spare — Colorado, Minnesota, Miami, and perhaps Washington spring to mind — would presumably love to pry away Castillo or Scarborough, and may be able to make it work if they throw in some pitching to sweeten the deal. If not, Santos and Davalillo look like intriguing change-of-scenery candidates.

Among the prospective secondary pieces, the arrow-up arms in Frisco look attractive. Curry and Pence each have a chance to start and runway for growth (perhaps a little more velo as he fills out in Curry’s case, a better change in Pence’s). For the more adventurous sorts, McQueen and Figuereo have impact traits and enough risk to keep the price point fairly low.

As we approach August, now is a good time to take a fresh look at the farm systems of some of the clubs we expect to be buyers at the trade deadline. These teams are both contending for a playoff berth and in position to make a buyer’s style trade for a star big leaguer, the kind that will likely require parting with a top farmhand or two. We kicked things off with the Atlanta Braves, and we’ll continue today with the Los Angeles Dodgers.

In tandem with an evaluation of the team’s needs and deadline posture, I’ve updated Los Angeles’ prospect list to account for graduations, incorporate the team’s new draftees, and reflect developments on the farm. The Dodgers have a great farm system, heavy on outfield prospects and pitchers who throw hard but who might just be relievers.

The Situation

The Dodgers have a comfortable 12.5-game lead in the NL West. They’ve successfully weathered injuries to several key cogs on offense (Tommy Edman, Teoscar Hernández, and Will Smith) through a combination of their older stars remaining productive, and Andy Pages and Dalton Rushing improving. On the pitching side, their younger hurlers, especially Justin Wrobleski and several of the sophomore relievers, have stepped up after many of their other arms went down (including Edwin Díaz, Tyler Glasnow, and Blake Snell), and despite a full injury ward, Los Angeles has a top six pitching staff in most statistical categories. More reinforcements are on the way from within, as a few of the injured Dodgers (Díaz, Snell, and Enrique Hernández) are on rehab assignments as the trade deadline approaches, creating a bubble that will force some action on the margins of the big league roster. They may have to play musical chairs a bit as they decide how aggressively to pursue star-caliber improvements to their few weak spots. Read the rest of this entry »

Since the draft concluded last week, the two of us have been working to add the newly-minted pro players to their team lists (you can find them here), move this year’s graduates to their own tab on The Board (which you can find here), and make a sweeping update to our Top 100 Prospects List. Below you’ll find the updated list, followed by notes on who moved and why via a rundown of the clusters of players that formed around similar profiles throughout the rankings. As a reminder, we rank however many players we have graded as 50 FV or better in our Top “100,” and as of this update, that’s 111 guys. Players whose grade have changed have a “↑” or “↑↑” in the trend column of the table, with the latter designation noting cases where the re-evaluation is quite dramatic; players dealing with full-season injuries are indicated with a bandaid.

If you want more information about these players, please head over to The Board, where you can find full scouting reports, tool grades, pitch repertoires and more. We proactively added a few players to the Graduates tab who are quite close to reaching the at-bat or innings pitched graduation threshold, or who have obviously spent enough days on the active big league roster to have exhausted prospect eligibility. Lastly, you can see the real-time farm system rankings here, with the rankings from before the graduates were pulled off and the draftees were added here. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is a team-by-team analysis of last night’s draft activity. Remember that you can find more detailed scouting reports and tool grades for the players drafted yesterday over on The Board. The positions below are what we have them projected as on The Board, not necessarily what the player was announced as. For pitchers, we have a role designated below: starter (SP), or single-inning or multi-inning reliever (SIRP and MIRP).

Arizona was in a tough spot, caught in the middle of the round just after the more skillful hitters (who are usually their type) were picked. They were left with a choice between a few hitters with balanced skill sets but bottom-dwelling defensive fits (like Logan Hughes) or good up-the-middle defenders with hit tool risk. They ended up taking a player from the latter category in Helfrick, who can frame, throw, and has power that he might not tap into consistently due to strikeouts. He could be a Mike Zunino reboot of sorts, which would be a good outcome at the 15th pick. Bryant has a nasty fastball/curveball combo and a projectable frame. We had him ranked 20 spots lower than he was picked, but we don’t really consider him to be a reach; the players in that range are comparable. Kerce has a good shot to be a speedy utility guy, Dowd needs to get stronger, and McDevitt is a test for a player dev group that hasn’t done well with pitchers. His fastball plays, but can they find a secondary pitch? — EL Read the rest of this entry »

I love the draft. Well, from a broader standpoint I find it morally abominable that workers entering an industry have no say in which company they work for or where they’ll be posted. But since we have a draft, and it seems highly unlikely that that’s going to change in the near future, I love covering it.

This is the confluence of amateur baseball (especially college ball, my great love) and the professional game. It’s the dawn of a new age of possibility; for months, we don’t know for sure where Roch Cholowsky or Jackson Flora are going to be playing in the pros. The moment in which we find out is an exciting one. I love seeing the stars of tomorrow before they’ve had their quirks sanded off by the great finishing school that is minor league baseball.

This is a minority position among baseball fans — even diehard fans — and media. In American professional sports, public interest in the draft is proportional to the proximity of draftees to the major leagues. This is as close to a law of natural science as you’ll find in sports, but since the pandemic, Major League Baseball has toyed with finding the limits of that law. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

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 »