Below is our list of the top 100 prospects in baseball. The scouting summaries were compiled with information provided by available data and industry sources, as well as from our own observations. This is the third 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.

All of the 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.

And now, a few important things to keep in mind as you’re perusing the Top 100. You’ll note that prospects are ranked by number but also lie within tiers demarcated by their Future Value grades. The FV grade is more important than the ordinal ranking. For example, the gap between Padres shortstop Jackson Merrill (No. 10) and Yankees shortstop Oswald Peraza (No. 40) is 30 spots, and there’s a substantial difference in talent between them. The gap between Peraza and Guardians pitcher Tanner Bibee (No. 70), meanwhile, is also 30 numerical places, but the difference in talent is relatively small. You may have also noticed that there are more than 100 prospects in the table below, and more than 100 scouting summaries. That’s because we have also included the 50 FV prospects whose ranking fell outside the 100, an acknowledgement both that the choice to rank exactly 100 prospects (as opposed to 110 or 210 or some other number entirely) is an arbitrary one and that there isn’t a ton of daylight between the prospects who appear in that part of the list.

You’ll also notice that there is a Future Value outcome distribution graph for each prospect on the list. This is an attempt to graphically represent how likely each FV outcome is for each prospect. Before his departure for ESPN, Kiley McDaniel used the great work of our former colleague Craig Edwards to find the base rates for each FV tier of prospect (separately for hitters and pitchers), and the likelihood of each FV outcome. For example, based on Craig’s research, the average 60 FV hitter on a list becomes a perennial 5-plus WAR player over his six controlled years 26% of the time, and has a 27% chance of accumulating, at most, a couple of WAR during his six controlled years. We started with those base rates for every player on this year’s list and then manually tweaked them depending on our more specific opinions about the player. For instance, Dodgers 2B/LF Miguel Vargas and Marlins shortstop Yiddi Cappe are both 50 FV prospects, but other than them both being Cuban, they are nothing alike. Vargas is a bankable, big league-ready hitter with moderate upside, while Cappe is a risky low-level prospect with huge upside. Our hope is that the distribution graphs reflect these kinds of differences.

This year’s crop of prospects has a relatively shallow high-impact group at the very top of the list. There is no 70 FV prospect in this year’s class and only two 65 FV prospects. In a typical year, we’d have a couple more than that, and sometimes as many as five or six, but this year there are only two. And it doesn’t take long before you start talking about players with warts that reduce confidence in the overall profile. This year’s 60 FV tier has some players who still show some hit tool red flags (Chourio, De La Cruz, Jones) that kept them from ever really being considered for the tier above.

Only 37 of the 112 ranked players here are pitchers. Pitchers tend to be volatile and subject to heightened injury risk, plus their usage is being spread out among more pitchers in the majors, reducing the impact of individuals. The 55 FV pitchers and above tend to have some combination of monster stuff and good command, whereas the 50 FV pitchers often have one or the other. We gravitate toward up-the-middle defenders littered all throughout the minor leagues, and really only tend to push corner bats onto the list when they’re close to the big leagues, or if we have an abnormal degree of confidence that they will continue to hit all the way through the minors. High-risk hitters with huge tools are also welcome since FV is a subjective way to factor both ceiling and risk into the same grade.

For a further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, please read this and this. If you would like to read a book-length treatment on the subject, one is available here. Read the rest of this entry »

I didn’t really see the first pitch of LSU’s season. I was watching on TV, but the ball just sort of teleported from Paul Skenes’ right hand to Brady Neal’s glove. Maybe it was a trick of the lighting or a glitch in the stream. Or maybe it’s the fact that the enormous 20-year-old decided to start off his season with a 99 mph fastball.

Skenes looks like what he is: the Friday night starter for the no. 1 team in the country and a likely first-round draft pick. Not only is he one of the country’s top pitching prospects, but he can handle the bat as well, hitting .367/.453/.669 with 24 homers in 100 combined games over his first two collegiate seasons. He’s not what basketball types like to call a unicorn. Most college seasons feature some elite two-way player, a Brendan McKay or a Danny Hultzen or the like, trying to pitch and slug a blue-blood program to the national title and himself into the top 10 picks in the draft.

What makes Skenes unusual is how recently he started seriously considering baseball a real career opportunity. At 6-foot-6 and 247 pounds, he might look like he was born to throw 99 mph for a living. But this time last year, he was committed to quite a different vocation. Read the rest of this entry »

Prospect Week continues with an update to the International Players section of The Board. Some of it is housekeeping, while some of it is scouting-driven and news-oriented.

Let’s begin with the housekeeping. For those of you who don’t care about this sort of thing and want to skip ahead, I’ve indicated below where the housekeeping ends. As you can see in the dropdown menu on the International Players tab, there has been a nomenclature change when the lists transition from 2019 to 2021. There was essentially no 2020 signing class because the pandemic pushed what was supposed to be the July 2nd 2020 class to January of 2021. It doesn’t appear that the international signing period calendar will ever return to the pre-pandemic July-through-May structure; the current format is either here to stay, or at some point we’ll get an international draft. We had previously referred to a given year’s signing period as its “July 2 Signing Period” because it ran across two calendar years, until the following May. If a prospect signed in April of 2015, for instance, he signed during the “2014 July 2 Signing Period.” Now that the signing period is basically flush with the calendar year, going forward we’ll refer to it as “20XX International Signing Period” on the prospect lists and “20XX International” on The Board. Capsules for players who signed in 2019 or earlier will still say “July 2nd Signing period, 20XX” until the prospects from that era are no longer part of the prospect population. Read the rest of this entry »

As the 2023 NCAA baseball season gets underway, so too does this year’s Prospect Week, which begins with a fresh coat of paint on my 2023 draft prospect rankings. I asked around the industry for thoughts about how many prospects it makes sense to ordinally rank at this time of year, and scouts’ and executives’ answers ranged from as low as 30 to as many as 75, with most answers falling close to 50. Typically, there are enough 40+ FV or better prospects by draft day to fill the first two rounds of the draft. For this update, I worked back through the players who already populated the 2023 rankings on The Board to revise their grades and reports, revisited my 2022 summer and fall in-person scouting notes, and integrated data from last season to identify and then help evaluate college prospects who weren’t already on there. I did that until I stopped finding players who comfortably hovered around the 40+ FV line or above.

Ideally, my draft list will eventually include all of the eligible players who are talented enough to make a pro team’s prospect list. Usually about 150 players end up migrating to the pro side of The Board right after the draft, a good many of whom haven’t even popped up yet. For a handful of them, the draft itself is my means of identification, with post hoc analysis generating their grade and ranking. Players who I already have notes and opinions about but who exist beneath the 40+ FV scope that I have hard ranked right now still make sense to have on The Board, just not yet with an ordinal ranking. The number of players in the 40 FV tier (future fifth starters and middle relievers, low-ceiling bench hitters, and volatile high school pitchers) and below is so substantial that it’s almost impossible to maintain a precise ranking into the fifth, sixth and seventh rounds of the draft (we’re talking about 200 rapidly changing youngsters at that point) since chunks of that would be rendered obsolete as early as this weekend. I have a few of these kinds of players bucketed by demographic below the ordinally ranked guys, as I have on past draft lists. Players will be added to those buckets, and the depth of the ordinal rankings will increase as the spring marches along and these players can be assessed with greater precision. Read the rest of this entry »

Will Bednar had a disappointing 2022 season. Drafted 14th overall in 2021 by the San Francisco Giants after a breakout campaign at Mississippi State University, the 22-year-old right-hander battled back issues and saw both his velocity and command take a step in the wrong direction. Pitching at Low-A San Jose, he logged a 4.19 ERA and issued 22 free passes in 43 innings. But there were positives, too. Even with the health-related downtick in his power arsenal’s effectiveness, the younger brother of Pittsburgh Pirates closer David Bednar fanned 51 batters and allowed just 25 hits.

One year ago this month, our lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen wrote that “Bednar’s best pitch is a plus low-80s slider with plenty of bite.” The offering remains the righty’s go-to, and I talked to him about it during his stint in the Arizona Fall League.

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David Laurila: Let’s start with the nuts and bolts. What is your repertoire?

Will Bednar: “Fastball, slider, changeup. I’ve been kind of playing around with a little bit of a two-seam, too.”

Laurila: The slider is your best pitch?

Bednar: “Yeah. The slider is definitely my best pitch. Without a doubt.”

Laurila: What is the story behind it? Read the rest of this entry »

Late last week, the Reds and Guardians swapped young outfielders, with Cincinnati acquiring 24-year-old Will Benson from Cleveland in exchange for 21-year-old Justin Boyd, a 2022 second-round pick. The trade gives the Reds’ outfield mix a source of left-handed power, which they sorely lacked, as the Guardians pick up a long-term prospect in exchange for a player who was going to have a hard time emerging from a crowded field of similarly skilled young players on their own roster.

The 14th overall pick in the 2016 draft, Benson made his big league debut in 2022 and was in the majors long enough to exhaust rookie eligibility. Deployed almost entirely against right-handed pitchers — he took 55 of his 61 plate appearances against righties — he only managed to hit .182 in a small big league sample. Benson has had contact-related question marks since he was drafted; “will he hit enough?” was the big question about his prospectdom. Plus-plus raw power and arm strength gave him an everyday right fielder’s ceiling if he can.

Benson traversed the minors striking out at a 30% clip and never hit better than .238 at any level. But even as he struck out at an alarming rate, he has typically walked enough and gotten to enough power to perform above league average at each stop. In 2022, his age-24 season, his strikeout rate was suddenly a manageable 22.7%. There has not been a change to his swing that I can identify, though it’s worth noting that his raw swing rate is a measly 37%, which would be one of the lowest in all of MLB; in 2021, per Synergy Sports, it was 46%. It’s possible he has become discerning within the strike zone in a way that has helped his bat-to-ball skills play at a 40- or 45-grade, but visual assessment of his swing still generates a lot of concern around in-zone swing and miss, especially against fairly common letter-high fastballs. The 35+ FV grade with which Benson graduated (a grade befitting a narrow, situational big leaguer with one premium tool) would not change given this new information about his approach. Read the rest of this entry »

Heston Kjerstad’s path to the big leagues began with a serious speed bump. Shortly after being taken second overall by the Orioles in the 2020 draft out of the University of Arkansas, the left-handed-hitting outfielder was diagnosed with myocarditis. He has since fully recovered, but because of a high-grade hamstring injury incurred last spring, he wasn’t able to make his professional debut until June. He didn’t forget how to hit during the long layoff. In 284 plate appearances between Low-A Delmarva and High-A Aberdeen, Kjerstad slashed .309/.394/.457 with a 135 wRC+. Moreover, he proceeded to earn MVP honors in the Arizona Fall League by pummeling pitchers to the tune of a 1.007 OPS.

No. 7 in a loaded Baltimore Orioles system, Kjerstad will celebrate his 24th birthday on Sunday. He talked hitting during his stint in the AFL.

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David Laurila: Tell me about your progression as a hitter. You were obviously out of action with the health issue for some time.

Heston Kjerstad: “You know, it’s part of the game. Everybody misses time here and there, but you’ve done it for so long and practiced it so much that while there is a little rust to be knocked off, it’s going to come back to you. And honestly, there are some things you learn from being away from the game, and you apply them once you are back.” Read the rest of this entry »

Termarr Johnson and Endy Rodriguez are the top two prospects in the Pirates organization. An 18-year-old middle infielder, Johnson was drafted fourth overall by Pittsburgh last summer out of an Atlanta high school. Meanwhile, Rodriguez, a 22-year-old catcher from Santiago, Dominican Republic, was acquired by the Pirates from the Mets in the January 2021 three-team trade that included David Bednar and Joe Musgrove.

I asked Pittsburgh general manager Ben Cherington about the highly-regarded duo during November’s GM Meetings in Las Vegas.

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David Laurila: Pirates fans and prospect nerds are quite familiar with Termarr Johnson, but a lot of fans around the country probably aren’t. What can you tell me about him?

Ben Cherington: “I think a good place to start is that he is currently in the Dominican, participating in our Dominican instructional program, which I think is a cool thing for a high first-round pick to do. It’s something that he wanted to do. Termarr wanted to go down there and be part of that experience, and to get to know potential future teammates who are young Latin players. He’s a full participant in our Dominican program.” Read the rest of this entry »

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 our own observations. This is the third 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 »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Baltimore Orioles. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the third 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 I 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 »