Lucas Elissalt is an under-the-radar prospect in one of the game’s top farm systems. A 21-year-old right-hander whom the Detroit Tigers tabbed in the 13th round of the 2024 draft out of Chipola College, Elissalt is coming off of a first full professional season in which he put up a 2.51 ERA and 3.23 FIP over 89 2/3 innings split between Low-A Lakeland and High-A West Michigan. Moreover, his 26.9% strikeout rate was the highest among Detroit farmhands who tossed 80 or more frames.

Elissalt’s fastball wouldn’t be described as high octane. The 6-foot-4, 190-pound hurler’s heater sat 90-93 mph last year, occasionally ticking up to 94 (but also down to 89). Adding good weight to his lanky frame — “maybe 15 or 20 pounds” — could contribute to increased velocity, arguably the key to his developing into a major league starter.

Regardless of any velo gains that might be forthcoming, the ABS system could work in his favor. Elissalt’s 9.4% walk rate wasn’t exactly Maddux-esque, but command nonetheless profiles as one of his strengths going forward. At a time when some organizations are reassessing their views of power versus pitchability, the young righty may be ascending the minor league ladder at an opportune moment. What Elissalt lacks in gas, he makes up for with guile. Read the rest of this entry »

Brayden Taylor had a disappointing season. Ranked seventh when our Tampa Bay Rays Top 56 Prospects list was published last February, the 23-year-old infielder went on to slash .173/.289/.286 with eight home runs and a 77 wRC+ over 437 plate appearances with Double-A Montgomery. It was a precipitous fall from the previous summer, when Taylor homered 20 times with a 143 wRC+ between High-A Bowling Green and the Double-A Biscuits.

I asked Taylor, a 2023 first-round pick out of Texas Christian University, about his lackluster performance in the early weeks of the Arizona Fall League season, where he was suiting up with the Mesa Solar Sox.

“Sometimes in baseball you just get a little bit out of sync,” said Taylor, who rallied to the tune of a .264/.400/.472 line in the hitter-friendly AFL. “Your sequence doesn’t feel good. Your body doesn’t feel good. Your mentality isn’t the greatest. I just didn’t have my best year at the plate.” Read the rest of this entry »

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Los Angeles Angels. 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 »

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 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 »

The burners of the hot stove have been simmering across baseball since Kyle Tucker’s signing, and on Thursday, the Washington Nationals added their ingredients to the pot, trading two years of MacKenzie Gore’s services to the Texas Rangers for a five-player prospect package (Ben Clemens wrote about Gore’s fit with the Rangers here). This marks the second significant trade of the Paul Toboni era in Washington (Harry Ford for Jose A. Ferrer was the other) as he and the new members of the front office look to put their fingerprints on the org. The deal includes Texas’ 2025 first rounder Gavin Fien, injured former top pitching prospect Alejandro Rosario, 2025 rookie-level breakout bat Devin Fitz-Gerald, 23-year-old 1B/RF masher Abimelec Ortiz, and 20-year-old outfielder Yeremy Cabrera.

In contrast with yesterday’s Freddy Peralta trade, the Gore return is about a combination of depth and potential ceiling, rather than the proximity and more concrete upside of the two-player Peralta package. Reasonable minds could consider any of Fien, Rosario, or Fitz-Gerald as the headliner of this deal. Each of those guys has the physical talent to be an everyday big leaguer, though each also comes with a measure of uncertainty too great to consider any of them a Top 100 prospect right now. I’ll walk you through the players who are joining Washington’s farm system, then we’ll take a step back and examine the state of the organization’s direction under new leadership.

There are folks in baseball who love Fien, the 12th overall pick in last year’s draft who signed for nearly $5 million to eschew a commitment to the University of Texas. Fien swings hard, he has impressive power for his age, and he was one of the top performers on the high school showcase circuit, with a 1.045 OPS in events tracked by Synergy Sports from 2023 to 2024. The scouts and clubs who liked Fien the most before the draft considered him a mid-first round prospect, and one of the best couple of high school hitters in the class. I was (and am) personally a fair bit lower on Fien, and had him ranked 34th. The length and awkward look of his swing gave me pre-draft pause about his ability to match pro velocity, and I think Fien’s infield actions will at least force him to third base, if not to right field (where his arm would be weapon). The combination of strikeout risk and a corner fit, at least in my eyes, relegated him more to the comp round despite his power. His look in pro ball after the draft — a 10-game sample at Low-A Hickory plus Instructional League activity in Arizona — reinforced these notions. This is the player in the deal where you’re likely to get the widest range of opinions, and my personal take happens to be on the lower end of that continuum.

Before he got hurt, the opposite was true of Rosario, who I thought had become one of the best couple of pitching prospects in baseball in 2024. But that was before he blew out and things got (and remain) complicated. A very famous prospect since his high school underclass days, Rosario’s mid-to-upper-90s fastball used to miss frustratingly few bats because of its shape. He ran an ERA over 7.00 during both his sophomore and junior years at the University of Miami despite sitting 95-96 mph with a plus slider and splitter. The Rangers quickly overhauled Rosario’s delivery, most notably his arm slot, which became much more vertical than when he was an amateur. It totally changed the way his fastball played without sacrificing his arm strength or the quality of either secondary pitch, and it also improved his command, as his line to the plate became much more direct and comfortable-looking than when he was in college. In a 2024 split evenly between Low- and High-A, he posted a 36.9% strikeout rate, a 3.7% (!) walk rate, and a 2.24 ERA across 88.1 innings. Read the rest of this entry »

Last night, the Brewers and Mets swung a big trade. Milwaukee sent staff ace Freddy Peralta, along with righty Tobias Myers, to Queens in exchange for two Top 100 prospects in Brandon Sproat and Jett Williams. Both are near-ready contributors who grade out as 50 FVs and slot into Milwaukee’s farm system as the club’s third- and fourth-best prospects, respectively. Sproat projects as a mid-rotation starter, while Williams is a middle-of-the-diamond player with an as-yet undetermined defensive home. Davy Andrews wrote up New York’s side of the swap. Here, we’ll take a look at the youngsters heading to the Midwest.

Let’s start with Sproat. After selecting the righty in the third round in 2022 and then failing to sign him, the Mets went back to the well a round earlier the following season. This time they got their man, and the former Florida Gator took to pro ball quickly. He posted a 3.40 ERA with 131 strikeouts in 116.1 innings in 2024, with solid walk and contact-management metrics alongside. He capped the year with seven starts at Triple-A, and while those were mostly forgettable, he entered 2025 as the club’s top farmhand and one of the brightest pitching prospects in baseball.

He then battled through an uneven 2025 campaign. He started slowly, with a new, less deceptive motion, and missed significantly fewer bats in the first half of the season than he had the year prior. Still, the traits that long made Sproat an enticing prospect mostly endured, as he was still sitting in the mid-to-upper 90s and mixing in a plus breaking ball. He righted the ship in July and saved some of his best baseball for the latter part of August, a run of form that culminated in his first big league call-up. Read the rest of this entry »

Mason Barnett doesn’t profile as a front-of-the-rotation starter, but he does project to provide solid innings for a major league staff. A 25-year-old right-hander who made his MLB debut with the Athletics at the end of August, Barnett is currently viewed by Eric Longenhagen as “a big league starter who has demonstrated durability [and] is a no. 4/5 on a good team.” Our lead prospect evaluator anticipates assigning him a 45 FV when our 2026 A’s list is published in the not-too-distant future.

The Kennesaw, Georgia native was originally in the Kansas City system. Drafted 87th overall by the Royals in 2022 out of Auburn University, Barnett was subsequently traded to his current club in the 2024 deadline deal that sent Lucas Erceg to America’s Heartland. With his time down on the farm now mostly complete, Barnett will head into the forthcoming campaign having logged a 6.85 ERA and a 4.88 FIP over five starts comprising 22 1/3 innings in his initial major league opportunity.

Longenhagen has assigned a 40/45 on the righty’s command, and it was that aspect of his game that Scott Emerson emphasized when I asked him about Barnett toward the tail end of last season.

“Barnett, interesting guy,” said the longtime Athletics pitching coach. “Very good competitor. Throws strikes with his fastball, which has some cut-ride. He’s got a good developing changeup. He spins the ball really well and has both the sweeper and the curveball. For me, a lot of it with Barnett is his being able to execute his pitches inside the strike zone when he needs to, and then being able to make them chase outside of the strike zone when he’s ahead in the count. He’s one of our guys who needs to learn to command the ball better.”

The numbers back that up. Barnett had a 10.8% walk rate (as well as a 17.3% strikeout rate) in his big league cameo, while in Triple-A those numbers were 11.9% and 22.8%. But, while concerning, it’s not as though he can’t throw strikes or miss bats. In 2024, he punched out Double-A batters at a 28.5% clip, and walked them at a more-acceptable (albeit still not great) 8.7% over 133 innings of work. Like Longenhagen and Emerson, Barnett also recognizes the need to improve his strike-throwing. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Toronto Blue Jays. 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 »