Chicago Cubs Top 34 Prospects

On the preseason Top 100 (Ballesteros ranked 84th this year), it’s common for the “high confidence, bat-only” position player prospects to exist at the top of the 50 Future Value tier. Ballesteros ranked about 50 spots behind that group despite his relative polish and upper-level performance because of his squat, atypical build and the likelihood that he’d be a DH-only player. As Mo Baller graduates from rookie eligibility, he has performed well enough to render those concerns moot and is ranked closer to the top of that FV tier rather than the middle. Ballesteros has plus bat speed, above-average raw power, and a knack for hard contact all over the zone. The numbers under the hood reinforce the visual look: Last year, he had an 80% contact rate and 43% hard-hit rate, which make for a middle-of-the-lineup combination. He has produced at every level despite a weird opposite field contact tendency and recent whiff issues against fastballs (which has not been a historical issue for him).

Ballesteros can catch, but you don’t want him doing so every day. He’s a comfortably below-average receiver and doesn’t release the ball quickly or cleanly enough to reliably control the running game. He’s manned first base periodically, and can do so in a pinch, but Ballesteros is one of those guys whose best position is “hitter,” and he’s likely to DH quite a bit during his career. That’s been the case so far, as he’s been third on the Cubs’ catching depth chart early in 2026, though a couple of days before publication, The Athletic‘s Patrick Mooney reported that the team was going to hit the gas on his catching frequency.

Ballesteros’ value and the shape of what we think his production will look like do not map cleanly onto the way we organize our value grades. To phrase it another way: When we grade a guy as a 50, we’re essentially projecting for him to accrue 2 WAR or so a year through his six years of team control. With Ballesteros, it may look a little different. There’s a chance he’s just a 135 wRC+ DH and clears that threshold the old fashioned way. But he may be more of a productive-but-flawed hitter who provides value in hidden ways as a second- or third-string catcher, playing first base once in awhile or pinch-hitting in a big spot — a rich man’s Victor Caratini or a peak Mitch Garver type. At a portly 5-foot-8, he may also be in his athletic prime right now and be due for an early-career dip. Ballesteros is a unique player in ways that aren’t universally positive, but he has always been a damn good hitter.

Rojas had a monster half-season at High-A in 2025, walking nearly as often as he struck out and slashing 278/.379/.492. While it was his second spin through the level, his look on both sides of the ball was enough for us to elevate him into the Top 100 in the middle of the year and hold him there through the offseason despite a really rough late-season performance at Double-A Knoxville.

Back with the Smokies to start 2026, Rojas has produced a great early-season statline but has been striking out much more than is usual for him, albeit in a very small sample made all the smaller by time off for a minor thumb issue for which he was not placed on the IL. In the days preceding his shutdown, he was very error-prone on defense (flubs, throwing inaccuracy). While Rojas isn’t going to win any Gold Gloves (his range and hands are only fair), he has the body control and arm strength to make up for his shortcomings, and he projects to stay at shortstop.

On offense, Rojas has tended to be an above-average contact hitter with excellent plate coverage. He’s frequently geared to pull and was swinging inside a lot of sliders in the lead up to list publication, but this wasn’t an issue for him last year, when he had roughly average chase and miss rates against righty slide pieces. While he’ll occasionally get extended on a pitch away from him and drive it to right field, most of Rojas’ contact is directed toward the left field foul pole, where he hooks lots of doubles and potential homers. Though he’s young, Rojas is already a pretty physical guy, and he isn’t likely to add substantial strength without it nerfing some of his mobility on defense. Here he projects to have an average hit/power combo seasoned by plus plate discipline, which should be enough for him to play every day at shortstop. His timeline — we’re looking at a post-2026 40-man addition and (slow playing it) a 2028 debut — overlaps with the team’s other infielders enough that Rojas should be considered a prime trade candidate, especially if the Cubs’ hot start is a true indication of their contender status.

Ramírez has been a plus contact hitter throughout his time in the minors, with a roughly 85% contact rate, year over year, since entrenching himself in full season ball back in 2023. His profile — compact, switch-hitting middle infielder with plus contact ability — is in the FanGraphs prospect nerd wheelhouse, but his lack of size and physical projection have held his forecast in the “non-shortstop utilityman” bucket. A scorching hot start to 2026, in which Ramírez has already hit as many home runs as he did in 2025, forced a re-evaluation to assess whether he had unexpectedly added a gear of power, or if this was an aberration created by the hitting environment at Triple-A. Our early-season conclusion is that it is the latter. Though Ramírez’s hard-hit rate is up slightly compared to 2025 (from 40% to 43%, the equivalent of roughly three balls in play), it’s not as if he’s torched balls at 113-plus mph or anything like that. He still has raw power on the 45-/50-grade line and it plays down a shade due to lack of launch.

Ramírez can hit, though. Even though he has a pretty big leg kick and move back toward the pitcher, he tracks pitches with precision and moves the barrel all over the zone. This guy torches fastballs and has virtually no performance dip against plus velocity, and these skills exist from both sides of the plate. Though he’s likely to slug a shade under .400, his xwOBA has been in the .320-.330 range the last two seasons, which puts him in the thick middle of the second baseman population the last several years along with guys like Bryson Stott, Donovan Solano, and Jake Cronenworth. While not quite the same caliber of contact hitter as Brendan Donovan, that’s the kind of player Ramírez can be, where he plays two or three different positions and is in the lineup every day. He moves into the Top 100 with this update.

Wiggins was a lights-out reliever as a freshman at Arkansas and looked like a potential future top 15 pick, but he struggled as a sophomore when he moved into the rotation. Then Wiggins’ elbow barked and he had Tommy John not long before the start of the 2023 season, his draft year. He already had significant relief risk prior to the injury, and this pushed things a little further in that direction. The Cubs took him in the second round and gave him $1.4 million, and Wiggins rehabbed until May of 2024, when he finally got into actual games again. The team quickly shuttled him to High-A, and he was dominant at the very end of the season, striking out 17 and allowing just four hits in his final 10 innings. In 2025, he was again shelved, this time for nearly two months, though the Cubs never formally put Wiggins on the IL. He didn’t pitch more than four innings in any outing after mid-June, but he still managed 78 total frames on the season, which was easily a career high and could remain such for another year. After two starts and eight innings, the 24-year-old has spent most of April once again sidelined by elbow inflammation, and while he’s up and throwing again, the Cubs are being pretty quiet about his estimated return.

Wiggins’ delivery and size create a unique downhill angle on his stuff. He’s built like an NBA wing player at a long-armed 6-foot-6, and he has an extreme vertical arm slot, which means he’s releasing the baseball from the clouds. Wiggins also gets down the mound well, with roughly six feet, nine inches of extension. There are only a couple of big league pitchers with release profiles like this (José Alvarado, Kevin Ginkel, Kenley Jansen), and hitters struggled to deal with the line it creates on Wiggins’ heater, which averages 97 mph, generated an elite miss rate in 2025, and was still playing like a 70-grade weapon even while down a tick at the start of 2026. It’s a dominant pitch that could spearhead a late-inning relief fit if he continues to have issues staying healthy and throwing strikes. Wiggins’ ability to turn over a side-spinning changeup has improved as he’s gotten pro run as a starter, and his breaking balls (both his cuttery slider and his curveball) flash the pure downward movement that would give him multiple ways to attack lefties. But for now, Wiggins is still a fastball-heavy starter with below-average command, and his inconsistent breaking ball feel impacts the quality and performance of those pitches.

We thought Wiggins had a chance to be the Jaws 2 version of Jacob Misiorowski for a competitive Cubs team that would likely need a midseason addition in the rotation, even if he is pretty raw as a craftsman and figured to have some developmental speed bumps remaining with his breaking ball command. The Cubs are indeed bopping and could really use some arms, but with Wiggins’ elbow troubles resurfacing, something closer to Dustin May’s 2019, where a starter prospect with big stuff emerges as a late season multi-inning relief weapon, is a more realistic, if still optimistic projection. Long-term, Wiggins has no. 3 starter ceiling and a realistic floor as a knockout reliever.

Alcántara, who was acquired from the Yankees in the Anthony Rizzo trade half a decade ago, has been a high profile prospect since before he signed because of his XL size and power projection, which, as he approaches age 24, he has made good on with plus raw pop and bat speed. He is a career .277/.352/.463 hitter in the minors as of this update despite having a couple of pretty serious flaws, in large part because his tools have been loud enough to shine through. The best of them is his power. Alcántara’s hard-hit rate at Triple-A Iowa is just shy of 50% as of this writing, and has been comfortably above the big league average for several seasons. It’s counerintuitive that a hitter with levers this long is good at catching up to fastballs, but Alcántara is. He has an 86% contact rate against them the last two seasons combined, with a mark north of 90% so far in 2026, including in big league spring training games.

Conversely, Alcántara struggles badly with well-located sliders. Of course, to qualify any pitch group as “well-located” implies hitters will struggle with them, but Alcántara’s issues are especially stark, and he’s missing sliders at a nearly 50% clip since the start of 2025. This issue is severe enough that you should consider it a precarious Jenga block in Alcántara’s profile, and it’s the biggest reason his hit tool projection is so demure. But Alcántara’s combination of power and center field defense should still make him a formidable player despite this issue.

Alcántara is a plus runner once he reaches top speed, and each of his strides eats up a ton of real estate in the outfield. He has plus ball skills, his size can make a difference at the wall, and he runs to the spot and positions himself to throw well before the ball gets here, which helps his average arm play up a bit. He shares many similarities with Michael A. Taylor, who is essentially the platonic ideal of of 45+-FV center fielder: A guy who has a couple of peak seasons with 20-plus homers, but whose offensive performance across several seasons is rather uneven. Alcántara is now in his final option year and this, combined with the Cubs’ glut of outfielders ahead of him, makes it increasingly likely that he is traded to a team that has the time and space to let him endure a likely adjustment period against big league secondary stuff.

Hartshorn slid to the sixth round last July after a tumultuous prep career that was heavily affected by elbow and back injuries that kept him from switch-hitting and relegated him to playing first base for long stretches. Many scouts fear that could be his long-term defensive home, but the second-round money ($2 million) the Cubs dropped is nevertheless looking well spent out of the gate, as even accounting for how well barely swinging works against wild Low-A pitching, Hartshorn is showing a precocious batter’s eye, hunts fastballs relentlessly, and is producing plus contact rates from both sides of the plate.

Watching Hartshorn against Low-A pitching right now looks like Robbie Grossman has found himself in some sort of 21 Jump Street situation, crankily reiterating hitting cues to himself while teeing off against teenagers who only occasionally find the plate. That’s also to say that Hartshorn is already a fully filled out 6-foot-2, 220 pounds, he’s unlikely to build much upon his above-average raw power, and even when his routes improve, he lacks the explosiveness to project beyond 40-grade corner outfield defense. Hartshorn uses a toe tap from the left side to keep his weight back, but he has struggled to elevate pitches that aren’t on the inner-third thus far and is currently running a groundball rate north of 50%. His bat path is less steep from the right side, and since he is still just 19 with time for adjustments, some scouts feel he’ll drift into a power-over-hit orientation with time. The kid can hit, but given his defensive limitations, that might be the necessary route for him to provide impact.

Conrad hit .389/.467/.704 during his sophomore year at Marist, then slashed .385/.433/.486 on Cape Cod before transferring to Wake for his draft year, which was cut short by a left shoulder injury and surgery. He performed well during the month that he played, which was evident in both his visual scouting look and his underlying data, but virtually none of it was in ACC conference action, which was going to be an important part of him solidifying his draft stock. Even though we had a relatively incomplete understanding of Conrad, the Cubs used the 17th overall pick on him. He has yet to play in a pro game due to a lower back injury, which was originally supposed to cost him a month, but as of publication (nearly a month after the start of the season) we have been told he is not especially close to returning. And so Conrad remains something of a toolsy black box.

Conrad has a classic lefty uppercut swing, but he’s still able to cover the top of the strike zone pretty well despite some length. He’s a fluid, explosive rotator with above-average bat speed. He struggled some to identify breaking balls at Marist, and we had barely gotten into conference play when he got hurt last year, so there’s some hit tool projection volatility here, and Conrad might require an adjustment period against better stuff. He played a mix of outfield and first base at Marist, then played center field at Wake. He didn’t look amazing out there, but he’s barely played it and runs well enough to give it a try in pro ball if the Cubs are comfortable with it given his growing injury history. This is a volatile potential regular who we know relatively little about compared to other 21-year-old first-round draftees.

Kepley transferred to UNC after two years at Liberty and had more walks than strikeouts in all three years of college. He has the skill set of an old school leadoff hitter, with blazing speed and catalytic qualities on offense, such as (almost excessive) patience and plus contact ability, but he probably doesn’t have enough power to be a first-division player. Kepley had an 89% contact rate at UNC in 2025 and an 83% mark after the draft, with a rate closer to 80% so far in 2026. He like to poke pitches down and away from him back through the middle and to the opposite field. That’s not to say Kepley is a slap-and-dash hitter; his wrists are strong through contact, and his flexible lower body helps him generate a bit more pop than his little frame might otherwise be capable of. While these attributes help Kepley to consistently hit the ball fairly hard, his lack of size does limit his top-end power, and he’s more likely to be a doubles machine than any sort of home run threat.

Kepley is a plus-plus runner who stole 45 bases in 49 attempts as a junior and will run a jailbreak 3.9 from home to first. He pretty easily has the range to play a great center field, and he plays with big effort and intensity, but his reads and routes are just okay. We’ve seen enough of Kepley against pro pitching to be more confident now than we were before the draft that he has big league physicality, and it’s possible his prospect stock will track similarly to Sal Frelick’s. But while this is an FV boost compared to Kepley’s pre-draft grade, it still has him pegged as more of a classic part-time outfielder or second-division regular than a star.

Caple spent two seasons as a reliever at Stephen F. Austin and then transferred to Lamar for another two seasons, where he moved into the rotation. He had a three-tick velo spike in his first full pro season, but he didn’t pitch especially well at South Bend. He’s back there to start 2026 and has had yet another little uptick in arm strength and is performing much better.

Caple is a big guy with a high arm slot, and the angle of his fastball seems to make hitters uncomfortable. He’s been able to blow 93-96 mph heaters past them at a plus-plus rate early in 2026. The rest of Caple’s repertoire has been augmented since he turned pro, as he now works with several different breaking balls that span the 74-91 mph range. He can manipulate shapes and speeds to give his stuff a cutter shape toward the top of that range, or bend in a slower curveball that is much harder than the version he threw in college. In between is a mid-80s sweeper. His changeup even has bat-missing sink on occasion, but Caple struggles to command it. Though the length of Caple’s outings so far should give one pause about assuming he’ll hold mid-90s velo all year (he’s averaging roughly four innings per start early on), he has the repertoire depth, pitchability, and size of a big league starter. He’s tracking like a prospect with a fifth starter floor whose upside might be closer to a no. 4 if he looks like this across 120 innings.

Ayers had a breakout 2025 (124 wRC+) as an old-for-the-level Low-A hitter, culminating in a stellar Arizona Fall League stint (at least on offense) in front of dozens of scouts and executives. He was assigned to High-A South Bend at the start of 2026, but was so good there that he was promoted to Double-A Knoxville after just two weeks of play. Ayers has uncommon switch-hitting power for a catcher and has so far gotten to it in games. His age for an A-ball hitter and small-school pedigree are opposing forces when attempting to contextualize his performance, but Chicago’s aggressive early-season promotion will help settle the score throughout this season.

We like Ayers’ tools and physical projection. His arm is awesome. He has the lightning-fast exchange of an undefeated late-1800s gunslinger, and routinely pops sub-1.9 with throws right on the bag. The other aspects of his catching defense weren’t great in last year’s Fall League, but they have been better this spring, especially Ayers’ ball-blocking. He was an above-average framer on paper during last year’s regular season and then bad in the AFL, perhaps just due to exhaustion (a common complaint of Fall League backstops). Again, this spring has been better.

It takes Ayers’ hands a little while to get going, and his length leaves him vulnerable to elevated fastballs, but once his mitts are moving, he can swing it pretty good. He’s a threat to do damage from both sides of the plate (but has better barrel feel as a lefty) and has surprisingly good peak exit data for a fairly skinny 6-foot-1 guy. Adding strength (his frame has room for it, but Ayers is nearly 25, so the cement might be dry) would add some pop and, more importantly, help Ayers weather the physical burden of catching. His offensive profile is different, but there are similarities here with Jonah Heim. Ayers is a projectable switch-hitting catcher with defensive tools who should have a window of offensive relevance during his physical peak.

Reid was lightly used for two years at Oklahoma State before transferring to Abilene Christian and striking out 112 hitters to just 27 walks over 88.1 innings. That, alongside plus extension and a nasty straight change, earned him a third-round selection last July, albeit with fourth-round money. He only sits in the low 90s with unremarkable ride, but the slight crossfire action of Reid’s delivery and his long-limbed extension down the mound give the pitch a chance to play average. His changeup has excellent late fade, but he drops his arm angle significantly to pronate it in a way that bears monitoring as he faces more advanced hitters. After throwing a below-average sweeper in college, Reid is getting on top of his breaking balls more with the Cubs. The location and action are both wildly inconsistent, but the best versions show the depth and two-plane movement to dream on an average slider emerging. With his strike-throwing, that offers no. 4/5 starter potential.

Wing’s NorCal high school was sandwiched in the area between San Jose and and Monterey Bay, but he was committed to Loyola Marymount down in LA. While it was likely tempting to have his future essays graded by Clinton Yates, the Cubs gave Wing $1.5 million to turn pro instead. He debuted the Saturday prior to list publication, and Wing was great. His fastball sat 94-95 early in the outing, his changeup was consistently plus and flashed even better than that, and he commanded two breaking balls that are better delineated now than they were in high school.

He looks like a Jonah Tong starter kit in many respects. Wing is really skinny, his delivery features a somewhat concerning amount of effort that might impact his command, he can really turn over a changeup, and the depth of his breaking pitches is aided by his high release point. His slider sits in the mid-80s, while his curveball hovers around 77 mph and has more depth. These are both in-zone offerings more than they are finishing pitches right now. One area where Wing is different than Tong is his fastball’s shape and playability. Even though he has a vertical slot, Wing pronates at release and has a fastball axis in the 1:15 area. This may impact his effectiveness and usage approach against more polished hitters. For now, he looks like a darn good draft pick and a potential eventual rotation piece.

Sanders entered college as a high-profile prospect but had a down 2023 junior spring at South Carolina because of an injury to his knee and lower fibula, which caused him pain during the season. The Cubs have pushed him pretty aggressively, as he reached Double-A in his first full season and Triple-A in his second. He’s back at Iowa to start 2026. Sanders’ best pitch is a plus-plus splitter that is so nasty it often doesn’t matter where he locates it. It falls off the table in any number of directions and is so effective that he throws it more often than his fastball, which has added a tick of velo so far this year. His third pitch is a mid-80s slider that Sanders tends to locate in the zone rather than for chase, though that’s not necessarily intentional. Some of his walk issues stem from his splitter-first approach — that pitch is hard to control — but overall his feel for location, regardless of pitch type, is below average. As Sanders approaches his addition to the 40-man late this year, he’ll likely start his career as a short-outing starter, but eventually he should wind up in relief, where he might be able to work in higher-leverage spots because of the quality of his split.

Armas was a college Gold Glove winner at the University of San Diego, which earned him sixth-round level money in the 2024 draft despite a light offensive résumé. He has a twitchy and explosive lower half that somehow shows itself best when he’s in his crouch. Armas has remarkable lateral quickness and can hop out of his stance fast enough with a quick release to average 1.9 second pop times. His hands are quicker than they are quiet, but the tools (and reputation for handling pitchers) are in place for Armas to make a career out of his defense. He’ll probably need to, as his lower half plays a lot stiffer at the plate, where he’s typically defanged by spin and lacks the bend to stay with soft stuff below the thigh. Armas stays pretty compact and tightly coiled at the plate and can flash some 45-grade raw pop to the pull side on inner-half mistakes, but a common Cubs hitting approach of rarely swinging puts him in a lot of two-strike counts that expose his spin vulnerabilities. He projects as a glove-first backup who will be the secretly preferred battery partner of a starter or three.

Florentino signed for just $10,000 and spent his first two seasons in the DSL before he blew the doors off the Arizona Complex League and (once he got acclimated) the Carolina League in 2025. He carried a 1.07 WHIP across 81.1 innings and was named the Cubs Minor League Pitch of the Year. This season, Florentino has yet to pitch in a game. MLB Pipeline’s Jim Callis reported in early April that Florentino, who is on the Development List, just needed more time to get ready for the season and that he’d join High-A South Bend soon. It has been just over a month since that report and no sign of Florentino, though some of that might just be due to the Cubs’ lack of extended spring games.

Last year, Florentino was dominant despite mediocre velocity because his sider is great and his fastball has “round up” traits. No matter how conservative you are in applying the “sweeper” label, this is absolutely one of them, as it averaged a whopping 19 inches of horizontal movement last season. It generated a 70-grade miss rate even though it averaged just 74 mph, which might be too slow to dominate big leaguers. The same is true of Florentino’s fastball. It sits 90, but has weird uphill angle and hairy enough movement to stay off barrels. Florentino has a starter’s command and athleticism, but maybe not the size, and definitely not the repertoire depth just yet. His changeup and cutter are crude. Based on his ability to spin the baseball, the cutter should mature into a weapon. Whether the changeup progresses and Florentino has the stamina to start are things that we’ll learn over the course of the next couple of years. This was supposed to be Florentino’s 40-man platform year, but now that it’s off to a slow start, the chances of him making a push for a roster spot feel pretty low.

It’s typical for contact prodigies like Triantos to be at least partially discovered because of their data — they rarely swing and miss during high school showcase play, and across several events, they generate a large enough sample for teams to flag them because of this. In Triantos’ case, the pandemic made it hard for him to accumulate such a sample, and yet the Cubs boldly gave him $2.1 million to sign as a second-rounder rather than go to Virginia. He has more or less run the minor league table as a plus or better contact hitter with all-fields doubles power generated via an inside-out approach.

His defensive fit and quality, as well as how much power Triantos would hit for, took a while longer to come into focus, and both are likely to remain below average. While Trianos is a ferocious rotator, it takes his body a while to unwind, and he ends up late and drives the ball into the ground fairly often. This can make it tough for him to hit for consistent power. The unique nature of his swing results in him covering the inner half of the plate much better than the outer portion of the zone. Originally a shortstop, Triantos doesn’t have great hands and can be error-prone on the infield. He got pretty good run in center field last year and isn’t great out there, but he’s no worse than he is at second base. Were the Reader GM interested in acquiring Triantos, who is now on the Cubs’ 40-man and blocked at each of his feasible positions, they should envision him playing part of the time in center field. Triantos’ contact skill and defensive versatility (despite below-average ability) should allow him to play a lesser utility role and be on 40-man rosters for quite a while.

Long had a breakout 2024, his first full pro season, as he hit 17 bombs in 114 games and posted a 149 wRC+ split between High- and Double-A. Last year at Triple-A Iowa, he slashed .305/.404/.479, hit 20 homers, and kept his strikeout rate down at 19.1%. He’s back in Iowa to start 2026, but is hitting for a little less power early on. Long swings hard and has several underlying data elements that corroborate his statistical output to this point — better-than-average contact, hard-hit, and chase rates, as well as peak exit velocities — but we’re skeptical of it translating to the big leagues without incident because Long’s swing is, well, long. It takes a while for his bat to match the pitch plane in a way that enables him to turn on the baseball, and he ends up late to the contact point. Long’s spray profile is super weird, and he ends up tomahawking a lot of high fastballs the other way when he isn’t getting tied up around his hands.

Some of his plate discipline also seems to be made of paper, as he’s one of several hitters in this system who just doesn’t swing. His overall swing rate is down near 40%, and last year, he offered at 68% of pitches down the middle, 10 percentage points below the big league average. When you watch Long hit, you can see he’s apt to offer at fastballs around his chest and above. Long’s swing is so weird that we think it might be the reason he had extreme reverse splits last year, with an xwOBA against righties (.358) nearly 60 points higher than against lefties (.299).

Long had been playing a mix of first and third base as well as left field, but so far this year he’s playing almost exclusively first, with just one left field start mixed in. He isn’t an especially good defender, and it’s his bat that’s going to need to carry him to a sustained big league role. Though a lot of Long’s data is promising, based on our visual assessment of his tools and movements, we’re apprehensive about him hitting enough.

Martin is a vert slot lefty reliever with good breaking stuff. He’s long had the look of a perfectly good lefty relief specialist from a stuff standpoint, but he struggled with walks in the minors so badly that he graded out as more of an up/down piece. That started to change in 2025, as Martin cut his walk rate a little bit (it was still 13.4%) and carried a 2.69 ERA across 63.2 innings. He’s off to an even better start in 2026, as he had a solid handful of big league appearances in the lead up to list publication. Martin’s arm stroke looks like it has been shortened, and his release has not only been more consistent but seemingly more deceptive, as hitters struggle to pick up his otherwise average fastball. More consistent strike-throwing and breaking ball quality (he has a gyro slider and a curveball) will be the keys to Martin’s future as he roots into a reliable middle inning role.

Kipp had an ERA approaching 7.00 at Yale and threw just under 80 innings in four years due to the pandemic. He planned on attending grad school at Notre Dame, but he pitched well on Cape Cod and signed with the Cubs for $50,000 as a undrafted free agent. Kipp, who is repeating Double-A as a starter, can really spin it. His curveballs often have in excess of 3,000 rpm and his fastball usually exceeds 2,600. Kipp’s curve has big two-plane movement, and he has a sweeper with big horizontal break and a gyro-style slider listed here as a cutter. The curve is easily the most productive of these pitches, in part because it’s the one Kipp can spot most consistently. He’s throwing all of his pitches for strikes so far in 2026 and has his walk rate in the single digits as of this writing, but historically, he has struggled to work with a starter’s efficiency. Could Kipp enjoy a velo spike in relief? It’d be worth it to the Cubs to find out via a late-season conversion that would precede an offseason 40-man decision. Here we think Kipp would fit nicely as a middle reliever.

Jerzembeck missed his final two years at South Carolina recovering from a TJ and later a stress fracture in his elbow. He was nasty on the backfields this spring, executing a lateral attack with a tailing mid-90s fastball and late-biting slider. Jerzembeck’s delivery has NC-17 violence and his recent injury history is severe, making him a likely reliever. Early this year he’s done a mix of starting and long relieving at Myrtle Beach. His changeup has enough tail and sink to give him a third projected bat-missing pitch, and he can tweak his slider to play more like a cutter. There’s a starter’s mix here, and Jerzembeck (who is underdeveloped from a reps standpoint) has pretty solid feel for location, but his delivery is just too messy to project him in the rotation. He should be a reliable long reliever instead.

McCullough carved at Division-II Wingate University, then boosted his pre-draft visibility with a stint on Cape Cod. He had a very successful first full season in pro ball split between Low- and High-A, as he struck out 108 in 86.1 innings across 21 starts. He began 2024 on the IL recovering from a 2023 knee surgery, finished his rehab in Arizona, was quickly moved up to Double-A, and then was put on the IL again with a shoulder strain and stayed there for the rest of the year. More injuries cropped up in 2025, resulting in a mid-season surgery that has also kept him out during the early portion of 2026.

When healthy, McCullough has the look of a potential no. 4/5 starter. He has a riding 91-94 mph fastball that plays better than its pure velocity, as well as a low-80s bullet-style slider that he commands to the locations where it’s most effective. His changeup flashed bat-missing action in 2023, though this was less true in his healthy 2024 window. McCullough stood a chance to climb into the 45-FV tier by the end of 2024; instead, we’re all waiting to see if he returns healthy in 2026.

Birdsell had Tommy John surgery in high school, spent his freshman year at Texas A&M, his sophomore year at San Jacinto, and then finally ended up at Texas Tech for his junior and senior campaigns. He was selected by the Twins in the 11th round of the 2021 draft, but an ill-timed shoulder injury resulted in him returning for his senior season, and a year later, he was a fifth-round selection by the Cubs. He had been durable and consistent in pro ball, and he reached Triple-A with little resistance, but injuries limited him to just eight starts in 2025, ending in another elbow surgery. He’ll miss all of 2026 as a result.

Birdsell has plus command. His ultra-short arm action and the simplicity of his entire operation help him stay consistent. He attacks with a ton of downhill mid-90s fastballs and a curt, 88-90 mph cutter/slider that he almost always puts right on the corner of the plate. Birdsell doesn’t really have a weapon to deal with lefties. He has a low-80s curveball, but it doesn’t have the huge depth or arm-side tilt of a platoon-neutral curve. Vulnerability to lefties will likely relegate Birdsell to fifth starter status when he returns in 2027.

Long-levered, lithe and lean, Lovich checks a lot of visual scouting boxes for a projectable power hitter, complete with a traditional lefty scoop-and-lift bat path and a love for dropping the bat head on pitches down and in. The Cubs gave $650,000 to the KC-area high schooler in the 11th round in 2024, and he’s still worth following even if little has clicked yet other than the fact that the 20-year-old is already creeping toward average raw pop (102.7 mph 90th-percentile EV last year) despite not adding much bulk. His swing path has driven outer-half plate coverage issues thus far, which, combined with excessive chase, has led Lovich to run a K-rate north of 30% at Low-A. He’s a below-average runner with very raw feel for tracking and finish plays at present, and a move to first base would quickly shift him into honorable mention territory.

Connected to the Marlins at an early point in the amateur scouting process, Tomas instead ended up signing with the Cubs in January 2025 for $1.1 million as a sushi-raw (but super projectable) shortstop and third baseman. He had the pro debut one might have expected (but not hoped for) given his amateur report, as Tomas hit .186 and K’d at a 29% clip. The Cubs still decided to promote him to Arizona for the 2026 season.

Tomas has a skinny, long-levered frame, and it can take his hands a while to get on plane with the baseball. He flashes exciting pull-side power — he homered on a hanging breaker in his ACL debut —but is also too late into the hitting zone a lot of the time. Tomas has a plus arm, but he’s a slower-twitch athlete who is still growing into his body, and he’s a better fit at third base right now than he is at shortstop. Overall, he remains a slow-burn developmental prospect who is a bit cruder in all facets than we would have hoped given the hype he generated in the amateur scouting space.

A Tommy John surgery delayed the start of Wheat’s pro career until nearly two years after he was drafted, and he dealt with further injury in 2025, when the Cubs tried to get him rolling as an A-ball starter. They started to ditch that track in the 2025 Fall League, where Wheat was first deployed as a reliever, and that has continued in 2026. Though he’s walking an inordinate number of batters (two per inning so far this year as of publication), Wheat has too much arm strength not to be on here. He’ll bump 102, his slider flashes plus, and at a hulking 6-foot-5, he’s built and moves like a power pitcher. This guy is a long-term project, but he has huge stuff. It’s not uncommon for things to click for relievers like this in their late 20s, and we think that’s possible for Wheat.

Mulé was a famous two-way high schooler who looked more promising on the mound because of his incredible arm strength. He missed what would have been his first full pro season due to elbow surgery and then struggled with walks (seven per nine) in 2024 and 2025. After three wild starts to begin 2026, he was shut down and put on the Development List. His stuff — mid-90s heat, a nasty gyro sider — looks like that of a late-inning reliever, but Mulé is so far away from harnessing it at this stage that he should be considered a developmental project.

The Cubs paid Southisene $1 million to bypass his commitment to Tennessee, and while we like him, we didn’t consider him a seven-figure prospect at draft time. Southisene plays with undeniable energy and hustle. He’s short, ultra-twitchy little guy with a rhythmic swing, a hand hitch trigger, average bat speed, and a pretty extreme opposite field tendency. Southisense had more walks than strikeouts in his pro debut and stole 41 bases, but he slugged under .300, which is consistent with our visual report of his power. He makes some nice plays at short because of guile and grit, but some of those plays are the kind that more typically-sized shortstops make look routine. We like Southisense as a grinder extra infielder and expect that he’ll begin to play other positions as he traverses the minors.

Cabada was evaluated as one of the more polished and stable hitters in the 2025 international signing class and he performed like it during his pro debut, slashing .287/.429/.426 in the DSL. He’s come to the States for his second pro season and is hitting in the heart of the Cubs’ ACL lineup. Cabada is a stocky, physically mature second baseman who tracks pitches with precision and moves his barrel around the zone. He isn’t an especially mobile defender or projectable athlete, and he’s going to have to make a special rate of contact to profile as a regular at second or third base, the two spots he appears athletically capable of handling. This grade is lower than Cabada’s from last year because the chances that he remains at shortstop appear worse than they did when he signed. He’s still a fine prospect because he does the thing we care most about: hit.

Noland not only played some quarterback at Arkansas, but ESPN had him as a four-star recruit out of high school. His leg strength and core stability are really on display in the way he glides down the mound. He has a short arm stroke that is repeatedly on time from a near over-the-top slot, unspooling a wide suite of downer-shaped secondaries. His sweeper has real wipeout two-plane action, but setting it up is Noland’s eternal burden. With a four-seamer that’s often 89-92 mph and lacks any bat-missing qualities, Noland has frequently had to be a nibbling, three-fastball-shapes kind of guy at Triple-A, and to diminishing returns so far this season. He has the command and feel to pitch to be a multi-inning up-down option, but the stuff is a little light for spot starter use.

Bateman posted a .319/.406/.373 career line at Minnesota and has continued to post great on-base numbers so far in pro ball, in part because he is one of the more patient, thumb-twiddling hitters in the minors. He tracks pitches well, covers the top of the strike zone, and slaps a lot of contact to the opposite field. Bateman runs just well enough to stick in center field, and he plays the position with the sort of infectious, reckless abandon that fires up his teammates. At 5-foot-10, he’s smaller than a typical big leaguer; Giants outfielder Will Brennan (who got stronger in pro ball, but still isn’t especially powerful or big) is a fair comp for what to hope Bateman can grow into. Especially if opposing pitchers attack him fearlessly due to his lack of power, his OBP skills will probably dip if he ever gets sustained big league run. Still, Bateman’s ability to play a decent center field should keep him on the 40-man fringe for a while.

Born in the Bahamas (he has competed for Great Britain in the last two WBC tournaments), Murray went to high school and college in Florida and, with the exception of his 2024 season, he has put together an impressive, well-rounded offensive résumé in pro ball that included a 20/20 season at Knoxville in 2025. Murray is a compact, switch-hitting corner infielder with modest bat speed. He tracks pitches well, and has enough barrel feel from both sides of the plate to play a bench bat role, but he lacks both the power of a regular corner infielder and the tools (speed/defense) to impact the game in other situations.

Snell began his college career at Auburn but didn’t play as a freshman and left for Wallace Community College in 2022. He spent two years as a two-way player there and then transferred to Alabama, where he both pitched and hit in 2024 before he was named team captain and exclusively played the outfield in 2025. The Cubs gave the fifth-year senior $200,000 in the draft’s fifth round, an indication that they considered him one of the priority senior players in the class. Snell was aggressively assigned to High-A and is back there to start 2026, and is starting to get some traction. He can run and throw, and he swings hard for a player his size, tools that didn’t always shine through in college (Snell stole zero bases at ‘Bama even though he’s a plus runner). It’s possible that’s simply because he has only focused on hitting for one year. Snell’s feel for defense isn’t great, and his swing path results in a lot of groundball contact. These are things that could be manicured with the reps and development that Snell has only just begun to get consistently. He’s a toolsy late-bloomer sleeper.

A two-way star as an underclassmen at the College of Charleston, Mathis offered feel to hit in a slugger’s frame, a reputation buoyed by a blistering performance on the Cape that saw him launch 11 home runs in 38 games ahead of his draft year. He didn’t pitch as a junior, but the early days of his pro career have been waylaid by the damage wrought on his elbow. He underwent TJ shortly after being drafted, missed most of last season with an elbow sprain, and at time of list publication, is basically first base-only, though he started out the year by obliterating Low-A pitching while old for the level. Mathis hit .294/.439/.765 with seven homers in 14 games at Myrtle Beach before getting bumped to South Bend, but he also struck out 27.3% of the time.

Mathis is sort of an odd duck for filling out a first baseman’s offensive requirements. There have been some subtle tweaks of late to give his bat path more space to generate loft, and he shows some good feel for bending at the waist, but Mathis is a high ball hitter with more of a level cut. His footwork is conservative at the plate, and the above-average power he has generated during portions of his career took a while to return after his injury. While his raw contact skill is plus, Mathis’ very passive approach, along with a lot of two-strike expansion for his experience level, has caused him to run elevated strikeout rates in pro ball. In all, there are too many warts and too many setbacks to project him as a regular at such a bat-first spot on the diamond.

Six-foot-eight and exceptionally broad-shouldered and long-levered, Coppola was a significant draft prospect back when he was a New Jersey prep standout, and despite covering less than 50 innings in three years at Florida thanks to back and shoulder injuries, he still got popped in the seventh round by the Cubs last July. His velocity and control have wavered a lot, as he walked nine in eight innings at Myrtle Beach after the draft last summer, sat 91-93 mph, and now has been stuck on the Development List all season. His arm action is long, his stride is a little short considering his size, he’s often late to the firing position, and his feel for his secondaries can abandon him. The fastball has missed bats like a 70-grade pitch even at diminished velocity, and his outlier frame makes him someone to watch, even if tagging his risk level as “extreme” doesn’t feel extreme enough.