Houston Astros Top 30 Prospects

Standing 6-foot-3 and still quite slender even as he’s arrived stateside this spring, Alvarez has the sort of frame that’s easy to project maturing into a power-hitting corner outfielder’s. But he made a ton of contact down the stretch (84% overall) while slashing .301/.419/.455 in the DSL last year, and it’s now a shade more inviting to also project an average hit tool, even if he’s still a long-levered 18-year-old who ideally has a lot of physical transformation left.

Alvarez sets up on top of the plate with an open stance, which is enabled by his precocious ability to shorten up and scoop pitches low and in, and it serves to enable pretty impressive outer-half plate coverage at the moment. Alvarez’s barrel is mobile enough, but his swing path suggests he’ll struggle a bit with the riding heaters he’ll see at the higher levels, and there’s some two-strike expansion buried within his chase numbers, which were solidly average overall. Nitpicking the offensive profile comes with the territory, because it’s already a left field projection based on Alvarez’s speed and arm even before he’s done much bulking up, though he’ll likely continue playing center for now. The bones of a middle-of-the-order presence are here, with maybe a bit more hit tool than was suspected this time last year. He was an offseason Pick to Click for Brendan.

Neyens hasn’t played an official affiliated game yet, but he already feels like the centerpiece of the Astros’ efforts to invest in power potential, represented by them dropping $4.12 million on the Washington high schooler/amateur barber last July. He’s a 6-foot-4 lefty with readily accessible above-average power that projects as 70-grade, and he flashes a precocious ability to tuck his hands in and explode on inner-half locations. That’s countered by contact rates that were already in the low 70s on the showcase circuit, with particular difficulty against secondaries. Neyens doesn’t need to make a ton of contact to access 30-homer thump, but the power-over-hit orientation is extreme enough for there to be elevated bust potential here, especially if he slides down the defensive spectrum.

The Astros drafted Neyens as a shortstop, but third base feels like the stretch goal. He has the raw arm strength to stick at the hot corner, but he already isn’t tremendous at getting low to the ground and is likely to get much bigger as in-game power remains his central pursuit. Neyens is a good enough runner and athlete for an outfield corner to be a viable fallback, but he could end up at first base if he really fills out. Real risk has to be incurred for a team to land a potentially star-level bat at the back of the first round, which is what a hollowed-out Astros system needs at this point. Neyens holds up both ends of the bargain.

The 32-inning big league demonstration of Blubaugh’s heater playing above-average (28.7% whiff rate) despite sitting in the 92-96 mph range takes some of the guesswork out of whether he can stick as a back-end starter. The 25-year-old will still be long and lanky the day he retires, but he experienced a two-tick jump in velo in 2025 that also dragged his sweeper and changeup into the 80s. Still, even with the revamped stuff, he was looking extra relievery at midseason, having walked 42 in 69.2 innings entering last July.

Blubaugh is a violent rotational mover and queues up his delivery with a big, coiling leg kick that isn’t the easiest thing to repeat. But he was striding farther toward the mound and less toward first base just as he was lining up some of the best strike-throwing of his life during the extended run he got in Houston through the end of September (28.2% strikeout rate, 8.9% walk rate). It’s still more of a control-over-command approach, which can be dicey with a sweeper that has average action, but he backspins a beautiful rise-and-run heater that currently enables enough bat-missing to make it work as a no. 4/5 starter.

Pecko’s efforts to fulfill his Pick to Click status unraveled early when forearm discomfort delayed his 2025 Double-A debut until June, but he ended the year looking the part; more importantly, he looked like someone who will make starts in Houston in 2026. After an early August promotion, he struck out 30 against just three walks over 21 innings in his final four starts in Triple-A, even if he didn’t see the jump in stuff that would mark him as a future mid-rotation arm rather than a good candidate to grab a job at the back end.

Like a few Astros pitching prospects, Pecko has grown into a drop-and-drive delivery that creates the flat angle necessary for his low-to-mid-90s fastball to play like a plus weapon. The pitch has flirted with 30% miss rates in recent years, but it also often plays like his best bat-misser. His slider has more compelling sweep than drop, and is mostly a righty-only weapon that he protects with equal use of a 88-91 mph cutter. Even if it winds up taking more damage in the zone, his sharp low-80s curveball is his most valuable secondary because it has to carry the load against lefties, as his changeup is quite firm and inconsistently located.

Pecko’s four-seamer and the swing plane of most left-handers really don’t agree with each other, so he’s avoided any sort of platoon split thus far. While his arm action is on the longer side, he’s comfortably thrown a starter’s level of strikes for two years running. This is a near-ready no. 4/5 starter.

With respect to the change to his hand setup that has been on display this spring, and that lends a bit more rhythm to his load and some demonstrated ability to access above-average pull power, it still seems unlikely that Janek will hit much. That’s OK; most catchers don’t. But his swing is pretty grooved to the thigh-line, and High-A pitchers were able to lure him with benders off the outside edge (31% chase overall) to a degree that doesn’t bode well for the upper levels. He wouldn’t be the first big league catcher to navigate around a 30 hit tool, nor even the first Astros’ first-round pick in the last decade to do so. Janek still is very reminiscent of former Astros first-rounder Korey Lee, which is a complement in the sense that Lee has ridden pull-side homers on mistake pitches and bazooka throws from behind the plate to 142 major league starts, a number that almost all A-ball catchers would find admirable, and Janek is capable of doing the same. The more limiting element of the comp is that Janek, having slashed .263/.333/.433 last season in a repeat of his draft year assignment to High-A, also lacks the hit tool to profile as a franchise catcher of the future.

Short-levered with quick hands, Janek isn’t surgical with his throwing accuracy yet, but he gets it in the vicinity with an average pop time of 1.9 seconds and above-average arm strength, and he shows the ability to utilize different release angles. It’s the most entertaining aspect of his game and the carrying tool of a glove-first profile, but his framing numbers will need to improve a bit to round it out. Janek’s hands are plenty good, but there’s a school of thought that shorter-levered catchers like him need to become positioning savants to counter a smaller margin for error when it comes to making mid-flight adjustments, and presently he can struggle to get calls at the bottom of the zone. On top of flashing some plus run times and stealing 33 bases (in 35 attempts!) across Asheville and the Arizona Fall League last year, Janek has the athleticism to dream on him maturing into a starting-caliber defender, but his bat doesn’t have the steam to accelerate his journey.

Mayer didn’t quite keep up the momentum that earned him Pick to Click status all the way through the 2025 season. His command wavered as he walked seven in 10.1 innings over his last three outings at Double-A, and he was essentially shut down on the development list at 87.2 innings on the year, roughly 28 frames more than he managed in his draft year/first season back from Tommy John surgery. But even as his command wilted down the stretch, Mayer’s stuff still played at Double-A (71.2% contact rate) to a degree that would outstrip the expectations for a righty who sits 91-94 mph and lacks a reliable changeup.

The drop-and-drive nature of Mayer’s delivery lends a flat approach angle to a four-seamer with 17 inches of induced vertical break, and his slider and curveball have tight spin (both are over 2,600 rpm) and late action despite sitting in the low 80s. Even more powered-up righty supinators face platoon splits when heading to war against lefties with a four-seamer/curveball attack, and Mayer is no different. Assuming his midseason command returns, Mayer looks like a nice back-of-the-rotation find for a 16th-rounder with little collegiate success to his name, but until he lands on a changeup solution or starts throwing hard (and he never really has before), that’s also about his ceiling.

A Synergy Sports query of all 545 plate appearances Matthews had between Triple-A and his brief major league cameo last year shows a 36% miss rate against fastballs. A late hand load and poor barrel control look like big contributing factors, but heaters as a population playing like 80-grade bat-missers, with a decided hole above the belt. That’s disqualifying for an everyday projection, even for a tooled up, up-the-middle athlete who slashed .260/.371/.458 at Triple-A as a 23-year-old last year.

Especially now that he’s moved on from shortstop and the accuracy issues that plagued his throws there, the talent around Matthews’ fatal flaw still shines. He has a good plan at the plate to go with plus bat speed, and he can eviscerate breakers that don’t finish for gorgeous pull-side homers, launching 21 combined between Sugar Land and Houston last year. He’s a plus runner and a good basestealer who already looks perfectly fine during his increasing dalliances in center field, which helps build out the superutility profile for which his bat is more suited.

Matthews was the team’s first draft pick after Dana Brown took over as GM, and he fits the recent Astros’ pattern of searching for very physically impressive athletes while tolerating the inevitable warts that cause them to slide to the back of the first round. While his contact issues are such that Matthews might never hit enough to be a major league regular, he also has enough physical talent that he’s harder to dismiss than most guys running a 65% contact rate in Triple-A. The rub is that contact issues of this scale often preclude a significant big league career at all.

In the first inning of his last start at UC San Diego before he blew out in March 2024, Forcucci’s flat-angle four-seamer touched 97 mph, which speaks to how he was running a 31% miss rate on it despite using it 60% of the time in his draft year. Along with a gyro slider that touched 88 mph and a high-waisted and athletic 6-foot-3 frame, Forcucci offers the sort of raw ingredients that make the Astros nabbing him for $1 million (more than a quarter of million dollars over his third-round slot) look like a shrewd bit of business. For an organization that has spent the last eight years picking at the back of the first round – when they’ve been picking at all – Forcucci is exactly the sort of bet the Astros need to make in order to access collegiate arms with mid-rotation potential.

Of course, they incurred some risk to do so, beyond the fact that it’s been two years since Forcucci has appeared in an official game. When you’re sitting in the mid-90s with ride in the Big West, there isn’t much point messing around, but even still, Forcucci’s slider varied a lot in velo and action, resulting in somewhat pedestrian miss rates. As might be expected, he threw very few changeups as a junior, and they were very much on the firm side; a pitcher’s feel for pronation – or measures to deal with the absence of it – can take time to figure out post-TJ. Forcucci threw barely over 130 innings in his college career and he used a longer arm action that wasn’t always easy to time up with his lower half. So while his walk numbers were generally excellent at San Diego, the lack of innings, and the need to refine his secondaries and polish his mechanics, offers some relief risk, though he’d quickly profile as an impact one.

Frey was already enormous when he drew some draft attention coming out of high school. He stayed near home, going to LSU, and between a loaded roster and a shoulder labrum injury, he didn’t garner attention or even much opportunity until his draft year, when he slashed .331/.420/.641 with 13 homers in the middle of a national championship offense. That such accomplishments made Frey overqualified for what minor league contraction has done to Low-A baseball is a valid point, but he also beat their brains in, slashing .330/.434/.470 and flashing massive raw juice (108.3 mph 90th-percentile exit velocity) with an 80% contact rate.

The raw ingredients and recent performance are both hard to ignore, but Frey arrives at them in a manner that merits parsing. He really doesn’t chase (19% at Fayetteville), which is awesome, but it can seem like a byproduct of just not swinging (38% swing rate, a decent uptick from LSU). He makes a lot of contact for a big man with a ton of power, but he comes by it via a pretty level cut that doesn’t produce a lot of fly balls below the belt, with breakers that don’t finish being the typical exception.

Frey mostly DH’d in college, so there’s some whiplash in how much the Astros threw the big fella out in center after the draft. It inspired some hope that he can eventually provide 40-grade defense in a corner, but at this point it might need to be left field, depending on if Frey’s throwing mechanics can be improved with more reps. It should be good enough to make him a regular if his massive power potential can be unlocked, but that’s easier said than done.

By opting to go to Southern Alabama to play baseball, Joseph ended the streak his grandfather and father began of Sullivans playing quarterback in the SEC. But after breaking out for 18 home runs and a .230/.400/.426 line in 121 games across two minor league levels and the AFL in his first full pro season, the uber-athletic outfielder looks like a big leaguer of some stripe. Still, while a major league future seems likely, whether it will be as an up/down defensive reserve/pinch-runner, a power-over-hit, glove-first strong side of a corner platoon, or a guy who takes significant reps in center field remains too noisy to pin down.

Compactly built and muscled-up at 5-foot-10, 198 pounds, Sullivan is nonetheless a loose mover with above-average run times and the ability to stay controlled while throwing his body around to finish plays. He mostly played left field in college and certainly would rack up prettier metrics in a corner, but assuming his feel for the wall and tracking balls straight over his head improves with time, he’s viable enough in center to make a roster as the backup option out there. His time in the AFL got him up to 50 stolen bases on the season, and while that’s overselling the role speed will play in his big league game, it’s another supplemental skill that raises his floor above that of the typical college hitter with a 72% contact rate in Double-A.

Sullivan is short-levered, with an open stance and a rotational swing, and his High-A breakout came from scooping and lifting the down-and-in quadrant with impact juice (106.9 mph 90th-percentile EV). He shows more ability to flatten out his barrel and clear out the top rail of the zone than that orientation would suggest, but Sullivan is going to and already does struggle to cover the outer half, though his 27.7% strikeout rate last year was also inflated by a super-passive approach (35% swing rate). While his chase rate is rock-bottom (13%), he swings at a below-average number of meatballs as well. It’s kind of the necessary approach to navigate the gaps in his plate coverage and poor performance against spin, and the physical toolkit buys more patience than a shaky hit tool would earn on its own. Sullivan is likely too much of a ‘tweener (better in a corner, bat is a better fit for center) to be a regular, but he’s too toolsy to be sure of that, either.

You could argue that the Astros prioritize contention over development, but they can’t be accused of rushing to the relief future that Ullola’s performance has long augured. The right-hander has been remarkably durable, averaging over 110 innings over the last three seasons, and he has the org’s patented low-maintenance, drop-and-drive delivery, with enough extension to make his hoppy, cut-ride heater play as close to a 60-grade weapon despite sitting in the low 90s. All those innings also mean there’s a pretty significant statistical sample to suggest that he cannot throw a starter’s level of strikes (15.9% walk rate), and he has yet to command any secondary well enough to take the weight off his heater. Ullola touched 97 mph and was added to the 40-man roster this winter, and the opening of his option years could soon do the job of shifting him to a role where he can air out his best weapon, with some potential to handle medium-leverage situations.

This report is from Eric’s overview of the 2026 international class: A physical switch-hitter, Fermín has a puncher’s chance to stay at shortstop and hit for some power from both sides of the dish. He’s already pretty big for his age, so it’s more likely that he slides to third base at maturity. There’s a comfort and ease to Fermín’s game, but no big explosion or athleticism. He signed for $2.1 million in January.

When Cole turned 25 this past August, he was repeating Double-A while once again posting a strikeout rate north of 36%. That usually brings a certain set of assumptions with it, even for guys with a .267/.363/.505 slash line at Corpus Christi. He simply kept bashing the baseball (56% hard-hit rate!) around hellacious amounts of whiffing (63% contact rate) en route to a career-high 23 home runs, with the last four coming in a phantasmagoric 15-game major league cup of coffee — .553 slug, 20 strikeouts in 52 plate appearances — that opened with him nuking the first pitch he saw 114.3 mph out to right. Thanks to a kind of disjointed Astros offseason, Cole entered spring competing for a corner outfield spot. Why waste time dreaming on Joseph Sullivan when a more extreme version is closer to the majors?

Cole is so tooled up that it’s difficult to fathom how he mostly rode the pine for his first two years at Ball State. He’s a plus runner with a huge throwing arm that you can already see big leaguers starting to respect, so while he doesn’t quite have the reads and acceleration of an everyday center fielder, he can moonlight out there and be a defensive asset in the corners. That suits the fourth outfielder role that his contact issues inevitably peg him for. Amusingly, his four big league jacks were all on pitches above the belt, where scouting reports surely suggested he should be attacked, though with Cole’s rotational swing and open stance, the up-and-away quadrant and outer half might wind up being his true weak points. This is an imprecise barrel, and Cole’s in-zone whiff rates are such that Joey Gallo has to be invoked as the last clear of example of someone effectively working around swing-and-miss of this scale. Cole has a ton of juice (109.9 mph 90th-percentile EV), but not quite that much.

While many of the right-handers in this system have more subtle elements in their delivery that allow their low-90s heaters to play above average, Tredwell is simply a giant man (6-foot-8, 245 pounds) whose over-the-top delivery puts his release point squarely in Earth’s exosphere. His high-70s curveball, which has helped drive reverse splits despite the absence of a changeup, comes out of his hand from seven and a half feet in the air. Everything Tredwell throws has vertical shape, with his heater, which has about 18 inches of induced vertical break and five inches of horizontal, bordering on cut-ride. The action helps his fastball play for whiffs at the top of the zone, and with all the downer breakers he’s throwing, makes a riding fastball at the knees a surprisingly confounding weapon as well.

A shoulder injury limited Tredwell to 57 innings in 2024, so the Astros gave him a lot of three- and four-inning outings to guide him to exactly 100 frames over a three-level campaign last year. The 23-year-old was working in this fashion while carving up Double-A hitters in his final five weeks (38.5% K%, 11.5% BB%, 3.18 ERA in 22.2 innings), and showed more flashes of 94-95 near the very end. But his velo has largely been static since the Astros signed him for $1.5 million out of UCLA in 2023, and his delivery can look a little bifurcated between when he sits on his back leg and when he snaps forward. Along with the pedestrian raw spin and performance of his gyro slider, it’s hard to see more than a no. 5 starter until there’s either a velo jump or something that adds a horizontal element to his arsenal to better handle righties.

Nezuh is yet another Astros righty with a 91-94 mph heater that plays above average due to its shape, though in this case, he just gets a ton of vert from an over-the-top release that he gets to in somewhat violent fashion. After logging over 120 innings in his pro debut in 2024, Nezuh missed two months with an elbow strain last summer and sustained a fair amount of hard contact while pitching to a 4.48 ERA in 72.1 innings at Double-A. Perhaps relatedly, he commanded his split-change erratically enough to muddy the waters as to whether he has a plus secondary to lean on heading into his 40-man platform year. Both of Nezuh’s breakers are more vertical in shape, but they vary a lot in sharpness and velocity. Despite his changeup racking up his best miss numbers in a vacuum, he’s had a decent-sized platoon split in pro ball. While Nezuh has commanded his fastball enough to keep starting, he’s also hit 96 mph with it, and the most interesting version of him probably involves him airing it out in the bullpen.

Leach had an amateur career full of elbow injuries that led to him going undrafted out of Miami of Ohio in 2023. He missed two months this past season with a strain in his throwing shoulder, which was all simply prologue for the 23-year-old right-hander to flash some of the best stuff in the Arizona Fall League. With all the drop-and-drive righties in the Astros system, Leach finally offers one sitting 95-98 mph, fueling a 30% miss rate across what were functionally four minor league stops.

For all the whiffs, Leach’s four-seamer can take some damage when he doesn’t locate it, which happens often given his presently 30-grade control, but the sinker he flashed this spring showed compelling running action. The stars of the show here are Leach’s two secondaries – a very high-80s cutter and a mid-80s power curve – that rack up superlative miss rates thanks to their late downer shape out of a high-three-quarters slot. Leach struck out 76 in 45.2 innings last year because he has the stuff for high-leverage, but he ran a 5.32 ERA because he has the command of an up/down guy.

At midseason last year, Santa was a 22-year-old with a fairly compact delivery for a pure reliever. He had a death-to-righties arsenal with three different spin shapes and a low-angle two-seamer that got tons of run and was tickling the upper 90s with increasing frequency.

Now, well, he’s still 22. Santa was bumped up to Triple-A at the end of July, walked 23.5% of hitters there, and then went unprotected and unselected in the Rule 5 draft. His stride is short while his arm action is not, and it’s easy for him to fall out of sync and be late to the firing position. But more than his in-zone percentages falling off a cliff, his walks have been driven by his heater not missing bats and him needing to throw a ton of spin to get by. While he touched 99 mph last year, Santa has been sitting 93-95 mph so far this spring and is pretty physically developed already.

Both of Santa’s breakers, but especially his slider, are proven bat-missers with impressive raw spin and length, so there’s major league utility here, but it’s looking more like it’s going to be single-inning and low-to-medium leverage in shape.

Yainier Diaz is not without his warts and there isn’t much immediate depth or experience behind him in the Astros’ catching corps, so it’s been interesting to see some pace slapped on the progression of the 22-year-old Bush. With first-round pick Walker Janek spending all of last season at High-A, Bush got pushed up to Corpus Christi in August. That allowed him to catch more before they were both sent to the Arizona Fall League (where Janek caught and Bush mostly played first) and then subsequently invited to major league camp — this despite Bush’s brand of bat-first, power-over-hit catching prospect typically following more of a slow-boil development track.

The physical maturity isn’t in question, however, as Bush is a filled out 6-foot-1 with above-average present raw power. He likes the ball up more than your typical power lefty with a lift-and-scoop swing, but Bush is pretty proficient at catching the ball out in front and accessing his pull-side power. It’s a solidly below-average hit tool (72% contact rate), and Bush’s very patient approach has driven a lot of walks and strikeouts to fuel a .228/.354/.392 career line in pro ball, but it reads as a fine bat for a backup catcher provided he can stay back there.

Bush’s framing and blocking metrics were underwater last year, as he can often struggle to make clean picks on dirted breakers. He has a solid average throwing arm, but muddy exchanges on low pitches and a longer arm action led him to underperform it (17% caught stealing rate). He’s still tracking toward providing enough walks and pop to be a useful backup who can threaten righty starters, but it might take a bit longer than his recent progression suggests.

Powell has a cannon for an arm and incredible raw juice (116.2 mph max exit velocity), and he saw most of his playing time at shortstop in 2025. Yet his hit tool issues are so pronounced that sliding off short – and his hands looked rough enough last year that he didn’t play there down the stretch – could be a big blow to his prospect status. Despite missing seven weeks with a left hamate fracture, Powell managed a .239/.344/.404 line at Low-A in 2025, but he loads his hands very late in a max-effort swing and he whiffed on heaters at twice the big league rate against younger competition. He’s big, strapping, and athletic, with the physical tools to mature into an excellent defensive third baseman, but his 62% contact rate was already meaningfully lower than any qualified big leaguer last season, so the odds of him whiffing too much to surface as a power-oriented corner reserve remain high.

Baez is a super physical 22-year-old with plus bat speed and monstrous raw power. He is just a season removed from launching 21 homers as a 20-year-old and hit a ball 115.4 mph last year. There are pretty intractable reasons why you have to stay on a guy with this kind of physical ability at this age, especially since his disastrous 2025 campaign — .246/.309/.335, 69% contact rate, two homers in 66 games at Double-A — came on the heels of offseason thumb surgery. That said, the suspicion that Baez doesn’t track spin well enough to realize his power potential was simmering well before he chased it at a 43% clip at Corpus Christi last year, and it’s hard to be optimistic about his ability to improve that aspect of his game as long as his power remains largely rooted in extending his arms on pitches middle-away. His ability to handle velo on his hands is an almost untested issue because Baez is so vulnerable to right-handed sliders, but two-front wars are often as tricky in player development as they are in real life.

Baez is already a big man and a 40-runner, and he’ll be a below-average corner outfielder if he wins the battle to stick out there, which still seems unlikely, though it’s closer to a toss up than it was last July. That sets a pretty high offensive bar to clear, and while Baez has big-time talent, there’s a lot weighing down his efforts at the moment.

Hicks is a former senior sign who was repeating Double-A after scuffling there in 2024 when a hard comebacker fractured his right throwing arm in April and knocked him out for three months. The low-slot, low-90s slinging righty recovered to dominate in the AFL, winning the award for best pitcher in the league by riding his kitchen sink, east-west oriented attack to 19 strikeouts and just two walks in 14 scoreless innings in the desert.

Hicks has an easy delivery and plus command, which is hard to find out there. But while his changeup produced great results last fall, his larger track record suggests that he lacks a bat-missing secondary. He puts the ball where he wants with a suite of different shapes, which gives him depth starter potential heading into his 40-man platform year, but not the stuff for much more.

Pentecost was a three-sport athlete as a northeast Indiana high schooler who was late to focus on baseball. He wound up as a starting pitcher for three years in NAIA ball, striking out 116 in 80 innings as a junior. Pentecost sits in the low 90s and tops out at 95 mph with unremarkable shape, but he has an athletic build and a starter’s delivery that oozes strikes with a four-pitch arsenal, rounded out by two distinct breakers and a firm, lefty-only changeup. This looks like a depth starter at present, which would be a nice find in and of itself.

Hertzler is a certified big boy (6-foot-4, 235 pounds), but he’s smooth mover who spent part of his time at Liberty as a two-way player before the Astros dropped nearly $400,000 on him in 2024. The surprising agility hasn’t kept him healthy for more than 21 innings since turning pro, with a forearm strain ending his 2025 season after four starts. He was carving up until that point, though (16 innings, 34.4% strikeout rate, 9.4% walk rate). His fastball has good carry out of a super vertical slot but sits 91-94 mph, and his command of a suite of secondaries stands out more than any one weapon. Hertzler’s changeup has racked up nutty miss rates in a tiny sample and clearly doesn’t lack for deception, but it has below-average drop and will require careful command. There’s back-end starter potential here, but he’s already dealt with the level of injury that will shrink his window to avoid a shift to relief.

Huezo was signed for nearly $400,000 as a 17-year-old high schooler in the 12th round of the 2023 draft and has taken most of his at-bats on the complex in both of his first two full pro seasons, getting eaten up by spin and posting too many strikeouts to be a serious prospect. Even after hitting .262/.371/.458 in a 2025 season mostly spent between the FCL and Low-A, his 65% contact rate limits him to a reserve outfielder ceiling. But he’s a tightly wound athlete with explosive rotationality, big bat speed, and plus present raw power from a slender 6-foot frame. Huezo is twitchy enough to man center, but straight-line speed that’s closer to solid average makes him more of a part-time contributor up the middle. The failure rate for hitters who struggle this badly to make contact is very high, but Huezo hits the ball hard a lot, and he’s a compelling athlete with a swing that’s measured enough to offer some hope.

The Astros went under slot on three straight picks before giving Mitchell, a lanky 6-foot-3 Delaware high school catcher, almost $800,000 in the seventh round of last July’s draft. All prep catchers are long-term development projects and Mitchell exemplifies that, as his small state origins mean that he’s seen and caught very little pro-level velocity. His big, projectable build provides compelling raw power potential, but he also consistently ran a contact rate over 80% on the showcase circuit and showed good bend at the waist to stay on breakers. Reports on Mitchell’s raw arm strength are positive and he moves well enough to project him to stick behind the plate, even if the work to find mechanical consistency and develop his receiving to be able to handle pro-quality stuff offers a long, risky path to major league impact.

Millan is an athletically built outfielder who signed out of Venezuela for a shade under half a million dollars in January of 2025, and thrived in his debut season, posting a .279/.407/.419 line in 42 DSL games. He’s slender with some room to add strength, and he already hits the ball quite hard at 17 (102 mph 90th-EV), but he stands 5-foot-11 and isn’t a big projection case. Despite a simple and fluid setup and a really precocious approach (he swung at 92% of pitches over the heart of the zone in his debut), Millan’s 72% contact rate was just OK. His plus speed has made him an effective basestealer and gives him a real shot to stay in center, where his power-over-hit skill set could play.

Another from Eric’s update on the 2026 international class: Arias’ hands and actions are very impressive and give him plus projection as a shortstop defender. He currently swings with well below-average bat speed, but should grow into some amount of offense as he fills out, though probably just enough to play a utility role. He signed in January for $1.4 million.

For all the starting pitcher prospects on this list with well-performing fastballs who might seem like good fits for a conversion to relief, Knorr is here to remind us that it’s not necessarily a turnkey process. After a shoulder injury ate half of his 2024 season, the Astros moved the big, strong righty (6-foot-5, 245 pounds) to the ‘pen in his 40-man platform year; his velocity tick up to 94-97, but he also got absolutely tattooed in Triple-A (27.2 innings, 6.51 ERA, 32 hits, five homers). Despite the damage it takes from its heavy use, Knorr’s heater is a genuine bat-misser, but he gets under a lot of his secondaries and sees them pop out of his hand too often. His high-70s curve is his best bat-misser by the numbers, though it doesn’t project as such against big leaguers, while his cutter is his most consistently executed secondary but doesn’t offer much separation. It looks like an up/down reliever profile until a solution emerges.

Potter barely pitched and sat 91 mph in two years at Crowder College before breaking out and touching 100 mph out of the Wichita State bullpen in his draft year. Nabbed in the fifth round last July for a slightly under-slot bonus, Potter didn’t pitch after the draft. He could be a fast-riser, not because he’s uniquely polished but because it’s about as straightforward of a fastball/slider righty reliever profile as you’re gonna get. Potter’s heater has mostly sat 94-98 out of a vertical slot with 18 inches of induced vertical break with near cut-ride shape, and it ran a higher miss rate (34%) than his gyro slider even as he used it nearly 80% of the time. His recent velo gains, obvious arm speed, and lanky, 6-foot-4 build offer hope he can more regularly sit in the upper 90s, and he has touched 99 mph this spring. Potter often struggles to coordinate his upper and lower halves in his uptempo delivery, which leads to a fair number of sliders popping out of his hand. There’s medium-leverage potential here assuming strength gains add more stability to Potter’s operation.

After ditching his two-way player pursuit as a sophomore, Monistere had a draft year offensive breakout at Southern Miss, launching 21 bombs and slashing .323/.410/.623 against Sun Belt pitching. It looked more like fringe average raw power with a long swing in a tough post-draft look at Low-A, where he ran a 74% contact rate but continued to look vulnerable and chase-prone against spin. Primarily a second baseman while being a defensive nomad who has done everything but catch over the last three years, Monistere obviously has a plus throwing arm but shaky hands. It’s a non-shortstop utility profile that depends on some more pop showing up.