The BA List

Baseball America released their list of the overall top 100 prospects in baseball today. The link to it is here.

Generally, I am not much of a fan of prospect lists. Lists are an easy way to deliver content and I think the goal of most prospect lists is to inform people about some various players that they might not otherwise be exposed to. That’s a good goal, but it strikes me that often most of the ensuing discussion revolves around minute differences in opinion on the ranks themselves, rather than about the varying merits of the players. Maybe people keep track of prospects better than I do and so everything on these lists is old news to them, but is it really important to debate whether Stephen Strasburg should be number 1 instead of number 2?

That is not to say that I don’t look at the rankings, but I like to look them more as groupings than as strict delineations. For instance, Miguel Sano coming in only in the mid-90s after all the hype that he got? That surprised me and drove me to read some more recent reports on him to try and understand BA’s ranking. I liked how Brett Wallace was ranked 27th and Michael Taylor 29th. I guess BA sees that trade as pretty even?

Aroldis Chapman all the way up at 22? I am a bit skeptical that he should be that high, but I can understand why scouts would drool over him. Similar to Tanner Scheppers being all the way at 42. To me, nobody with his injury history should be that high until he shows himself well past the recovery phase, but I think that could be a fun debate.