Below is our list of the top 100 prospects in baseball. The scouting summaries were compiled with information provided by available data and our own observations. 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.<\/p>\n
All of the prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details than this article and integrates every team\u2019s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here<\/a>.<\/p>\n And now, a few important things to keep in mind as you\u2019re perusing the Top 100. You\u2019ll note that prospects are ranked by number, but also lie within tiers demarcated by their Future Value grades. The FV grade is more important than the ordinal ranking. For example, the gap between Nolan McLean<\/a> (no. 3) and Sal Stewart<\/a> (no. 34) is about 30 spots, and there\u2019s a substantial difference in talent between them. The gap between Stewart and Luis De Le\u00f3n<\/a> (no. 64), meanwhile, is also 30 numerical places, but the difference in talent is relatively small. You may have also noticed that there are more than 100 prospects in the table below, and more than 100 scouting summaries. That\u2019s because we have also included the 50-FV prospects whose ordinal rankings fall outside the top 100, an acknowledgement both that the choice to rank exactly 100 prospects (as opposed to 110 or 210 or some other number entirely) is an arbitrary one, and that there isn\u2019t a ton of daylight between the prospects who appear in that part of the list. <\/p>\n You\u2019ll notice that there is a Future Value outcome distribution graph for each prospect on the list. This is an attempt to graphically represent how likely each FV outcome is for each prospect. Before his departure for ESPN, Kiley McDaniel used the great work<\/a> of our former colleague Craig Edwards to find the base rates for each FV tier of prospect (separately for hitters and pitchers), and the likelihood of each FV outcome. For example, based on Craig\u2019s research, the average 60-FV hitter on a list becomes a perennial 5-WAR or better player over his six controlled years 26% of the time, while he has a 27% chance of accumulating, at most, a couple of WAR during that stretch. We started with those base rates for every player on this year\u2019s list, and then manually tweaked them depending on our more specific opinions about the player. For instance, Franklin Arias<\/a> and Bryce Rainer<\/a> are both 55-FV prospects, but other than the fact that they are both shortstops, they are nothing alike. Arias is a super stable contact hitter without a ton of power, while Rainer has impressive power for his age but swung and missed a bunch before he got hurt last year. Rainer is more volatile because he might strike out to an excessive degree, but he also has more power potential than we think Arias does. Our hope is that the distribution graphs reflect these kinds of differences.<\/p>\n This is a good prospect crop at the very top, with just our third 70-FV prospect since 2022. It\u2019s also the first time the 65-FV tier and above has had four total players since 2022, a group that that year included Adley Rutschman<\/a>, Bobby Witt Jr.<\/a>, Grayson Rodriguez<\/a>, and Julio Rodr\u00edguez<\/a>. Of the 110 prospects with a 50-FV grade or higher this year (about 10% deeper a group than the last couple of seasons), 44 of them are pitchers, a greater ratio than most offseason hondos. We think the pitching in the minors is especially strong right now, and there are several high-profile pitchers near the top of the list with major league experience. Since the current CBA\u2019s rules around service time manipulation and prospect promotion incentives were implemented, teams have gotten into the habit of promoting players late enough in the season that they retain their rookie eligibility the following year, and so we have McLean, Trey Yesavage<\/a>, and others who are still rookies. As always, our list gravitates towards up-the-middle position players more than it does corner bats, with 48 of the ranked players occupying catcher, second base, shortstop, or center field.<\/p>\n For a further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, please read this<\/a> and this<\/a>. If you would like to read a book-length treatment on the subject, one is available here<\/a>. <\/p>\n 70 FV Prospects<\/p>\n 65 FV Prospects<\/p>\n 60 FV Prospects<\/p>\n 55 FV Prospects<\/p>\n 50 FV Prospects<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Below is our list of the top 100 prospects in baseball. The scouting summaries were compiled with information…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":484597,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[558],"tags":[64,63,591,85],"class_list":["post-484596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-mlb","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=484596"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484596\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/484597"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=484596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=484596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=484596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}