Top Prospects, Part 1
March 20, 2013
This is the time of year when most of the major
baseball sites come out with their top prospect lists. As with any attempt to rank people, there’s
quite a bit of subjectivity and conjecture involved. With this endeavor in particular there is a
considerable amount of cross-purposes at work.
For example, some lists rank players according to their perceived
immediate value to their parent club while others grade how much of an impact
they’ll have during the peak years of their career. Within those circles in the Venn diagram
there is additional grading as to the likelihood that each player will reach
that projection. Some lists heavily
consider a player’s ability with the glove while others pay only a passing
mention of it. So comparing these lists
can create quite a bit of confusion, especially when the purpose of doing so
might be something entirely different, like drafting for a fantasy team.
What I am going to do is make an aggregate list of
all the major prospect lists, weighting their selections based on the track
record and reputation of the lists (for example, Baseball America’s list will
carry more weight than Prospect 361’s list) and then follow it up sometime next
week with my own list of the top prospects.
This list is drawn by combining the rankings from Baseball
I’ll go into the methodology of my list more when
I post it. So without further adieu,
here are the top 100 prospects in baseball according to the top prospect
evaluators in the media:
1) Jurickson Profar
2) Dylan Bundy
3) Oscar Taveras
4) Wil Myers
5) Gerrit Cole
6) Zack Wheeler
7) Jose Fernandez
8) Taijuan Walker
9) Shelby Miller
10)
Xander Bogaerts
11)
Miguel Sano
12)
Tyler Skaggs
13)
Christian Yelich
14)
Travis D'Arnaud
15)
Jameson Taillon
16)
Trevor Bauer
17)
Francisco Lindor
18)
Javier Baez
19)
Mike Zunino
20)
Billy Hamilton
21)
Archie Bradley
22)
Carlos Correa
23)
Byron Buxton
24)
Nick Castellanos
25)
Anthony Rendon
26)
Kevin Gausman
27)
Mike Olt
28)
Danny Hultzen
29)
Jonathan Singleton
30)
Carlos Martinez
31)
Julio Teheran
32)
Jackie Bradley
33)
Kyle Zimmer
34)
Addison Russell
35)
Jorge Soler
36)
Albert Almora
37)
Gary Sanchez
38)
Mason Williams
39)
Matt Barnes
40)
Aaron Sanchez
41)
George Springer
42)
Alen Hanson
43)
Bubba Starling
44)
Trevor Rosenthal
45)
Chris Archer
46)
Max Fried
47)
Noah Syndergaard
48)
Robert Stephenson
49)
Kaleb Cowart
50)
Jedd Gyorko
51)
Aaron Hicks
52)
David Dahl
53)
Taylor Guerrieri
54)
Casey Kelly
55)
Nick Franklin
56)
Gregory Polanco
57)
Nolan Arenado
58)
59)
Tony Cingrani
60)
Brian Goodwin
61)
Alex Meyer
62)
Hak-Ju Lee
63)
Kyle Crick
64)
Matt Davidson
65)
Jake Odorizzi
66)
Oswaldo Arcia
67)
Martin Perez
68)
Jake Marisnick
69)
Rymer Liriano
70)
Kolten Wong
71)
Justin Nicolino
72)
Trevor Story
73)
Yasiel Puig
74)
Luis Heredia
75)
Jesse Biddle
76)
Allen Webster
77)
Tyler Austin
78)
Wily Peralta
79)
Delino DeShields Jr
80)
Daniel Corcino
81)
Zach Lee
82)
Arodys Vizcaino
83)
Kyle Gibson
84)
Courtney Hawkins
85)
J.R. Graham
86)
James Paxton
87)
Lucas Giolito
88)
Adam Eaton
89)
Slade Heathcott
90)
Dorsyys Paulino
91)
Yordano Ventura
92)
Michael Wacha
93)
A.J. Cole
94)
Michael Choice
95)
Tyler Thornburg
96)
Jon Schoop
97)
Dan Straily
98)
Christian Betancourt
99)
Jarred Cosart
100)Roberto Osuna
A
couple of notes: the top three prospects (Profar, Taveras and Bundy) were pretty much unanimous. It was only the order that varied.
One
of the more peculiar discoveries in this exercise was that Tyler Skaggs was
clearly the #12 ranked prospect. Other prospect rankings varied wildly. Xander Bogaerts, for example, was ranked as high as #4 and as low
as #31. That’s a huge swing for a player
so highly valued but those kinds of swings in opinion were quite common further
down the rankings. Some were even more
dramatic: Francisco Lindor ranked as high as #7 one
on list and as low as #59 on another.
With Skaggs, however, there was very little variance in opinion. He was ranked exactly #12 on two lists, #13
on another and #11 on yet another. He
was ranked as high as #7, as low as #17 (for an average of 12); on one list #9
and another at #16 (average of 12.5). So
go ahead and argue about how good any other prospect is, but Tyler Skaggs is the #12 prospect in all of baseball.