2025 Top 100 Prospects

Sasaki cemented a legacy while he was still in high school. There was a stretch when he was asked to throw nearly 500 pitches in an eight-day span, including a 12-inning complete game during which he also hit the game-winning two-run homer. He became the LeBron James of Japanese baseball in the process and was the first pick in the 2019 NPB draft, wielding much more arm strength than the typical top-of-the-class arm there, touching 101 mph and sitting around 97.

In 2021, Sasaki amassed a 1.98 ERA in 77 total innings across 15 starts split between the Eastern League (NPB’s minor league) and the Pacific League (their top league). The 2022 season was his first full slate in Japan’s big league and Sasaki was great, making 20 starts, pitching 129 innings, posting a 2.02 ERA and making international headlines by throwing 17 consecutive perfect innings in April. At one point, Sasaki retired 52 consecutive batters (the MLB record is Yusmeiro Petit‘s 47) during that stretch. Sasaki was having an even better 2023 — 85 IP, 39% K%, 5% BB%, 62% GB%, 1.88 ERA, 0.92 FIP — before he was shut down with an oblique tear in July, which cost him most of the rest of the season. He made three appearances at the very end of 2023 and his stuff was crisp as usual.

In 2024, however, it backed up pretty substantially, as did Sasaki’s overall performance. He hasn’t been healthy for an entire season yet and most of his relevant stats (his ability to generate whiffs with his fastball, avoid walks, and get groundballs) took a nosedive in 2024. Sasaki’s plus-plus, upper-80s splitter (which often has slider shape to his glove side and can easily be mistaken for it) is still easily his best pitch, and might be the nastiest splitter on the planet. When he’s operating at apex, Sasaki looks like a slam dunk, top-of-the-rotation talent, like one of the best handful of pitchers in baseball. He’s young and seems likely to return to peak form at some point, though his injury history and general volatility keep him from being a 70 FV player. After buzz late in 2023 and early in 2024 that he was poised to be posted after the 2024 season, Sasaki signed with the Dodgers as part of the 2025 international class and enters camp primed to slot into their big league rotation.

In high school, Anthony presented clubs with a risky but exciting combination of present raw power and long-term power projection, but he made a below-average rate of contact on the showcase circuit (71%) and, at his size, seemed likely to end up at a corner position on defense. It’s part of why he was in essence a late-first round pick (he went 79th overall, but his $2.5 million bonus was in line with the 30th overall pick) rather than an obvious top prospect.

In pro ball, Anthony’s swing has become looser, and more active and kinetic, as his hands build enormous momentum before they explode and break the sound barrier with some of the best bat speed in pro baseball. The whip and looseness of his hips and hands at his size is very special. These changes not only unlocked a new gear of raw power for Anthony, who is now a career .284/.398/.473 hitter in the minors, but they also seem to have made him more comfortable and adept at moving the barrel around the zone. He posted a 75% contact rate in 2024 as he dominated Double- and Triple-A at age 20. The adjustments have also made Anthony more adept at covering fastballs running up and away from him, which was an issue for him in high school and upon his entry into pro ball, though they’ve also caused him to concede some of his ability to scoop low pitches. His cut often has a downward path, which is part of why he averaged just nine degrees of launch in 2024, though that’s up from six degrees in 2023. Anthony’s strikeout rates have hovered in the 23-25% range the last couple of seasons (a little south of the big league average) in part because he’s a very patient (bordering on passive) hitter who runs a ton of deep counts. His 39% swing rate from 2024 would have been the fourth-lowest in the majors last year. Though his swing isn’t totally optimized to get to all of his raw power right now, Anthony has such ridiculous juice that he’s going to hit for power anyway. LIke Jarren Duran before him, Anthony’s feel for actualizing that power in big league games will probably take a little bit of time to reach its apex, but at peak, Anthony will be a middle-of-the-order monster posting huge power and on-base percentages.

Speaking of Duran, the presence of him and Ceddanne Rafaela on the roster would likely usher Anthony to an outfield corner most of the time regardless of whether or not Roman could actually play center field, but as Anthony has filled out and become more physical, he has begun to slow down enough to shift his defensive projection to a corner anyway — probably right field because of his terrific arm. Boston has a glut of outfielders at the big league level, with Anthony charging hard behind them. He might already be a better option than Masataka Yoshida, and Rafaela’s swing-happy approach makes him a volatile player. It’s plausible we’ll see Anthony be added to Boston’s roster in the middle of the year if they’re in the thick of it with the other good teams in their division. If the big league club is again toward the back of the pack, then it’s more likely Anthony exhausts rookie eligibility in 2026.

Crews went wire-to-wire as one of the best 2023 draft prospects, if not the best. He was the top unsigned high schooler from the 2020 class, a toolshed who swung and missed on the summer showcase circuit more than teams felt comfortable with. He ended up at LSU rather than in pro ball, and from day one was among the toolsiest and most productive college hitters for three straight years. He slashed .380/.498/.689 and had more walks than strikeouts during his tenure at LSU. Crews’ first full pro season also went well. He slashed .270/.342/.451 split between Double-A Harrisburg and Triple-A Rochester, then was called up at the end of August to get his feet wet without exhausting rookie eligibility. His underlying data was much better than his surface-level stats during that stretch.

Crews can punish you to all fields. He’ll get extended on fastballs away from him and crush them the opposite way, and he can also turn on slower pitches on the middle two-thirds of the plate and hit some titanic blasts to left. His best swings feature unbelievable verve and explosion, with Crews’ lower body usage evoking Mike Trout. At times, the depth of Crews’ load will leave him late on fastballs. Early in 2024, he was really struggling with fastballs tailing in on his hands, but by the time he was in the big leagues at the end of the year, Crews had begun to move off the plate against righties (we won’t know how this impacts his plate coverage against sliders until we see more). He also cuts his stride with two strikes, but can still generate power because of how explosive the rest of his operation is. All of this is very similar to Jackson Chourio, and Crews will might need a similar adjustment period before he really takes off.

Some of the Chourio similarities extend to Crews’ defense. He can absolutely fly and will show you jailbreak-y, sub-4.1 run times. He easily has the speed to play center field, but his reads, routes, and ball skills aren’t great. His pure speed should enable him to remain in center field, but he’s probably going to underperform out there relative to his pure speed. The opposite is true on the bases, where Crews’ speed arguably plays up because of his feel and acumen. Even if he’s relegated to a corner due to the presence of superior on-roster options in center, he’s going to hit for enough power and make a big enough impact on the bases to be a star.

Walcott was seen some in the U.S. during the fall of 2021, and he leapt off the field because of his physicality and power. The Rangers international scouting group was originally connected to a player named Camilo Diaz for a rumored bonus of $3 million, but seemingly diverted to Walcott around this time (Diaz later signed with Houston). Walcott signed in January of 2023 and immediately stood apart from his peers on the backfields because of his size and bat speed. He went to the D.R. for the start of the 2023 DSL season, but was quickly promoted to Arizona and lit up the ACL up for a month (he was hondo’d at this time) before opponents realized he couldn’t recognize a breaking ball. He ended up having a .273/.325/.524 line in Arizona with terrifying peripherals, including a 6.4% walk rate and 32.5% strikeout rate. In 2024, the Rangers sent Walcott, who turned 18 during spring training, straight to High-A Hickory. Amazingly, he held his own there, slashing .261/.342/.443 with 10.6% walks (sigh of relief) and 25.5% strikeouts before earning a promotion to Double-A Frisco for the final week of the season.

As you are reading this Top 100 blurb, Walcott is still just 18 years old. He has immense physical ability, a cathedral ceiling, and the long-term athletic projection to be very good for a very long time. He looks like a future NFL wide receiver in his uniform and has elite hand speed in the batter’s box, which he generates with shockingly little effort for a hitter his age. There are some mechanical flaws and nits to pick with Walcott’s swing, but when you’re this talented, these tend not to matter. Walcott’s front side often opens up toward third base when he swings, leaving him very vulnerable to sliders away from him. His tendency to chase and miss against secondary stuff is still kind of scary, but his fastball swing decisions are very good, and overall, his baseline chase and two-strike chase were about the big league average in 2024. His bat path slopes down and tends to swat the baseball into the ground, unless Walcott is making contact way out in front of the plate, at which point those of you in the parking lot need to keep your head on a swivel. Despite his issues, Walcott is generating plus big league peak exit velos as a freaking 18-year-old, and just had a 125 wRC+ season in the mid-minors even though the paint on many aspects of his game is still wet. His stride direction might require eventual adjustment, but rather than intervene right now, I think it’s fine to see if Walcott’s timing and feel to hit come naturally once he’s challenged.

By the end of the season, Walcott had also leveled up on defense. He lacks the footspeed and twitch of most big league shortstops, but his ability to bend at his size is amazing, and Walcott’s short arm stroke (reminiscent of Manny Machado‘s) allows him to effortlessly send the baseball wherever it needs to go. His actions and exchange on slow rollers have also improved. By the end of the season, Walcott (who still has some accuracy hiccups) did not seem sped up or flustered by the speed of the game on defense like he had early in the season. Walcott’s ceiling as a power hitter is as big as any prospect in the minors, and of the players close to him, he pretty comfortably has the best chance at remaining at what is arguably the most valuable position in baseball. This guy is easily the odds on favorite to be the top prospect in baseball a year from now, and he’s a grade of breaking ball recognition away from being a 70 FV talent.

Basallo is a power-hitting kaiju catching prospect who looks like a gear-wearing Rafael Devers. His swing looks a lot like Devers’, and he too has plus-plus power projection, a penchant for expanding the zone, plus arm strength, and some profound defensive flaws. Basallo became one of baseball’s best prospects in 2023, as the then-18 year-old hit .313/.402/.551 with 53 extra-base hits in 114 games and smooched Double-A. A stress fracture in Basallo’s right elbow, which was discovered just before 2024 spring training, kept him from catching until May and limited his action behind the dish for the entire season. He caught in just 56 games all year and donned the tools of ignorance on consecutive days only eight times, while splitting his remaining games nearly equally between first base and DH. He hit .289/.355/.465 as a 19-year-old at Double-A Bowie, then was called up to Norfolk for the final month of play, but didn’t really hit.

The elbow issue may have had a temporary impact on Basallo’s game, especially his throwing, which was a plus-plus attribute in 2023 and more of an above-average one in 2024. Basallo was popping closer to 1.95 on average rather than being in the 1.8s like he was in 2023, and his footwork remains kind of sloppy and immature. As is true of a lot of catchers his age (let alone his size), Basallo could stand to be more accurate and consistent coming out of his crouch, but he easily has the raw arm strength to catch, and if his peak form returns, he’s just some technical polish away from being a run-stopping weapon. His receiving isn’t good yet, but it isn’t so terrible that it damns Basallo permanently to first base. His ball blocking might be though. It’s this area of Basallo’s game that most needs to improve, especially when it comes to backhanding balls in the dirt. His size and mobility (especially when he’s moving to his left) are commensurate with the traits of a primary catcher, but if Basallo were promoted tomorrow, he’d probably be a ball-blocking liability.

Though his offensive numbers have been incredible (he’s a career .286/.364/.477 hitter and has always been young for his level), Basallo has some growing to do at the plate as well. He’s very chase-prone, including much more often against fastballs than is typical, but Basallo already has ridiculous left-handed power at age 20 and is going to grow into more. Ludicrously listed at 180 pounds, he’s actually more like 250 and is built like a sophomore edge rusher. He’s an unbelievably explosive rotator for an athlete his size, and Basallo’s peak exit velocities are already one or two standard deviations better than the big league average, depending on the metric. The players who make a huge big league impact despite a ton of chase and a contact rate hovering around 70% (like Basallo’s) all have this kind of power, hitters like Salvador Perez, Teoscar Hernández, and Bryce Harper. Basallo’s power is absolutely going to be at the level of those guys and other sub-70% contact sluggers, and if he can refine his approach as he matures, he’s going to become one of the best hitting catchers in baseball in his prime.

Basallo’s chalk 40-man platform year is 2025. He’s been promoted ahead of that pace so far, but it’s pretty rare for catchers with his particular issues to be in the express lane to the big leagues. If the Orioles just want access to Basallo’s bat and decide to fast track him as a DH, or proactively move him to first base knowing Adley Rutschman is in place as the franchise catcher for a while, then a late-2025 debut feels possible. If the Orioles want to give Basallo the best chance of having immediate success as a big league catcher, then he’s more likely on a late-2026 or spring 2027 trajectory. There are few other prospects in the minors who have this kind of offensive ceiling and a chance to play a premium position.

Painter ended 2022 as one of the best two or three pitching prospects in baseball. He overpowered hitters with his fastball at the lower levels of the minors, but by the end of the year, he was carving up Double-A and looked like a fully-formed, four-pitch monster. He entered the spring of 2023 with a legitimate shot to break camp in the Phillies rotation, like a pitching version of Fernando Tatis Jr. from a few years earlier. Instead, Painter’s elbow barked and he was shut down with a partial UCL tear after his first Grapefruit League outing. Painter and the Phillies, who rightly believed they’d be contenders, opted for a plasma-rich platelet injection rather than immediate surgery, in the hopes that the right-hander would be able to pitch at the end of the season and possibly into October. But Painter’s elbow didn’t heal completely from the PRP and rest, and he needed Tommy John toward the end of July. The timing of the surgery meant his rehab lasted through the entire 2024 regular season, in essence costing Painter two whole years. He was sent to the Arizona Fall League, where he again looked excellent. In six outings, Painter pitched 15.2 innings, struck out 18, and allowed 14 baserunners, usually sitting 94-98 while touching 100 and flashing the same plus slider and curveball combo that made him lethal in 2022.

Good luck getting on top of Painter’s fastball when he locates it at the top of the zone. Even though he’s so big and his pitches travel downhill toward the imaginary rectangle, it has still been hard for hitters to snatch his high fastballs, similar to the way Justin Verlander‘s fastball plays despite his size and release height. Both of Painter’s breaking balls have huge movement but are still a bit of a work-in-progress in terms of their usage. Painter is much more comfortable locating his breaking balls in the zone rather than as chase pitches. His slider has two-plane sweep and tended to be in the 86-90 mph range in Arizona, while his curveball is more north/south and sits 82-85 mph. Perfecting his slider locations is one key to Painter maxing out; the other is finding a weapon to thwart lefties. He can pitch backwards off his curveball and finish them with high fastballs, but Painter would do well to either find more consistent curveball finish below the zone, or a better changeup, to do so. He began incorporating more changeups into his mix later in his AFL run. The pitch was 7% of Painter’s usage late in 2022 after he had been promoted to Reading, and he will show you a really good one every fourth try or so. He’s loose enough to project this pitch as being a fourth above-average weapon down the line.

Phillies POBO Dave Dombrowski told reporters in December that Painter’s 2025 season will start on a delay. In order to backload his innings for the middle and end of the season, he’s on track to pitch in competitive games “July-ish.” Independent of his initial innings cap, Painter is one of the best pitching prospects in baseball. He extends the shelf life of an already stacked Phillies rotation deep into the future.

At Georgia Tech, Campbell was an outstanding slash-and-dash leadoff man who was among the most difficult Division-I hitters to make swing and miss during the 2023 season. He hit .376/.484/.549 and struck out just 17 times in 217 PA during his draft year as an age-eligible redshirt freshman. The Red Sox have essentially made him into a Jarren Duran sequel, taking another speedy, contact-oriented second baseman and making subtle changes to his swing and approach, resulting in a seismic shift to his offensive output, which now includes big power. Campbell posted a .997 OPS in his first full pro season and raced from High- to Triple-A by the end of the year.

Campbell is now swinging with damage-seeking intent and has been able to lift the ball more (three degrees of launch in 2023, nine degrees in 2024). The power he’s generating with his new style is shocking. His high-end exit velocities are now comfortably plus on the big league scale (he hit a ball 114 mph last year), and he’s doing huge damage to all fields.

These changes have come at the expense of some of Campbell’s ability to make contact (he had a 90% contact rate in college, 81% in pro ball 2023, and 78% in 2024), but not so much that he’s totally out of control and at risk of not hitting. His cut still looks weird, like it did in college, when he was often chopping down at the baseball. But no matter how you slice up Campbell’s performance, statistically or visually, there isn’t a pitch type, location, or velocity threshold where you really encounter a red flag. This weirdo swing works for Campbell even though it’s unconventional, and he’s now proven it across 340 upper-level plate appearances. He crushes mistakes in the middle of the plate and squibs hard-hit contact around the diamond on pitches closer to the edges of the zone. And unlike a lot of the powerless college bat-control mavens who go on Day Two of the draft, Campbell isn’t undersized or unathletic; he’s a strapping 6-foot-3 guy with explosive rotational athleticism. This isn’t a skills-over-tools type who fails to check the physical scouting boxes; this is a projectable athlete who has only played high-level baseball for two seasons.

The early part of the 2025 season needs to be about Campbell finding a viable defensive position. He played second base at Tech, then mixed in a lot of center field during the first half of 2024 before that experiment took a back seat to reps at shortstop during the second half. Campbell is a plus runner who has the wheels for center, but his feel for the position (especially coming in on balls in front of him) is very raw. His athleticism bailed him out of some bad reads last year; Campbell would get twisted around out there and still find a crazy way to make the play, which was pretty exciting given the context of his development. The Red Sox already have lots of good upper-level outfield options, though, so while continued experimentation in the outfield might have been more worthwhile for other orgs, his best chance at cracking Boston’s lineup soon is on the infield. Campbell is at his best when he is moving from right to left while making the play. He doesn’t have the pure arm strength to play shortstop, but the Red Sox were positioning him deep in the hole so that he could make most of his throws with his whole body’s momentum moving toward first base. If Campbell is asked to make throws from any kind of odd platform, his strength and accuracy waiver, and this includes when he’s playing second base. His arm accuracy issues might always mean he’s a bit of a sketchy option on defense even though other aspects of his game (range, hands) are fine. Where Campbell plays at the big league level on any given day could be dictated by where the ball is least likely to be hit based on the matchup, and he might continue to rove. He’s going to be a unique impact player, both in terms of his style and roster fit.

Hidden under the Henry Davis bushel at Louisville, Rushing finally got regular reps in 2022 and played himself into the draft’s first day. He was a bat-first prospect whose defensive issues (ball blocking, throwing accuracy, a general lack of polish as a receiver) seem to have been due to a lack of playing time rather than a lack of talent, as Rushing has improved fairly quickly in a lot of these areas whilst raking his way to Triple-A. He’s a career .273/.410/.520 hitter as a pro and is approaching the big leagues so quickly that it might force the Dodgers to roster him and Will Smith simultaneously, a possibility that has led to experimentation with Rushing at first base (2023) and in left field (2024). Rushing’s plus-plus arm (he absolutely launches out of his crouch and routinely pops below 1.9 seconds) would be kind of a waste at either position. Rushing’s throwing accuracy can still be a tad wayward and he remains a below-average receiver and pitch framer, but he’s gotten much better at picking balls in the dirt, and he’s started to backpick runners at first when he has the opportunity. There’s still work to be done here, and Rushing’s framing around the edge of the zone really pulls down his overall defensive ability right now, but his arm and the rate of his progress in other areas is very exciting.

On offense, Rushing’s muscular physique generates above-average raw power and his swing is tailored to get to it. In fact, he’s so geared to launch that Rushing might outproduce his raw power in games. It’s enough offense that it doesn’t really matter what position Rushing plays; he’s going to hit enough to profile. If he can keep improving as a defender, he’ll be a multi-time All-Star.

Jobe was the consensus top high school arm in the 2021 draft and earned a bonus of nearly $7 million as the third overall pick. He had a somewhat rocky first full season in pro ball and his velocity was down a bit compared to his peak pre-draft look. Hitters seemed unphased by Jobe’s trademark curveball despite its elite spin and huge depth. He struggled to throw strikes and the visual quality of his stuff regressed. Then Jobe was put on the IL to start 2023 and missed two and a half months recovering from lumbar spine inflammation. When Jobe returned in mid-June, he did so with a vengeance; he tallied 103 strikeouts and just 11 walks in 79.2 IP (including his Fall League stint), and his fastball often touched 98-99. The first half of Jobe’s 2024 season was interrupted by a hamstring strain, but he returned in June and by the end of July had stretched back out to six inning per start while holding his peak stuff. He debuted in Detroit’s bullpen late in the season.

Jobe scrapped his curveball in 2023 (more on that in a second) and now utilizes a firm 87-92 mph cutter and a low-80s sweeper (averaging 3,000 rpm), while also having upped his changeup usage considerably. Neither of Jobe’s new breaking balls has consistent quality of finish just yet; both are a little better than average. His changeup is arguably his nastiest secondary now, as Jobe uses it against both lefties and righties. The changes he’s made in response to the ineffectiveness of his 2022 breaking ball have made Jobe a more complete pitcher. A few days before Top 100 publication, the Detroit Free Press reported that Jobe was going to reintegrate a curveball and add a sinker to his repertoire in 2025.

Will we see this kind of velocity from Jobe across 120-140 innings? We didn’t quite get to know the answer to the workload question in 2024 because of his IL stint, but at the end of the season he looked healthy, nasty, and, from a craftsmanship standpoint, fairly ready to pitch in the big leagues. He is arguably the top pitching prospect in baseball behind Sasaki if you value Jobe’s proximity and stability relative to Andrew Painter.

Williams was a two-way high school player who was talented enough to be considered a prospect as both a shortstop and a pitcher. The Rays gave him a $2.3 million bonus to keep him from heading to Cal, and have developed him solely as a hitter. During the last three years, Williams has become one of the better prospects in all of baseball, averaging 20 annual homers as a young-for-the-level player who also plays Gold Glove-caliber defense at shortstop.

In 2024, Williams slashed .256/.352/.469 with 20 bombs and 33 steals in 44 attempts at Double-A Montgomery. That’s not to say that Williams is a lock to hit. He’s struck out more than 30% of the time so far in pro ball, and he has severe issues contacting breaking balls. The 65-68% contact rates he’s posted the last couple of years are scraping the bottom of the big league barrel at shortstop. The players in that area who tend to succeed (a select few: Elly De La Cruz, Oneil Cruz, Ezequiel Tovar) do so because they have enormous tools, and thankfully so does Williams, who is still a fairly skinny 21-year-old and already generating above-average big league power with the flick of his wrists. That and his premium defensive ability are the two attributes that support Williams’ entire profile.

Williams is an unbelievable athlete and flashy shortstop defender who is as creative as he is talented. His range, body control, and plus-plus throwing arm make many tough plays look routine, and make some seemingly impossible plays possible. This defensive ability gives Williams a very high floor. The bummer version of Williams looks something like Adalberto Mondesi, while the version who polishes his hit tool enough for Williams to be a consistent All-Star looks more like Willy Adames.

Baldwin signed for just south of $650,000 as the Braves’ third rounder in 2022. He slashed .318/.426/.549 throughout his college career in Springfield, had as many walks as strikeouts, and posted a 51% hard-hit rate (Missouri State plays in the same stadium as the Cardinals’ Double-A team, so it’s fitted with all the tech) in a pretty sizable sample as a junior. As a pro, Baldwin has coasted through the minors, posting a comfortably above-average wRC+ at every level, except for the very start of 2024 at Double-A, where he had some tough BABIP luck.

Baldwin’s ability to move his hands around the zone and spray well-struck contact to all fields is commensurate with an impact primary catcher. He’s thick and physical, rotates with ferocity, and yet his short levers keep his swing from getting too long. He again posted a hard-hit rate up around 50% in 2024, though Baldwin almost exclusively inside-outs fastballs the other way and big league pitchers might be able to limit his game power by attacking him with velocity on the outer third. Though a bunch of his TrackMan data is very similar to Dodgers catcher Dalton Rushing, Baldwin’s power is not as well-actualized, and stylistically, he looks more like an all-fields doubles hitter. He does a little bit of everything at a position where one thing is often enough.

Baldwin has made impressive developmental progress on defense. The Braves drastically altered some stylistic elements of his receiving, most notably paring down Baldwin’s footwork and putting him more regularly on one knee, and it has taken him some time to get comfortable with that. His receiving and ball blocking are only fair, while the quickness and consistency of his exchange on throws to second base has become excellent. What he lacks in height relative to most catchers, he makes up for in bodily density. He’s of sturdy build and caught close to 100 games in 2024 when you take his AFL and Premier12 postseason activity into account. Though he’s not currently on the 40-man roster, Baldwin is in position for a 2025 debut, and given Sean Murphy‘s injury track record, it’s possible he’ll get some extended run.

Dollander sat 93-95 mph as a freshman at Georgia Southern, then started throwing harder as a sophomore after he transferred to Tennessee. Throughout 2022 and 2023, he sat 94-97 with riding life and would frequently top out in the 98-99 mph range. In 2024, he sustained that across 23 starts, 118 innings, with the last two months of the season spent at Double-A Hartford.

Dollander does (or projects to do) everything well. He has plus fastball velocity, as well as the angle/movement traits you want in a power pitcher’s bat-missing heater. He also has a plus-flashing breaking ball in his upper-80s slider, a pitch that wasn’t turning the corner as consistently late in 2024, but was dominant early in the year. He can take a little off and show hitters a vertical curveball, too, and both breaking balls have distinct movement. Dollander’s changeup is improving despite limited usage. The pacing of his delivery, which has huge acceleration at the very end, should help mask his changeup, which has plenty of action and a chance to be yet another bat-missing pitch for him at peak. Dollander’s secondary pitches were dominant during the first half, but weren’t as impressive after the All-Star break. By the end of the season, his chase and miss rates were pretty average for his secondaries across the board, but remained outstanding for his fastball.

A strapping 6-foot-2, Dollander has the frame and delivery of a 160-plus inning workhorse. His line to the plate can waver at times, but for the most part his delivery and release are consistent, and Dollander’s fastball is nasty enough to give him lots of margin for error on the days when his command is a little looser. He’s going to be an impact mid-rotation guy — and maybe the Rockies’ best starter — very soon.

Shaw is among the twitchiest, most fun to watch players in the minors. A 5-foot-9 stick of dynamite who plays with all-out effort, he has blazed through the minors with relative ease, reaching Triple-A toward the end of his first full pro season. Combined between Double-A Tennessee and Triple-A Iowa, Shaw slashed .284/.379/.488 with 44 extra-base hits (21 of them homers) and 31 steals in 42 attempts, then he was the best hitter on Team USA’s Premier12 roster in the fall.

Perhaps most importantly, the 2024 season gave us growing clarity around Shaw’s defensive fit and ability. Shaw exclusively played the middle infield as an amateur, but as a pro, he has begun seeing reps at third base. Shaw sometimes struggles with throwing accuracy and he lacks laser-like arm strength from deep in the hole, but he is otherwise growing into a tremendous third base defender. His lightning-quick exchange helps him shamelessly throw two- and three-hoppers to first base on those deeper throws, his range is exceptional, and he’s capable of some very acrobatic stuff. Especially if his feel for throwing from third continues to improve, his ceiling as a defender there is very high. Shaw has also continued to play some shortstop and second base. Dansby Swanson and Nico Hoerner are entrenched on the Cubs’ middle infield right now, but the departure of Isaac Paredes in the Kyle Tucker trade clears the runway for Shaw to seize the Opening Day job at third, though he may have to beat out Rule 5 pick Gage Workman during spring training.

Shaw is also an enormously entertaining hitter. He swings like a turbo-charged Sal Bando — closed stance, closed stride, with hands that load very low — except with a huge leg kick, one that is so big and elaborate that it’s often hard for him to time. He gets beaten by fastballs up around the belt fairly often, in part because of the path his hands take as a result of his low load, but mostly because his front foot is often late getting down. When he’s on time, Shaw is capable of doing all-fields damage, not only because of the explosion created by his whole-body swing, but because of how quick and powerful his wrists are. There are times when the finish to Shaw’s swing is abbreviated, à la Chase Utley, but he still smacks the crap out of the ball. That said, opposing pitchers can neuter his power by executing down-and-away from him, where his bat path ends up driving the baseball into the ground; this is why Shaw’s game power is graded below his raw. A fair bit of slider chase adds some volatility to Shaw’s offensive forecast, but especially with a much more stable and enthusiastic understanding of his defense, he’s tracking like an above-average everyday player and foundational young talent.

Lawlar has been beset by injuries basically since he was drafted. He needed surgery to repair a torn labrum in his shoulder almost immediately after he drove his pro career off the lot, then was sidelined by discomfort caused by a bone growth on one of his ribs in mid-2022, before suffering a fractured left scapula when he was hit by a pitch later that season. Lawlar had a healthy 2023 and cracked the big league roster for the first time, but he didn’t hit enough to usurp Evan Longoria during the Snakes’ postseason run. He then tore a ligament in his right thumb during 2024 spring training, had surgery, and dealt with recurring hamstring issues a couple of times after he returned. He played just 14 games at an affiliate and was sent to play for Licey in the Dominican Winter League until around Thanksgiving, doubling his 2024 plate appearances to just over 200 total.

Lawlar has a below-average hit tool but does everything else well. He’s an acrobatic defender who finds all kinds of crazy ways to contort his body and send the baseball where it has to go, which is especially evident on his feeds to second. Lawlar is often positioned so he can make plays moving right to left, which he’s most comfortable with. He struggles to make accurate throws off the backhand, so putting him in position to make as few of those as possible makes a lot of sense. Lawlar got some third base reps with Licey and did fine, putting him on the depth chart at both spots on the infield’s left side.

On offense, Lawlar hit for power when he was healthy at Double-A in 2023, but his exit velocities are shockingly low (and have been for multiple years) given his pedigree and look during BP. He doesn’t have great feel for the barrel, and this may be a contact quality issue rather than an actual lack of raw power. His FV grade slid as I worked on the Top 100 as a whole, and got a 10,000 foot view of the entire player population. He’s on time to pull lefties with power, and shows gap-to-gap spray against righties. He has plus bat speed, but requires a ton of effort to generate it, often so much that he stops tracking the ball. It’s possible that the considerable amount of time Lawlar has missed means that his hit tool will develop late, and that he’ll improve enough in this regard to produce offense like Trevor Story or Willy Adames did during their years of team control. At least initially though, his offensive output might look more like like that of Danny Espinosa and Paul DeJong.

Miller had a monster first full season, as he slashed .261/.366/.446 across both A-ball levels and got a shot of espresso at Reading to cap the year. Pre-draft fretting over Miller’s age relative to his high school peers has evaporated with the pace of his promotion. His explosive hands have lovely lift out in front of the plate, and he adjusts them nicely to breaking stuff. Miller can still roast ’em even when his weight shifts early and his hands are responsible for doing all the damage. Because his hands fire late and take a path that creates scoop and lift, Miller will probably always be vulnerable to fastballs running up around his hands. But he’s so dangerous throughout the rest of the zone that his production isn’t likely to bottom out because of this issue.

Defensively, the Phillies have only ever deployed Miller at shortstop. His exchange is a little slow when operating around the bag, and Miller lacks the prototypical, from-the-hole arm strength of a good shortstop, but that’s also true of Trea Turner. Miller tends to start deeper toward the hole so he can make the lion’s share of his plays moving right to left as a way of masking this issue. It isn’t ideal, and I had Miller projected to third base both when he was an amateur and last list cycle, but based on how the Phillies have operated, I have him projected as a below-average shortstop now. Be he a passable shortstop or an average third baseman, Miller’s bat is going to enable him to be a damn good everyday player and maybe make a couple All-Star teams. He has a shot to kick down the door and debut in mid-to-late 2025.

Domínguez has played a little bit in the big leagues each of the last two seasons, but a late-2023 Tommy John surgery kept him out for most of 2024 and is why he hasn’t yet lost rookie status. Often described on this website as “Baseball’s Zion Williamson,” Domínguez signed for $5.1 million in 2019 as easily the toolsiest player in his signing class, a plus-running center fielder with huge switch-hitting power. He resembled Zion in both a hype and bodily sense. Domínguez had very mature physicality at a young age. It was and is where his prodigious tools come from, but he was so muscular so young that it was tough to predict what kind of mobility he’d have as he aged into his 20s. He’s built like the kind of tightly wound athlete you see grabbing at their hamstring at least once a year. To this point, though, he has been able to keep things in check and remain explosive and mobile, especially in his hips. He’s a career .274/.373/.444 hitter in the minors and is poised to assume the playing time left vacant by Juan Soto‘s crosstown departure.

Domínguez is going to hit for power. Though he struggled with strikeout issues as a young-for-the-level player while he rocketed through the minors, Domínguez’s lefty barrel control was better in 2024 upon his return from TJ, and his contact metrics hovered around average. He’s looking to pull from the left side of the dish, while he’s a bit more opposite-field oriented from the right side. A shorter-levered guy, Domínguez can wait an extra beat to identify breaking balls, and he crushes the mistakes he sees.

Where he needs to improve is on defense. Perhaps because he’s missed extended time due to injury, Domínguez has sketchy feel for his position. His reads and routes can be wayward, and he looks uncomfortable at the catch point. He runs pretty well, but not well enough to play center field without good instincts and feel. The week of list publication, Yankees manager Aaron Boone told reporters that Cody Bellinger and Aaron Judge will likely push Domínguez to left field, which is probably the best fit for him in a vacuum anyway. A more optimistic contact projection than a year ago outweighs what is lost from Domínguez looking like flub-prone defender, and he should be an above-average everyday outfielder and young, build-around bat.

The fifth pick in the 2023 draft, Jenkins crushed pro ball after signing to the tune of a .362/.417/.571 line, with a 90% z-contact rate during that span. His 2024 regular season got off to a delayed start due to a hamstring strain, which Jenkins suffered in his first game at Fort Myers. He rehabbed on the complex in May, then got 150-ish PA at both Low-A Fort Myers and High-A Cedar Rapids, before ending with a six-game sip of Double-A Wichita. He slashed .282/.394/.439 with just six homers, but 22 doubles and 17 steals in 20 attempts.

The way Jenkins’ hands operate is evocative of Jesse Winker; he has exciting feel to hit and barrel control. He tracks pitches exceptionally well and can move his hands all over the strike zone, snatching fastballs up around his hands to his pull side, or spraying up-and-away fastballs to left field in the air. Jenkins posted an excellent 88% in-zone contact rate and 83% overall contact rate in 2024, backing up his fantastic 2023 debut metrics. There are instances when Jenkins will take what he’s offered and make weak groundball contact rather than wait for something he can drive, but he’s a very promising young hitter in basically every other way. Though Jenkins lacks big raw power right now, his 6-foot-3 frame has room for muscle and strength, and he should have above-average pop at maturity. The Twins have been deploying Jenkins in center field (when he’s not DH’ing, which is frequent), but realistically, he’s a left fielder with a 40 arm. He should hit enough to be a heart-of-the-order hitter and impact regular regardless of his position.

On the one hand, it’s incredible that Schultz has been able to dominate the mid-minors with one great pitch. On the other hand, it’s imperative that his other offerings get better if he’s going to hit his ceiling. Schultz is the Oneil Cruz of pitching, so to speak. He has XXL size and a couple premium characteristics, some of which play down in games. He has one of the best sliders in the minors, a 2,900 rpm, 82-85 mph bender from hell with 10-to-4 shape. Schultz should also theoretically be able to run his fastball up the ladder to garner whiffs, because even though he’s built like an Andean Condor at a lanky 6-foot-9, his low arm slot gives him a release height of just five-and-a-half feet. But Schultz’s fastball, which sits comfortably in the mid-90s, barely ever misses bats; his heater surrendered an 89% zone contact rate in 2024. He also works with a cutter and a changeup, neither of which is good right now. Again, despite these truths, Schultz ran a 2.24 ERA at High- and Double-A last year at age 20. He’s freaky and performing, and yet he might just be scratching the surface of his potential. If Schultz can improve the effectiveness of any of his non-slider pitches in 2025, he might be the top pitching prospect in baseball a year from now.

While he was still an amateur, Susana had a very, very late velocity spike and progressed from throwing in the mid-80s to the mid-90s in a very short period of time. Because he popped up late relative to his peers, most of the pool money when he was first eligible to sign had already been committed, and he opted to wait a year so that more teams could pursue him with a meaningful bonus. The Padres signed him for $1.7 million and pushed him to camp in Arizona during 2022 minor league spring training. Susana had only pitched in eight official games on the complex before the Padres traded him to Washington as part of the Juan Soto deal. After a walk-prone 2023 (40 free passes in 63 innings) and a rough start to his 2024, Susana appeared to turn a corner in June. He had five dominant starts in a row, was promoted to High-A Wilmington, and then only had two starts the rest of the year in which he walked more than two batters. Susana ended up working 103.2 innings (40 more than the prior season), struck out 35.4% of his opponents, and generated groundballs at a whopping 60% clip.

It’s easy to point to Susana’s velocity (which he held basically all year) as an impact attribute, but it’s his slider that’s easily his best pitch. There are times when it has cutter-movement, but it has eye-crossing downward bend at its best, in the Brad Lidge slider mold, except as hard as 92 mph. It’s a slam dunk 80-grade pitch that generated misses just over 50% of the time in 2024. Susana’s fastball will touch triple-digits, which is enough for it to dominant A-ball hitters. It lacks great movement or tough angle, and its performance will probably keel off a bit as Susana faces upper-level hitters. He barely used his changeup last year; it’s currently a glorified two-seamer in the 92-94 mph range. One out of every 10 or so of Susana’s changeups is any good, but he often casts it and it sails on him; the ones that flash have enough tailing action to miss bats. His slider has enough utility as a strike-stealer and finisher against lefties that he might not ever need a changeup, but some kind of splinker/splitter thing might emerge down the line, as tends to be the case for lots of the pitchers today who have lower arm slots like Susana. Now that Susana has began to check the “durability” and “control” boxes, seemingly at the same time, he’s one of the most exciting pitching prospects in baseball. He’s a 6-foot-6 Leviathan on track to gobble up NL East hitters in 2027.

Rodriguez is one of the more entertaining and fascinating prospects in the minors, an incredibly slick defensive center fielder who has plus power and plate discipline. He also has barely played. What would have been Rodriguez’s first pro season was squashed by the pandemic and his next two were shortened by knee and abdominal injuries, limiting him to just 84 combined games in his first three years as a pro. A thumb sprain sidelined him for much of 2024 and required surgery in September.

When healthy, Rodriguez has posted huge stats; he’s a .250/.422/.510 hitter in 230 career games. His underlying TrackMan data corroborates the power and OBP aspects of that output. I thought I’d have to go back and use Rodriguez’s 2023 data to illustrate this because of his thumb injury, but I don’t. Even with a bum digit, he had a 56% hard-hit rate in 2024, and hit a ball 114 mph. He’s only chased 10-14% of the time the last two seasons. This is like a turbo-charged version of Trent Grisham, with louder all-fields power but similar patience and defensive ability.

I can’t wait for the MLB.TV surfers among you to see this guy play defense. He isn’t an elite speedster with huge range; instead, he has incredible skill at the catch point. He makes spectacular plays around the wall and while going to the ground. His reads, routes, instincts and ball skills in center are all spectacular, and right now, he has the foot speed to play there. “Right now” is key, however, and this is where Rodriguez’s profile takes a bit of a turn and becomes more difficult to wrangle. Almost 22 years old, Rodriguez is already a stocky 5-foot-11, 215 pounds or so. He glides around the outfield with ease at present, but whether that will still be true even three or five years down the line isn’t certain because his body is already maxed out.

The other potential issue here (and this is where his profile also kind of aligns with Grisham’s) is that Rodriguez has a well-defined hole in his swing up and away from him; his swing is bottom-hand dominant in the extreme and causes him to swing underneath these pitches with concerning regularity. Rodriguez’s compact body helps keep his swing short enough to be on time in the rest of the zone, and his tremendous plate discipline assures that he only hunts pitches he can drive early in counts. Rodriguez’s defense will give his offensive flaws room to breath during the periods when he is going through contact dry spells, and across an entire season (assuming Rodriguez will eventually be healthy for one), he should produce like an above-average center fielder.

Among the most high-profile international amateur prospects of the last decade or so, Salas signed for $5.6 million in January of 2023 and weeks later was in Arizona competing with upper-level minor leaguers and the occasional big leaguer during spring training. He was promoted from the extended spring group to Low-A Lake Elsinore just a few days before his 17th birthday, and he thrived there for most of the rest of his debut season.

In 2024, he really struggled with the bat at High-A Fort Wayne, posting a paltry .206/.288/.311 line there. He also struggled badly with ball-blocking for a huge chunk of time in the middle of the season and went through a phase of flinching and aversion to the baseball. By the very end of the regular season, this had started to improve, and Salas had a good, if sometimes haggard-looking, six-week run in the Arizona Fall League, hitting .228/.327/.424 with as many homers (four) as he had all year at Fort Wayne as the circuit’s second-youngest player.

It’s hard to contextualize Salas’ 2024 statistical performance because there isn’t much precedent for his promotion pace, and the little that does exist is different due to changes to the structure of the minors. Wander Franco and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. debuted in the Appy League, for instance, rather than in full-season ball like Salas, but both also reached High-A during the back half of their age-18 seasons, and both of them really hit. Salas did not, at least not on the surface. His underlying contact data is better than that of a .206 hitter (77% contact rate, 83% in-zone), but it isn’t awesome. Salas’ bat path creates some issues, as he’s underneath a lot of fastballs away from him and struggles to make good contact against softer stuff. He can snatch fastballs up around his hands, but otherwise isn’t a dangerous hitter right now. Salas is still super projectable and is likely to wind up with plus raw power at maturity. If he becomes as good a defender as he’s projected here, he can have a one-note offensive skill set and still be a really good player.

Salas’ receiving is incredibly still and quiet, and he’ll likely be a great pitch framer at maturity, if he isn’t already. His arm is comfortably plus, and the ease and consistency with which he exits his crouch and gets to his release point is unbelievable for anyone, let alone a catcher this age playing several levels above what is typical. The ball-blocking aspect should improve as Salas keeps getting bigger and his body can more comfortably weather the storm of catching. He remains projected as a premium all-around defender with rare raw power for his position, but the hit tool aspect of Salas’ profile is tracking below what was considered possible when he first debuted. It’s looking less likely Salas will be “Kyle Tucker, but a Gold Glove catcher.” Instead, his swing is reminiscent of Jason Heyward‘s and he might have a similar trajectory, where he’s merely very good rather than a franchise-altering talent.

Smith spent his underclass seasons jockeying back and forth between Arkansas’ bullpen and rotation, working just over 70 innings each year. Entering the spring of 2024, I thought he had more of a relief look, like a Brooks Raley 레일리 type, but Smith had an incredible season. He struck out damn near two batters per inning (161 K, 84 IP) and posted a .893 WHIP across 16 starts. A big reason why Smith now not only looks like a slam dunk starter prospect but potentially a top five pick is because of his fastball command, which he sustained throughout the 2024 season even as his velocity climbed. He averaged 95-96 mph, both pre- and post-draft, and touched 100. The rise/run combo of his fastball helps big swing-and-miss results, and Smith’s arm stroke (which is both very quick and very low) appears deceptive and makes hitters uncomfortable. It looks like the delivery of a shorter-levered Madison Bumgarner. Smith routinely locates his heater up and to the arm side of the plate, where its movement plays best. Off of that his huge sweeping slider bends in the opposite direction, and Smith commands that too. It doesn’t tip its break until very late in flight, and once it starts to move, it moves a ton, sometimes all the way from the arm-side edge of the plate to the dirt in the opposite batter’s box.

Those two pitches were enough for Smith to carve up SEC hitters, but he’ll probably need a third pitch to truly hit his ceiling. Right now, he has a changeup that he can control the location of, but it doesn’t have great movement. Smith’s arm stroke is quick and he has feel for location, so his changeup projection is quite good. He could also take a route similar to Bumgarner and mix in a cutter, which he’d need to develop from scratch. He has mid-rotation projection either way.

Chandler was a two-sport, two-way high schooler who could have gone to Clemson for baseball and football. Instead he signed for $3 million as the first pick in the 2021 third round and was developed as a two-way player for parts of two seasons before focusing on pitching beginning in 2023. Things have gone very well. Across the last two seasons, Chander has worked at least 110 innings and struck out a little more than a batter per frame, with his walk rate trending down to a little better than the big league average as he climbed to Triple-A in August. He was still sitting 95-98 at the very end of the season, even as he set a career-high mark for innings.

Chandler’s fastball is his best pitch. He hammers the top of the zone with it, and it generated plus chase and miss in 2024. His 86-90 mph changeup has progressed very quickly. It can sometimes sail on him, but it has plus tailing action that misses bats when Bubba keeps it down in the zone, and it can occasionally steal a strike by running back over the corner of the plate even when he mis-releases it. His slider hasn’t taken quite the same leap; too often it backs up on him and is hittable despite sitting 88-90 mph. It didn’t miss bats consistently in 2024, but its ceiling is still pretty exciting because of how hard Chandler throws it. Though his delivery is a bit more effortful than most big league starters, and he has occasionally struggled with walks as a pro, Chandler’s athleticism and multi-sport background make me want to continue projecting on his command deep into his 20s. There’s still development happening here (for instance, Chandler made his first start on four days rest in the middle of 2024), but so far, Chandler’s dev is going as well as could have been hoped when he was drafted, and he’s tracking like a mid-rotation starter. He’s entering his 40-man platform year and could debut late in the season so he can retain his rookie eligibility into 2026.

Sproat was the Mets’ 2022 third rounder, but he didn’t sign, opting instead to go back for a fourth year at Florida, where he exceeded 100 innings during the regular season; he was shut down after the Mets drafted him again.

Sproat was a cross-bodied, lower-slot guy in college, but he’s more direct to the plate now, and is throwing from more of a three-quarters slot, giving his fastball rise/run shape rather than the sink/tail of his college days. He has kept throwing hard amid the changes and has been living in the upper-90s without incident for several years. He was still reaching back for 100 late in the 2024 season. The delivery tweaks added depth and diversity to Sproat’s breaking pitches, and he’s now attacking with six different offerings. He has a sweeper-shaped slider in the 82-85 mph range, the shape of which he can alter to look more like a cutter, and an upper-70s curveball. He also mixes in two- and four-seam fastballs, and pronates over top of his trademark changeup. Breaking ball consistency was Sproat’s biggest issue at Florida and it looks as though the Mets have helped him make an adjustment there. That sweeper is currently his most consistent bat-misser, but I expect Sproat’s changeup will also return to being a weapon as he gets feel for this new delivery. His other pitches are deployed with such unpredictability that they’ll induce weak contact; he had a 50% groundball rate in 2024.

After working 116.1 innings and reaching Triple-A Syracuse in 2024, Sproat is on the doorstep of the big leagues and is likely to debut in 2025. He should be a mid-rotation stalwart soon.

Dana signed for just under $1.5 million as an 11th rounder in 2022, and it took him just two years to become a workhorse mid-rotation starter prospect. He had a Herculean 2024 season, as he was able to sustain average velocity for the entire year even though his workload doubled to 146 innings. At just 20 years old, Dana made 23 starts at Double-A (14 of them “quality starts”) before he had a rocky cup of coffee with the big club in September.

Dana is built like an innings-eating monster at a muscular 6-foot-4. Though he lacks precise command right now, his delivery is so loose and easy that it’s fair to project he’ll keep improving in this area and develop plus command of his four-pitch repertoire as he enters his prime. Dana’s best pitch is his slider, which resides in the 84-88 mph range and can be used to garner chase, or as a backdoor offering against lefties. He flashed a good changeup during his brief big league call-up — its power sink even made Kyle Tucker and Yordan Alvarez miss badly — but his feel for dotting it in enticing locations isn’t as consistent as it is for his other pitches (yet). Still, given how loose and easy his delivery is, it eventually should be.

The biggest change to Dana’s report compared to last cycle concerns his fastball grade. I was too worried about its in-zone viability on my last pass. It played great in the zone in 2024 and, considering how he held his arm strength under a massive innings increase, he might have another gear of velo in him once he gets used to working this much. Plus, it looks like he’s going to command it to the locations in which it plays best. Dana is basically big-league ready as he approaches his age-21 season and projects as a mid-rotation stalwart in the Germán Márquez mold.

Eldridge is a human skyscraper at 6-foot-7 and has some of the most exciting raw power projection in all the minors. In his first full pro season, split pretty evenly between Low- and High-A, he hit .289/.372/.513 with 23 home runs. Then the Giants gave him two model-jobbing promotions to Double-A Richmond and Triple-A Sacramento; Eldridge played fewer than 10 games at each stop before he was sent to the Arizona Fall League, where he looked absolutely exhausted (especially on defense).

Eldridge is going to have enormous power in the Matt Olson/Adam Dunn zip code one day. He already has plus raw — 111 mph max velo, 106 mph EV90, 56% hard-hit rate in 2024 — and still has a ton of room on his frame for mass and strength. Any time a hitter this size comes along, there are justifiable doubts about whether or not he’ll be able to catch up to big league velocity, and while Eldridge is definitely going to have elevated strikeouts throughout his career, he also has a remarkably short swing for a hitter his size, and he has shown an ability to move the barrel around the zone. He still had more swings and misses than balls in play in 2024, which is often a scary indicator, but while his contact metrics are a full standard deviation below the big league average — 16% swinging strike rate, 77% in-zone contact, 67% overall — there’s just too much playable power here to fret over that.

Where Eldridge most needs to improve before he dons a big league uniform is on defense. It’s no doubt exhausting for a guy this size to bend and get deep into his lower body all summer, but by the end of the year, Eldridge was playing first base with such a high center of gravity that it often cost his team outs. There are times when he fails to stretch enough on a bang-bang play, or comes off the bag entirely because he can’t stretch enough, and this happens way more often than is acceptable at the big league level. Eldridge doesn’t have to be doing the splits at first to be a fine defender, but he definitely needs to learn how to hold the bag better. The Giants have tried him in right field (Eldridge was also a marginal pitching prospect in high school, and his arm would play there), but not at all in 2024; he seems like a first base-only prospect now. This guy is going to be a middle-of-the-order force, so it doesn’t really matter where he plays and it barely matters how good a defender he becomes, but it’s the aspect of his game that needs the most help right now. It’s plausible Eldridge will be up late in 2025, late enough for him to retain rookie eligibility entering 2026. Like your balsa wood bridge from shop class, if Eldridge’s hit tool can pass the test of upper-level pitching, he’ll be a top 10 prospect by that time.

Misiorowski’s velocity climbed throughout the lead up to the 2022 draft; he was sitting 91-93 early in the year, but by the time the Combine rolled around, he was touching 100. Misiorowski quickly added a second breaking ball to his repertoire upon his entry to pro ball, and he’s been able to sustain upper-90s arm strength amid a 20-inning uptick in each of the last two years. He threw just shy of 100 innings in 2024 and was put in the bullpen late in the year as a way of limiting his workload (and in the event that the Brewers needed him out of the ‘pen for a playoff run). He’ll be sent out as a starter again in 2025.

Miz is incredibly nasty — even at the end of 2024, his fastball was averaging 98 mph and touching 101 — but he has walked 13-15% of opposing hitters at each minor league level. He is a gangly and wiry 6-foot-7, incredibly loose and explosive, and simply hasn’t developed sufficient body control to throw strikes yet. Because Misiorowski was a junior college draft pick, he’s pretty young — as you’re reading this Top 100 blurb, he’s still 22 years old, with stuff is so overwhelming that he has K’d 30% of Double- and Triple-A hitters. Both of his breaking balls added velocity in 2024; his curveball was averaging 85 mph once he got to Nashville, and he threw some 93-95 mph cutters during that time. There’s definitely risk that Misiorowski will go the way of Nate Pearson, another junior college pick with enormous stuff who not only hasn’t figured things out enough to start, but has also struggled in relief. That’s the floor here. But this is extra-planetary stuff we’re talking about, and Misiorowski is much more loose and sinewy than Pearson, and should have superior athletic longevity. Even if Miz ends up in the bullpen, he could be an Edwin Díaz-type closer. If he polishes his strike-throwing enough to start, then there really isn’t anyone to compare him to.

Burns was one of those pitchers who was already touching 100 as a high schooler and throwing with such effort and violence that teams were standoffish and generally had him pref’d in the comp round. That wasn’t high enough for Burns to sign, and he ended up at Tennessee where, after a great freshman season as a starter, he was squeezed out of a talented rotation as a sophomore (but was great in high-leverage long relief). Burns transferred to Wake Forest (renowned for its pitching development) for his junior year and had an incredible season (100 innings, 96 baserunners, 191 strikeouts) but missed out on a national title. He went wire-to-wire as maybe the best pitching prospect in the 2024 draft class and could feasibly be in the big leagues early in 2025.

Burns has been able to sustain elite velocity for his entire career, and the way his pitches work together when he is commanding them (which is kind of an issue) is stylistically similar to Justin Verlander and Hunter Brown. While he’s a more tightly wound athlete than most front end big league starters, Burns otherwise has prototypical size and physicality. He will probably grow more and more barrel-chested as he ages; his frame started creeping that way late in college. Burns uses big spinal tilt to get to an extreme vertical arm slot that, in concert with his size, gives his fastball huge downhill plane. Even at his velocities (he averaged 98 and touched 101 in 2024), this causes his fastball to be hittable when it’s in the meat of the zone and below. He needs to command it more consistently to the upper boundary of the strike zone for that pitch to max out. If he can, then we’re in Verlander pitch mix territory because of the way Burns’ secondary stuff can play off of that fastball location.

His high arm slot makes it very difficult to spot breaking balls popping out of Burns’ hand because they’re always descending. His slider has nasty vertical depth for a pitch in the 87-90 mph range and can be used to get strike one, or deployed like a cutter in on the hands of lefties, or as a finishing pitch in the dirt. His curveball gives him a second, slower version of everything, but it’s not nearly as nasty as the slider. It’s tough to turn over a changeup from his arm slot, so Burns doesn’t — his slot lowers when he throws his change, and his best cambios are a well-located 45-grade offering. Because of the way his breaking balls play versus lefties, this shouldn’t be an issue in pro ball, though it wouldn’t hurt to have a good changeup. Burns’ mechanical operation requires a lot of effort and it detracts from his command. It’s possible he’ll continue to refine the feel for his body and release as he matures (he’s a 22-year-old kid throwing 100 for goodness sake), but it certainly wasn’t a polished part of his game as of draft time. He’s a pretty good bet to become a mid-rotation starter and has front-end upside if his command gets better.

Duno is one of the freakier prospects in baseball, a tool shed 6-foot-3-ish catcher with elite power potential and and eye-popping speed for someone so big. His titanic size and strength, as well as his remarkable athleticism for such a huge teenager, give Duno both extraplanetary power potential and room to forecast huge growth on defense.

After a 2023 pro debut in the DSL, the Reds skipped Duno over the domestic complex and sent him straight to Low-A Daytona in 2024. There Duno slashed .267/.367/.422 with a 28.8% K% in 32 games before he broke a rib and was shut down for the rest of the year. Duno looked like he was starting to get a feel for how to use his size on defense in the couple of weeks leading up to his injury, and this was especially true when it came to ball-blocking. Duno’s mobility for a catcher his size is incredible, and the way he can bend and explode out of his crouch to field his position is very exciting. His throwing has not been as good as was advertised when he first signed. He dealt with elbow issues in 2023 (which is why he didn’t catch that year), and he hasn’t shown a consistently plus hose stateside, though some of that is because his footwork coming out of his crouch has been so inconsistent. It’s something to watch, but the way Duno progressed on defense in his little bit of healthy 2024 play was very positive overall.

At the plate, Duno is still getting a feel for his volcanic bat speed and bodily verve, but holy cow, can this guy swing it. He has plus raw power right now at age 19 and is going to grow into more. He’s big but not maxed out, built like Heliot Ramos scaled up four inches. Duno is also shockingly fast, and not just for his size, posting some run times to first base near 4.25 seconds in his limited action. Duno presents one of the most exciting toolsets in all of minor league baseball, but he hasn’t played very much yet, and whether or not his strikeout issues can improve via regular reps will dictate how good he becomes. He’s a risky prospect with superstar ceiling, and my tape study of his defense was encouraging enough to say that he raised his floor in 2024 even though he didn’t get the opportunity to race up the minor league ladder.

Del Castillo looked like he might be the best catcher in his draft class and a potential future top 10 pick during his freshman year at Miami, a season that saw him also play some third base and right field. A COVID-shortened sophomore campaign meant he didn’t get the opportunity to repeat that performance and solidify his spot in the class, and then Del Castillo regressed as a hitter during his junior season and was a buy-low of sorts at pick no. 67. After a rough, strikeout-prone introduction to pro ball in 2021 and 2022, Del Castillo has been raking, and debuted with the big league club late in 2024. The hitting environments at Arizona’s upper-minors affiliates — Amarillo and Reno — should generate some skepticism about his overall statline from the last two seasons, but importantly, Del Castillo posted a career-best strikeout rate (by a huge margin) in 2024, and his strength and conditioning looks as though it has taken a meaningful step forward.

Del Castillo still has some issues on defense. Most significantly, his 2.05-ish second pop times are at the bottom of what tends to be acceptable for a regular catcher (he hasn’t played other positions as a pro). His excellent accuracy makes up for this to some extent, but he has allowed a career 80% stolen base success rate in the minors, with a 93% success rate on 29 attempts during his call-up to Phoenix. Other aspects of Del Castillo’s defense are also below average, but not so bad that he needs to change positions. Speedy opposing offenses will turn games against him into a track meet, but with Gabriel Moreno entrenched as the primary guy, los Serpientes get to pick their spots with the way Del Castillo is deployed.

He’s going to hit enough to justify some DH/1B reps, too, and depending on whether Arizona re-signs or replaces Joc Pederson and Christian Walker, Del Castillo could see 400 PA in 2025 as a combo backup catcher and platoon DH. He can still be beaten by well-executed fastballs up and away from him, but you had better put it there because he can do damage throughout the rest of the zone, especially against stuff on the inner half. His added strength shows in his TrackMan stats, as Del Castillo’s measurable power has taken a leap in two consecutive years; for example, his hard-hit rate has risen from 29% to 46% during that time. The big question here is whether Del Castillo’s significant improvement in strikeout rate will hold multi-year water. It’s logical that the added strength has had an impact on Del Castillo’s raw power, but has it also somehow made him a more skilled hitter? His batting stance changed somewhat in 2024, but the rest of his swing really hasn’t. He has always had lovely hitting hands, and he tracks and identifies breaking stuff, he just struggles to get on top of a somewhat large subset of heaters. Were Del Castillo definitely a “no” at catcher, then maybe a strikeout rate regression to his career norm would be something to fear, but there’s enough playable power here for him to be considered a primary catching prospect in a vacuum.

A gigantic individual with enormous strength, Kurtz’s performance plateaued during his junior year at Wake, but he still clubbed more than 20 homers for the second consecutive season and posted a 1.294 OPS. The A’s made him the fourth overall pick and The Colonel reached Double-A by the end of the summer and then picked up Arizona Fall League reps. This is an upward re-evaluation of Kurtz compared to his pre-draft grade, which had him more in the middle of the first round.

Kurtz does some special stuff and has some unique physical characteristics that make him effective. He has plus power generated by big time thunder in his hands, and his swing features a back-side collapse, which creates power-producing loft. Despite his size, Kurtz is a short-levered guy. His front arm basically bars as he loads his hands, but his T-Rex levers help keep his swing from getting too long. He has terrific vertical plate coverage and is a threat to do damage all over the zone. Big league pitchers are likely to attack Kurtz on the outer third with fastballs and changeups, which his short levers/open stride combo sometimes cause him to swing inside. Concerns about covering the outer third of the zone were a big part of why Eric was lower on Kurtz before the draft, but while he does his fair share of whiffing in that location, he’s also incredibly dangerous to the opposite field when pitchers don’t quite execute there. His college (87% z-contact%, 80% overall contact) and post-draft data (86% in-zone, 76% contact, 8% SwStr%) reinforce confidence in his contact ability.

Kurtz isn’t a great athlete or bender, and he plays defense with a high center of gravity but scouts love his first base defense. He might have a relatively short shelf life as an athlete because he’s such a big guy, but now isn’t the time to fret about that. In the immediate future, Kurtz is likely to race to the big leagues and produce like an impact heart-of-the-order hitter at 1B.

The Cardinals gave Mathews $600,000 as a senior sign in the fourth round of the 2023 Draft after he threw 124.2 innings as Stanford’s Friday night starter. He struck out 158 batters and, infamous 2023 postseason pitch counts aside, he was viewed as a very safe, changeup-oriented backend starter prospect whose ceiling was capped by well-below-average velocity.

Then, ho hum, Mathews had a significant velocity spike in 2024 and led the minors in strikeouts. I’m buying that Mathews’ uptick in velocity (he averaged 91 in his final year at Stanford and was sitting 93-96 last year) is for real because it was accompanied by a physical change. This guy has been doing glute bridges and such; his lower body has gotten much, much stronger. He’s also not being ridden as hard as he was at Stanford, though his workload in college primed him to pitch 143.1 innings in his debut season as a pro. He’s among the most stretched-out, fully-baked pitching prospects in the minors, and could handle a full big league season workload this year if he had to.

Mathews’ secondary stuff remains strong. His slider has also enjoyed an uptick in velocity, climbing from 79-81 mph in college to 83-86 mph in pro ball, and touching above that. His changeup was a legit bat-missing offering in college and remains so. It plays very well off his fastball, solid arm speed sells the pitch, and it has late, sinking action. None of this has had a detrimental impact on Quinn’s command, or his mechanical look. He’s still a super smooth operator who takes a consistent, direct line to the plate and fills the zone. He is on pace to do what Tanner Bibbee did in Cleveland: race to the big leagues in a mid-rotation capacity after looking like the most vanilla of backend starters just a year before.

Genao still has some issues to solve on defense before he can be considered a shortstop fit, as his arm strength and accuracy remain sketchy. But the good news is that it might not matter where he ends up playing defense, because Genao is starting to get stronger and deliver brutal blows to the baseball, which should enable him to profile at second or third base if it comes to that. He slashed a BABIP-aided .330/.379/.499 split between the two A-ball levels last season. Genao, who turns 21 in mid-May, has one of the cooler looking swings in prospectdom, a somewhat elaborate, full-body hack with a big finish behind him. He’s more skilled as a lefty, but he can damage mistakes from either side. Aspects of Genao’s swing might leave him vulnerable around his hands once he starts facing good velocity, but for now Genao (pronounced jen-OW) looks like an everyday middle infield performer in every statistical category. He’s a sneaky bet to wind up in the top 20 of next year’s list.

Clark was a well-known, top-of-his-class high schooler several years before he was draft eligible because of his consistent, superlative performance in travel ball tournaments. He entered pro ball as a dynamic, old school leadoff hitter prospect, and so far that’s exactly what he looks like. Clark spent most of his first full pro season at Low-A Lakeland and was promoted to High-A West Michigan for the final month and a half of 2024. Combined, he slashed .279/.372/.421 and tallied 36 extra-base hits and 29 steals in 33 attempts in 107 games.

Clark’s lightning-quick hitting hands are best at snatching pitches around the top of the strike zone. He slices and hooks lots of hard, low-lying contact from line to line, then uses his speed to take extra bases. His swing doesn’t feature big lift, and Clark lacks overt, frame-based power projection, but the amount of contact he makes and its quality should enable him to hit for plenty of in-game power in pro ball — it will just likely manifest as 40 or 50 doubles rather than 30-plus home runs.

Clark still has some developing to do in center field. He easily has the speed to play the position well, but often looks uncomfortable at the catch point. None of Clark’s underlying data is particularly nutty when compared to big league averages, but it’s impressive across the board for an up-the-middle player his age. He’s still tracking like a traditional leadoff-hitting center fielder with a well-rounded game.

For those who consider bat-to-ball skills to be an innate ability, I present Freeland, who had a 67% contact rate in 2023 and a 78% rate in 2024. This delta is most pronounced from the left side, as Freeland’s contact rate as a lefty was 70% in 2023 and a miraculous 80% in 2024. His left-handed swing appears toned down relative to 2023 (he’s gone from a leg kick to a toe tap), and in 2024, he climbed three levels to Triple-A while slashing .260/.387/.442. Freeland still swings hard and is capable of leaving the yard to all fields. He’s gotten better at covering the upper part of the strike zone from the left side, though his righty swing is much less dynamic and only geared for low-ball contact. Freeland’s excellent arm strength makes him a shortstop fit on defense despite below-average range. Without an obvious shortstop on the Dodgers big league roster, Freeland is in position to play a very important big league role in 2025 and might be the club’s long-term answer at that position.

A six-sport athlete at Turramurra High School (about 20 minutes north of the Sydney Opera House), Bazzana ran track (100m dash, long jump and high jump), played soccer, basketball, and rugby, lettered in cricket from grades seven (!) through 12, was captain of his high school’s state championship cricket team, and was on Australia’s U18 Baseball World Cup roster in 2019. He was immediately a good college hitter at Oregon State, where he slashed .360/.497/.660 throughout his career and .407/.568/.911 as a junior with 28 homers and only 37 strikeouts. The Guardians made him the first overall pick in the 2024 draft and Bazzana struck out at a surprising 25.4% clip in 122 PA at High-A, twice what he did before the draft.

A compact athlete cut from the same cloth as Rougned Odor and Brian Dozier, Bazzana has terrific plate coverage, with power and swing loft that ensures he gets to it in games. This guy can bang to all fields. Short levers enable Bazzana to turn on inside pitches with power (this is where he’s most dangerous), while his raw strength and bat speed give him oppo-gap doubles pop. Bazzana has an uphill, damage-causing bat path all over the zone, and his lower body can dip to help him scoop low pitches.

Though he runs well in a straight line, Bazzana is not an especially graceful mover, nor a very good second base defender. He’s a 40-grade athlete in space, with below-average hands and arm strength. Very similar to JJ Wetherholt, Bazzana lacks the size of your typical impact big leaguer, but à la Rougie, there’s plenty of precedent for a guy like this succeeding. Considering his non-traditional baseball background, it’s conceivable that Bazzana still has room for growth as a hitter as he gains high-level experience. Athletic limitations make it tough to forecast the same kind of growth on defense, but Bazzana has been an “arrow up” guy for the last three seasons, and should be a good everyday second baseman even if he isn’t a great defender.

De Vries was unanimously viewed as the best prospect in the 2024 international signing class, a do-everything, switch-hitting infielder with power from both sides of the plate. At the time, there were international scouting folks whose club reports on De Vries said “everything is at least plus,” and who considered him a no-doubt shortstop with a 60- or 70-grade arm and a projectable frame; one executive considered him the best international prospect in more than a half decade. Same as they have with their recent high-profile prospects, the Padres wasted no time in pushing De Vries’ promotion pace. Most prospects who sign in a given year spend all of the rest of it in the D.R. getting their feet wet in pro ball. De Vries was on the Peoria complex weeks after he signed, and after a little bit of extended spring training action, he was sent out to Low-A Lake Elsinore when he was roughly 17 1/2. He slashed .237/.361/.441 at Elsinore before wrapping up his season in the Arizona Fall League.

De Vries doesn’t have great range or footspeed, and he isn’t a great bender, but basically everything else he’s doing at shortstop is great. He has one hell of an arm, which helps him make up for his lack of range to a degree, and he’s an acrobatic and creative defender capable of making highlight reel plays around the bag and in the hole to his right. I have him evaluated as a skill-based fit at short, but how his body and mobility develop as he ages is definitely something to monitor. If he has to move to, say, third base, it’s plausible he could be an amazing defender there.

On offense, De Vries can bang from both sides of the plate. He has remarkably consistent feel for elevation and enough power to be dangerous already at age 18. Both swings are fairly grooved, which is pretty typical for a switch-hitter this age, but De Vries is going to damage mistakes that run into his bat path. His contact performance — 80% in-zone, 72% overall — is south of what is typical for a big league shortstop, but it isn’t terrible, especially with his age and level in mind. De Vries hit exclusively left-handed for a stretch in late May and then returned to switch-hitting, and most of his homers came from the right side. This is a very talented young fella with the potential to be an impact middle infielder. The range of outcomes is pretty big. He could be an Ozzie Albies type of power-hitting second baseman, or an Asdrúbal Cabrera type shortstop, or a Wilson Betemit type of third baseman except with much better defense. Most of the outcomes are good so long as De Vries fine-tunes his game the way most teenage hitters have to.

Made was on the 2024 International Players section of The Board because the heuristics with which I approach that market gravitate toward switch-hitting up-the-middle guys with contact feel, even when they’re relatively small dudes. Made has become quite strong very quickly and has already shattered my expectations. He torched the 2024 DSL with one of the league’s more cartoonish all-time statlines — .331/.458/.554 with 21 extra-base hits in 51 games. His underlying TrackMan data was even more absurd — 90% in-zone contact, 89% overall contact, 15% chase, 108 mph max exit velo, 104 mph EV90, 47% hard-hit rate — especially when you consider Made’s age. Some of these marks are comfortably two standard deviations above the big league average. They are, of course, tough to contextualize given the nature of DSL pitching, but for the most part, Made’s visual scouting report backs up the notion that he’s a very talented young hitter. He has filled out and looks much stronger in his lower body now than he did when he was an amateur prospect, and he’s on a path where his physicality could be in the Robinson Canó or Ketel Marte area at maturity. The fluidity in Made’s hips as he swings and the authority in his hands through contact are both remarkable. He’s capable of impacting the baseball with lift in most of the zone (including when he’s crowded around his hands), and his swing has a gorgeous finish.

The ease and stillness with which Made can swing hard is pretty special. He did struggle some with velocity, and guys with swings naturally geared for low-ball contact like Made’s sometimes have issues that we simply don’t know about when they’re in the DSL because the pitching there isn’t good enough to illuminate them. But if Made were a domestic high school prospect, we’d absolutely be talking about him as the potential top overall pick in this year’s draft. He’s a potential do-everything middle infielder (he’s played 2B/SS/3B so far) with a special hit/power combination. The Brewers have been pretty aggressive about promoting their top DSL guys directly to full-season ball the following season, so Made is arguably priority no. 1 for me on the backfields during spring training, since he’s unlikely to stick around for extended.

A very famous prospect since his high school underclass days, Rosario’s mid-to-upper-90s fastball used to miss frustratingly few bats because of its shape. He ran an ERA over 7.00 during both his sophomore and junior years, sitting 95-96 and flashing a plus slider and splitter. The Rangers quickly overhauled Rosario’s delivery, most notably his arm slot, which is now much more vertical. It’s totally changed the way Rosario’s fastball plays without sacrificing his arm strength or the quality of either secondary pitch, and it also improved his command. In a 2024 split evenly between Low- and High-A, he posted a 36.9% K%, a 3.7%(!) BB%, and a 2.24 ERA across 88.1 innings.

This is an “I’ll have what she’s having” situation. There are many people in baseball who are jealous of the Rangers for this one, and others who think Rosario should be furious with the staff at Miami for failing to help him improve in college, as it probably cost him a lot of money (Andrew Walters, too). Rosario’s line to the plate is much more direct and comfortable looking now than when he was in college. His mid-90s fastballs (Rosario mixes four- and two-seamers) have a flat enough angle to beat hitters above the zone even though they lack great ride. His breaking ball has morphed into a nasty two-plane slider that looks more like a curve when Rosario lands it in the zone, and his splitter (which sits about 90 mph) garnered an elite whiff rate in 2024. In less than a year, Rosario has gone from a frustrating Day Two prospect to a potential mid-rotation starter with three plus pitches. He could be the best pitching prospect in baseball a year from now if he proves he can sustain this performance across another 30 or innings while facing upper-level sticks.

A two-sport Texas Tech commit coming out of high school, Smith-Shawver raced to the big leagues in his second full season even as his repertoire and delivery were evolving. His strike-throwing stagnated during a homer-prone 2024 at Triple-A, but the barely-22-year-old Smith-Shawver (who also dealt with a grade two oblique strain last year) still checks basically every athletic box you’re looking for in an impact pitcher and he hasn’t focused solely on baseball for very long. Since he was drafted, the Braves have augmented AJ’s release point and, in 2022, altered the shape of his slider. In 2023, he added a mid-70s rainbow curveball that complements the shape of his riding mid-90s fastball. In 2024, he suddenly had a plus-flashing changeup. For Smith-Shawver to have entered pro ball as a fastball/slider projection guy and, amidst all these changes, reached the big leagues before he was legally allowed to drink is remarkable.

A super loose 6-foot-3, Smith-Shawver’s mechanical consistency should improve with reps. His fastball’s velocity and ride give it margin for error in the strike zone, but his secondary pitches (especially his slider) need to be located more consistently if they’re going to thrive. The developmental imperative for AJ and the Braves is to find more consistent slider release, so that that pitch is located off the plate rather than constantly backing up into the wheelhouse of righty batters.

I’m consciously avoiding prospect fatigue here — were Smith-Shawver a college righty sitting 95 mph with his changeup quality, we’d be talking about him as a lock to be a top 10 pick. The Braves’ aggressive promotion schedule has backed them into a bit of a corner here, as Smith-Shawver has just one option year left, which might impact his role in the short-term. Over time, I think he’ll be a good mid-rotation starter with two plus pitches and, eventually, much better command than he has right now.

Emerson had a loud introduction to pro ball in 2023, as he and the Mariners’ other high school draftees from that year’s class made noise in Modesto. His 2024 was more muted, in part because Emerson missed significant time with a foot fracture during the regular season (and looked slower on defense when he returned), and then was shut down during his Arizona Fall League stint (he raked there) because of a strained hammy. He is now a career .290/.419/.419 hitter in 94 minor league games.

Emerson’s hitting hands are lovely and explosive, working in an aesthetically pleasing loop that creates natural all-fields doubles power. He posted an 87% in-zone contact rate in 2024, and he has terrific feel for the strike zone. As sexy as his swing looks, I’m a tad worried about how his bat path will play against better velocity. Hitters with swings like this tend to cut underneath a lot of right-handed fastballs up-and-away from them. Still, you should keep in mind that Emerson will (probably, hopefully) be going from one extreme hitting environment to another in 2025 as he transitions from Everett to Arkansas, so even if his numbers take a dive, it doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m already right about that.

Emerson is a little too heavy-footed to play shortstop for me. He can throw from tough platforms but is a little too slow-twitch to be a big league shortstop. The Mariners gave him a little run at third base in 2024, and I think that’s his most likely eventual home. That will make it a little more important for Emerson to get to more power than he has to this point, but there should still be enough offense here for him to profile as an average everyday option there.

Petty, who touched 102 in high school, came to the Reds from Minnesota during the spring of 2022 in a trade for Sonny Gray. After missing time with an elbow issue in 2023, he had a healthy and complete 2024 season in which he worked 137 innings spent mostly at Double-A Chattanooga, many more frames than he had thrown in any prior year. At the very end of the season, after Petty had been promoted to Louisville, his fastball was still sitting 94-97 mph.

Petty is an incredible on-mound athlete whose body whips around like a tornado throughout his delivery, which looks like a more consistent version of Abner Uribe’s. He has never had issues throwing strikes, and now he’s proven he can sustain plus arm strength under the stress of a starter’s load of innings. Another big development for Petty is that he’s altered his approach with his heater. He formerly used it as a low-in-the-zone sinker, but is now peppering the top of the strike zone with it. Off of that, he works with a low-90s cutter, a mid-80s slider, and a mid-80s changeup. The two-plane version of Petty’s slider is his nastiest pitch, while his cutter and changeup are more about inducing weak contact from lefties. If Petty can continue on this mid-rotation path, he’ll stand apart from the routine failures that most of the hardest throwing high school pitchers in the draft endure. He’s a special athlete with special arm strength and seemed to make relevant tweaks in 2024, while simultaneously increasing confidence that he can actually start by holding his stuff all year. There’s a pretty good chance he debuts at some point in 2025, though he may not exhaust rookie eligibility until 2026.

In part because of the pandemic and in part because of the crowded field of Yankees catching prospects above him, it took Ramirez four years to exit rookie ball, which he did during a breakout 2023 that saw him climb from Low- to Double-A. In 2024, Ramirez slugged his way to another promotion with a monster .289/.372/.570 first half at Somerset, and he spent a month in Scranton before the Yankees traded him to Miami as part of the Jazz Chisholm Jr. deal.

The 2024 season was Ramirez’s first on the 40-man roster and, due to his immaturity on defense, it was a purely developmental season that used one of his option years. His receiving around the edge of the zone and pure arm strength are both fine, but Ramirez is currently pretty bad at picking balls in the dirt, and his slow exit from his crouch drags his pop times down into a slightly below-average range. He isn’t ready to be a big league defender just yet, but he also isn’t so bad that he has to slide to first base.

This is still a young catcher with rare power at a position where players tend to break late. Ramirez has big bat speed and power, and enough plate coverage to weaponize it. He’s maintained modest strikeout rates despite a max-effort style of swinging, with the finish of Agustin’s backswing so big that it’s often incredibly dangerous for the catcher behind him. He is going to do enough damage to warrant starts at first base and DH like Ryan Jeffers has — essentially an everyday player who catches some of the time. Expect Ramirez to get his feet wet at the big league level in 2025 and get regular at-bats at C/1B/DH, then establish himself as Miami’s primary catcher as soon as he gets a little better at playing defense.

Liranzo is a huge-framed, power-hitting catching prospect with several very raw attributes. He was part of the Dodgers’ Wilman Diaz/Rayne Doncon/Josue De Paula position player group on the complex and in Rancho Cucamonga, where Liranzo hit 24 bombs in 2023. Promoted to the High-A Midwest League in 2024, Liranzo struggled early in the season, as many hitters in that league do when they shift from training in Arizona to playing in 40 degree weather in Michigan. Liranzo hit .159 in April but slashed .262/.399/.424 the rest of the year. He was traded to Detroit as part of the Jack Flaherty deadline swap, went on a torrid run after the deal, and then continued to rake in the Arizona Fall League.

Liranzo is what I’d call a Michael Myers Prospect: slow-moving but inevitable. He’s raw enough that as he enters 2025, his 40-man platform year, he’s probably still a couple of seasons away from reaching the big leagues, and will need a few more after that to hit his ceiling. Chief among Liranzo’s developmental imperatives are his ball-blocking and throwing accuracy. When he has a clean exchange, Liranzo’s arm is lethal. He has uncommon athleticism for a guy his size and is capable of firing rockets from his knees or from funky arm angles, à la Patrick Bailey, with some pop times hovering around 1.80 seconds late in the 2024 season. So why has Liranzo allowed stolen bases at an 85% clip the last two years? He too often fumbles his exchange and can’t even get a throw off, or has the carry on his throw impacted by having a poor grip on the baseball. His stone-handed issues are evident when he tries to pick short hops, too, though Liranzo began receiving on one knee in 2024 and is learning how to use his size as a ball-blocking barrier from this body position. The physical tools to not only be a viable catcher, but a very good one, are here, and Liranzo is built like a lot of other late-blooming catchers whose size tends to win the war of attrition they’re all constantly fighting.

We can be hopeful that Liranzo will make similar progress on offense. He already has plus power from both sides of the plate at age 21 and will probably have another grade of it at his peak. He’s not a skilled hitter — Liranzo’s swing is grooved and he’s looking to run into mistakes that find the very middle of the zone — but he is very dangerous from both sides of the plate if he gets one. Again, we must remember this scouting axiom: Switch-hitters tend to develop late, as they have two swings they need to get a feel for. There’s evidence this has been happening for Liranzo. His contact rates improved four percentage points (both overall and in the strike zone) in 2024 compared to 2023, though at 69% and 77%, respectively, both marks would rank near the bottom of the primary catcher population. The natural launch in Liranzo’s best swings combined with his ability to mis-hit contact with enough strength to produce whoopsie doubles should allow him to get to power even though he’s going to strike out a ton. Projected as a flawed-but-good primary catcher overall, Liranzo should have some peak power-hitting seasons that make him an All-Star.

Mayo had a five-year track record of mashing dating back to high school before elevated strikeouts began to creep into his profile once he was promoted to Double-A. Since arriving in Bowie and then Norfolk, his K% has hovered around 25%, while Mayo’s underlying contact rate has slowly dipped into a problematic range, from 75% to 73% to 70%, as he’s progressed up the minor league ladder the last three years. Mayo’s funky, pull-heavy swing generates enormous pull-side power and loft, and he’s on time to destroy fastballs (his splits against plus velocity are great) even though he’s a massive, long-levered 6-foot-5 guy. His tendency to pull off toward the third base side has left him very vulnerable to sliders on the outer half, and as Mayo has faced more sentient pitching at the upper levels, that has been more consistently exploited. In spite of this, Mayo crushed Triple-A (.287/.364/.562) at age 22, including after he returned from a month-long IL stint due to a fractured rib. He looked positively lost during his 17-game, late-season big league call up to Baltimore, in which Coby K’d in nearly half of his plate appearances. He is starting to have a more polarized power-over-hit offensive profile, but Mayo is so strong and his swing is so tailored to get to all of his power in games that he should still be an everyday bat.

Mayo’s profile becomes a little dicey if he ends up at a first base-only defender. His size makes it hard for him to move around at third base, and he has been speculatively projected to right field here at FanGraphs since before he was drafted because that’s the position that best takes advantage of his plus max-effort arm strength. The Orioles have shown no inclination to try Mayo out there, and began to deploy him at first base semi-frequently starting in 2023; he has played about 20 games there each of the last two seasons. It’s not ideal for a hitter whose bat is nearly ready for prime time to still have such an out-of-focus defensive fit. If Mayo can successfully play a more valuable position than first base, it will take pressure off the need for him to resolve his issues with sliders and give him a better chance to be a star-level performer. At first base (where he’s now projected, though I’d still love to see a right field trial ASAP), he’s more of an average regular.

Alcántara’s time is nigh, as he enters his final option year in 2025. His looming lack of roster flexibility might force the Cubs, who even after effectively swapping Kyle Tucker in for Cody Bellinger in their outfield, are still flush with big league outfielders at the time of publication, to make a trade that clears room for him to be rostered on Opening Day 2025. That would preserve that final option in the event that Alcántara struggles to find his big league footing and absolutely needs another stretch at Triple-A Iowa to get himself right. This course of events is plausible because Alcántara is still fairly raw and has all the physical markers of a hitter who might require a prolonged adjustment period to actually start hitting.

At a freaky 6-foot-6, Alcántara’s swing is very long and difficult to time. He tends to be late on fastballs and struggles to pull them in the air, but he has plus bat speed and the power to leave the yard to the opposite field even when he isn’t on time. He has plus measureable pop at age 22 and he isn’t even close to being totally filled out; his frame has room for another 15-20 pounds of muscle before Alcántara’s mobility would be threatened by his size. Compounding the hit tool volatility here, however, is Alcántara’s tendency to miss secondary pitches, as he doesn’t identify or adjust to them all that well and had miss rates north of 40% against sliders and changeups in 2024. Alcántara also drives the ball into the ground a lot; his grounder rate was 50% in 2024, but he still managed to have 35 extra-base hits in 111 minor league games (he missed a few weeks with a shoulder injury) because he hits the ball so hard. Center fielders whose contact profiles resemble Alcántara’s include Jose Siri, Michael A. Taylor, James Outman, and Luis Robert Jr., guys whose performance tends to vary a lot year-to-year, and the same will likely be true of Alcántara.

The thing that stabilizes Alcántara’s profile is his center field defense, which has become quite good. He’s a plus runner with plus range and ball skills, and he plays with a fearlessness around the warning track. He’s gotten very good at the minutiae of the position, like deke’ing baserunners or running to a spot to position himself to throw before he’s collected the baseball. With Pete Crow-Armstrong around, Alcántara is more likely to be a potential Gold Glove corner outfielder in Chicago, but here he’s evaluated as a center fielder because, league-wide, that’s the position at which he has the most value. There’s bust risk here, but especially if his ability to lift the ball starts to improve, Alcántara is going to have some All Star-caliber power-hitting seasons and be a very valuable everyday outfielder.

The freakishly talented Caglianone presented a serious conundrum to teams picking atop the 2024 draft. He was perhaps as talented and toolsy a college player as there has been in the last decade or so, wielding elite raw power and, for parts of his career, elite fastball velocity, but Caglianone’s plate discipline and command were both so lacking that they threatened his entire profile on both sides of the ball. He slugged .738 and hit 33 homers as a sophomore, then slashed .419/.544/.875 with 35 bombs in his draft year, but long levers and poor ball/strike recognition (his chase rates approached 40% in college) caused Cags to whiff quite a bit more than his 8.2% junior year K% might otherwise indicate. His swing, which features a very aggressive hand load way up and away from his body, takes advantage of Caglianone’s prodigious athleticism to generate nutty power, but it might benefit from being toned down, not only to help stop Cags from striking out too much, but so that he doesn’t drive the ball into the ground so often, which was an issue after the draft. Caglianone looks as impressive in his uniform as anyone in pro baseball (his thighs are practically bursting out of his pants), and he’s strong enough to do damage with a simpler operation. These blemishes create risk, but the notion that Caglianone will polish his hit tool and feel for the strike zone once he’s been allowed to focus on hitting in pro ball makes him a very exciting prospect.

There’s also an exciting fallback option on the mound if strikeouts turn out to be a problem, though that comes with its own risk. Caglianone has an ideal pitcher’s frame at a hulking 6-foot-5. He’s limber and loose and powers down the mound with ease. His fastball sat 97-100 in 2023, and he has a great changeup. But Caglianone’s velocity plummeted in 2024, and he only averaged 92-93 mph from May until the end of the season. His two breaking balls (an upper-80s slider/cutter and a low-80s slurve) are also wildly inconsistent, as is his command and overall feel for pitching. A return to the mound should probably only be explored if Caglianone underwhelms as a hitter for the next couple of seasons. His ceiling as an everyday hitter is big enough that it should be his/Kansas City’s focus until it becomes clear that it isn’t going to work. This guy has 35 homer upside.

For two consecutive years, De Paula has posted an above-average offensive line as a young-for-the-league hitter. He now sports a .291/.411/.420 career line, and his underlying exit velocities are remarkable for a teenager, as they’re nearly plus on the big league scale. This is a big, physical, loose-in-the-hips outfielder with enormous raw power projection and an early-career track record of plus plate discipline and closer-to-average contact rates. There are some funky elements to De Paula’s swing that have prevented him from tapping into his power in games, and that create some hit tool risk that hasn’t yet been exposed. De Paula tends to lose his base as he swings, his mechanics can get handsy (sometimes he still crushes the ball anyway), and he’ll spin out even when he isn’t swinging all that hard. De Paula is also very vulnerable to righty fastballs running up and away from him. He swings underneath a ton of them, which will become more detrimental to his production as he climbs the minors and faces better heaters. This is a prospect who is still more about projection than present ability on both sides of the ball. De Paula is a tentative corner defender with a great arm that he has not yet tamed. He’s talented enough to be valued as a 50 FV prospect because the power-hitting ceiling here is nutty if De Paula and the Dodgers can remedy even a few of his issues.

Teel, who raked in high school, opted out of the 2020 draft, raked in college, was picked in the middle of the 2023 first round, and has raked so far as a pro. He posted a 145 wRC+ at Double-A Portland in 2024, his first full pro season, and was promoted to Triple-A Worcester in mid-August. It seemed plausible that Teel might debut in Boston in 2025, in part because he has played so well and in part because incumbent catcher Connor Wong has struggled. Instead, Teel became the most well-rounded member of Chicago’s fairly crowded big league/Triple-A catching contingent when he was included in the Garrett Crochet deal.

Teel does not have the prototypical size and bulk of an everyday catcher; he’s a leaner athlete, and there are times when his lack of strength impacts his receiving and pitch framing at the bottom of the zone. But he does virtually everything else well on defense. He’s a really great ball-blocker and has sensational hands when picking balls in the dirt. Teel’s raw arm strength is average, but he is very accurate even when awkward pitch locations force him to contort his body to throw.

On offense, his skill set has begun to take on a power-over-hit flavor. He takes a lot of high-effort cuts, and the path of his classic, low-ball lefty swing is geared for lift. Teel has struggled to cover fastballs up and away from him enough that his contact rates have fallen a bit below the major league average at catcher, but his playable power and selectivity (which helps him hunt pitches he can drive) should be enough for him to perform like a good primary backstop.

Briceño had a monster 2023 spent mostly on the Lakeland complex, slashing .319/.402/.529 with seven homers. He was among this system’s hard-hit leaders at a whopping 42%, one of the few lower-level hitters consistently hitting the ball 95-plus mph that year. He missed most of 2024 due to a strained PCL suffered in mid-May that kept him out until the end of August. He was only able to amass 176 regular season plate appearances and hit .278/.381/.377 (but repeated the 42% hard-hit rate), then Briceño went to the Arizona Fall League and won the League MVP with an absurd .433/.509/.867 line and 10 homers in 25 games.

Briceño has plus pull power and has now had consecutive years with strikeout rates around 14.5%. His power can be neutered if pitchers execute to the outer third of the zone, but Briceño is capable of going the other way to produce singles and doubles. Briceño didn’t catch at all after his knee injury, but he looked pretty good back here before he got hurt, much better than the year before. He does everything fairly well — receiving around the edge of the zone, ball-blocking, throwing — and has improved pretty quickly for such a big, young catcher. He should return to catching in 2025 and projects as an average defender at peak based on his early-2024 look. Another positive development here is Briceño’s conditioning. He looked much more lithe and limber in Arizona, and seemed to have cut weight without sacrificing power. Whereas in 2023, Briceño looked maxed out, he suddenly has positive physical projection. It’s rare for players who miss half the season or more with injury to have also had an overwhelmingly positive year, but that’s the case for Briceño, who looks like a future primary catcher.

Lowder’s performance steadily improved throughout his college career, which ended with a bang. He went 15-0 in 17 starts for Wake Forest prior to the College World Series and posted a sub-1.00 WHIP and sub-2.00 ERA during his draft spring. He was drafted seventh overall as a strike-throwing, quick-moving, three-pitch starter, and in his first full pro season, Lowder was exactly that. He ascended all the way to Cincinnati, where Lowder made six starts at the end of the year.

A gangly, unspectacular athlete with a theatrical, cross-bodied delivery, Lowder clearly works hard to keep his somewhat awkward frame in great shape. His bow-legged front side, and the stiffness in his hips and lower back, contribute to a funky operation that aids in deception, albeit via an atypical look for a starter. Lowder’s stuff isn’t overwhelming, but the pieces of his repertoire fit together nicely, and while imprecise, he fills the zone with them. His best pitch is his mid-80s slider, which has considerable length for a breaking ball that hard. The sink/tail action of his fastball limits its bat-missing ability in the strike zone, but its movement pairs nicely with his slider, and it’s hard for hitters to cover both sides of the plate when those two pitches are located well in sequence. Lowder’s changeup has enough tail and sink to miss the occasional bat, but it more frequently induces groundballs, which is true of his entire repertoire. Lowder is a low-variance fourth starter.

Wilson was the best bat-to-ball hitter in all of college baseball during both his sophomore and junior seasons. As a soph, he had the lowest strikeout rate among qualified college hitters at a microscopic 2.8%, while as a junior, Wilson only swung and missed a total of 18 times and posted a whopping 10-to-1 ball-in-play-to-whiff ratio. He ended his college career having hit .361/.419/.558 and became the sixth pick in a loaded draft.

Despite his collegiate success, Wilson was a fairly divisive amateur prospect due to the light, opposite-field nature of much of his contact, as if he were a better-gloved Nick Madrigal sequel. Wilson has allayed some of those concerns in pro ball, as he slashed an incredible .401/.446/.606 combined in the minors across a sample shortened by knee tendonitis. That slugging percentage isn’t emblematic of WIlson’s actual power (by a lot), but performance at that level demanded rapid promotion to the big leagues, where Wilson slashed .250/.314/.315 across 103 PA toward the end of 2024 (a season interrupted by a hamstring injury).

Though their tendencies as hitters are similar, Wilson separates himself from the spectre of Madrigal’s lack of impact with much better defense and better long-term physical projection. Wilson has unspectacular range and struggles with hot shots, but his actions are often acrobatic and fun once the ball is in his hands. He is going to make a ton of SportsCenter Top 10s making jump throws to first and crazy feeds to second.

Since turning pro, Wilson’s frame has filled out, especially in his shoulders. He’s strong enough to make doubles-oriented contact now, flattening his path to impact pitches at the top of the zone and dipping to scoop low ones, which he often drives the other way. Wilson’s inside-out style has him spraying fastballs to right field and pulling mistake breaking balls. He’s incredibly aggresive and chase-prone, but his bat control helps him get away with it. Low walk rates are common among players who make high-end rates of contact; guys like Luis Arraez, Madrigal, David Fletcher, Martín Prado, and countless others have had varying degrees of big league success despite not walking very much. What separates Wilson from many players of this ilk is that he’s a quality shortstop defender, and he has better long-term athletic projection than many of them because of his lanky build. Erick Aybar and Andrelton Simmons are fair performance comps for what readers should expect from Wilson’s arc as a hitter. He should be the Athletics’ everyday shortstop from Opening Day 2025 and onward, and while his ceiling is capped by a lack of power and what are likely to be low OBPs, his elite feel for contact should allow him to produce in the 2-3 WAR range.

Ingle is one of the twitchier athletes in the minors, with his quickness impacting the game in many different ways. This has been the case for Ingle on offense for a while. He was an excellent contact hitter at Clemson and he’s carried that ability seamlessly into pro ball. Of compact build, Ingle can wait forever before he decides whether or not to swing. He’s a count-working nightmare who spoils a ton of tough pitches and sprays line drive contact all over the field. In 2024, Ingle slashed .305/.419/.478 at mostly High-A. He walked more than he struck out and kept hitting even after he was promoted to Double-A Akron later in the year.

The key developments for Ingle in 2024 involved his physique and defense. He has always been on the smaller side of what is typical for a big league catcher, and while that remains true, he has added 15 pounds or so and is noticeably stockier than when he signed. The added strength has made Ingle a much quieter receiver and it hasn’t cost him any quickness; he is incredibly agile and it shows in his blocking and the way he exits his crouch. Ingle’s arm strength is only fair, so he needs to get rid of the baseball as quickly as possible, and he does. His accuracy can suffer because of his haste, but overall this approach worked for Ingle in 2024, as he’s hosed 26% of would-be base stealers and trended better after he was promoted to Akron. It’s still fair to wonder how Ingle’s body will hold up against the rigors of catching most days at the big league level (he caught 74 games in 2024), but he now has the skills to play the position well, and his combination of contact and on-base ability should be enough for him to clear the offensive bar at his position.

Ranked 19th on the 2023 Draft Board, McGonigle was arguably the high school player from that class with the highest floor because of his middle infield fit and contact ability. McGonigle’s stocky build capped his power projection and, theoretically, his ceiling, but his early-career contact performance has been special enough that he might become an impact player, even with modest raw pop.

McGonigle missed the beginning of the 2024 season due to a hamstring injury and the end of it due to a broken hamate. In between (60 games at Low-A Lakeland and 14 at High-A West Michigan), he slashed a fantastic .309/.401/.452 with more walks than strikeouts and 22 stolen in 24 attempts. His more granular data, albeit in a relatively small sample, was sensational. McGonigle posted an 88% contact rate and 41% hard-hit rate. There aren’t any big league hitters with marks that high in both categories, which, though impressive, is also an indication it’s probably not sustainable. Regardless, McGonigle’s short levers and terrific barrel feel, especially at the top of the strike zone, is real. He’s incredibly hard to beat, even when he expands the zone (which he does much more often with two strikes). McGonigle’s hard-hit rate comes more from contact consistency than big raw power. He has below-average raw and, at a maxed-out 5-foot-10, is unlikely to grow into a ton more. But his early count selectivity, and his ability to impact the ball with lift at the top of the zone, should still allow him to get to an okay amount of power for a shortstop.

McGonigle’s hands weren’t as crisp in 2024 as usual, but he still has enough arm for short, a well-calibrated internal clock, and great actions around the bag. He’s a low-variance everyday middle infielder tracking for a late-2027 debut.

We’re in Joel Embiid territory here. DeLauter has not been able to stay on the field since entering pro ball, and he’s now had several foot/ankle fractures and sprains dating back to college, some of which have recurred. He has played just 96 regular games since being drafted in 2022, but he has been great when he’s been healthy, and is a career .317/.387/.517 hitter who ended his 2024 season at Triple-A. DeLauter’s unique swing, in which he alters his footwork as a means of directing his barrel around the zone, often has a weird, truncated finish. This seems to work for him, in part because DeLauter’s hands are so strong and able to generate thunderous power without help from big rotational movement. While he’s best at golfing low pitches, DeLauter is also capable of taking ones on the outer third deep to the opposite field. His background contact data and lack of chase both reinforce the hitterish scouting look. His injuries have impacted his mobility when healthy such that it’s been hard to evaluate his defense; at his size, however, he’s absolutely ticketed for a corner. On talent, DeLauter looks like a heart-of-the-order hitter, but his persistent injuries force his FV grade down a shade compared to last year.

Keaschall had two solid underclass seasons at the University of San Francisco before he transferred to Arizona State for his draft year, during which he hit an unbelievable .353/.443/.725. He had some first round buzz (probably under slot; the rumor was Boston) and was heavy in the mix of model-driven teams because he was not yet 21 on draft day. Keaschall ended up signing for $1.5 million as a second-round pick.

The undersized Keaschall is a premium in-the-box athlete with a flexible and powerful lower body, as well as strong wrists that turn over through contact. At Arizona State, he would often look a little out of control, chasing a ton and swinging so hard that he found himself off balance. This is one of the areas in which Keaschall has changed since joining Minnesota’s system. His swing rate has dropped from 50% at ASU to 38% with the Twins, and he walked more than he struck out at High-A Cedar Rapids prior to a promotion to Double-A Wichita in late May. He slashed .303/.420/.483 with 15 homers and 21 doubles in 102 games even though he was dealing with nagging right elbow discomfort that ultimately led to a late-2024 Tommy John. Aside from his hard-hit rate, which might very well spike when he returns healthy in 2025, every one of Keaschall’s statistical indicators is better than the big league average. Keaschall’s swing brings consistent pull-side lift to the party, which means his power production might really pop if a healthy elbow means he can hit the baseball harder.

Keaschall’s best position is “hitter,” and his ultimate defensive home still isn’t clear. A bad college middle infielder, Keaschall continued to look rough at second base with Cedar Rapids, then he DH’d for most of May because of his elbow, and came out the other side playing more center field and even some first base. His feel for center was predictably pretty rough, but it got a little better as the season went on. Whether Keaschall’s elbow issue was part of why he looked so bad at second base, we just won’t know until he returns. A number of things could happen here, from “Keaschall’s feel for center field improves” to “healthy Keaschall hits for enough power to be a full-time first baseman.” But I’m confident enough in his bat to value him as an everyday player of some kind as he enters his age-22 season.

For a couple of years now, I’ve written about my apprehension surrounding Mayer’s issues with secondary stuff. Throughout his entire career, he has performed in spite of these issues, but they continue to terrify me. Marcelo’s front side is so upright throughout his swing that it makes it nearly impossible for him to dip and scoop soft stuff at the bottom of the strike zone and below. He can absolutely button a fastball, but big league pitchers aren’t going to show him many of those if he keeps performing like he has against secondaries. Just how stark is the contrast? Mayer had an 87% contact rate against fastballs last year, and a 57% contact rate against breaking balls. It seemed feasible in 2023 that his issues were the result of him playing through injury, but even as he slashed an amazing .307/.370/.480 at Double-A Portland in 2024, this problem lurked beneath the surface and is an unstable Jenga block in the middle of an otherwise exciting profile. Mayer is a powerful mistake hitter with all-fields juice when he gets a pitch in the the middle of the strike zone and above; he had a very impressive 50% hard-hit rate in 2024 and tallied 36 extra-base hits in just 77 games, as Mayer’s 2024 season was interrupted for the third straight year by injury. In consecutive years, he has had wrist, shoulder, and back issues, which season Mayer’s profile with another element of risk.

Mayer has always been a bit boxier than the usual elite shortstop prospect, but his hands and actions are so skilled and polished that he seemed likely to play there despite middling range. His footwork and actions are very polished, and the Red Sox have found a way to mask his mediocre range and arm strength (for shortstop) with good positioning. It isn’t sexy, but it works. Though Mayer’s performance (and my grade for him) has seesawed a bit during his prospect lifetime, he has enough power to be considered a productive, power-hitting shortstop.

In 2024, Montgomery had a rough go of things at Triple-A Charlotte, where he slashed .214/.329/.381 and hit 18 homers in 130 games. Though he’s never had strikeout issues quite as stark as he showed in 2024, his incredible 2023 looks like a small sample anomaly compared to the rest of his upper-level output. The huge-framed Montgomery still has rare lefty power for an infielder and he has a great idea of the strike zone. His approach is geared to pull as often as he can — it lacks skill and nuance — and he struggles badly to cover the top of the strike zone.

Especially with the benefit of good positioning, Montgomery does enough to stay at shortstop (he makes plays coming in on the grass very well), but he’s a little too slow and clumsy to be considered average there. He should still produce like an good everyday shortstop because of his on-base ability and power relative to others at the position, but he may frustrate in other ways, especially initially. At peak, he could have some seasons with 30 homers and fair shortstop defense, but it almost certainly will not be right away. Montgomery isn’t a plug-and-play star who’ll be productive on arrival; it will probably take some time.

In part because of the modern media climate and our collective fixation with The Next Big Thing, Rocker’s baseball odyssey has been perhaps the most visible, dramatic and prolonged roller coaster ride any prospect has ever been subject to. He looked like a first rounder for much of his high school career, but his stuff dipped as the 2018 draft approached while his asking price did not, so teams backed away and Rocker went to Vanderbilt. After some rocky early starts his freshman year, something clicked for the right-hander and he was utterly dominant during the second half, culminating in a 19-strikeout no-hitter in a postseason game against Duke. That outing, and Vanderbilt’s run to a national title, made Rocker a household name even among casual baseball fans. The pandemic squashed his sophomore season, then Rocker emerged with a noticeably higher release point as a junior. He was fantastic early on, but his fastball lost two ticks as the spring progressed.

Despite his excellent career performance — 236.2 IP, 321 K, 68 BB, 2.89 ERA — volatility was an inextricable aspect of Rocker’s 2021 draft profile, and he fell to the Mets at 10th overall. New York was scared enough of his post-draft physical to squash his deal, which meant Rocker had to wait another year to enter pro ball. He pitched in the independent Frontier League in 2022 and his velocity was back, but again his arm slot had totally changed; this time, it was much lower than when he finished up at Vanderbilt. The Rangers made him a top five pick and sent Rocker to the 2022 Arizona Fall League, where he was scattering 95-97 mph fastballs and had his trademark, plus-plus slider. Then Rocker’s elbow blew out in May of 2023 and he had Tommy John, shelving him until July 2024. Upon his return, Rocker was touching 99-100 right out of the gate and again had changed his release, this time to a low-three-quarters slot but a vertical hand position. Over a span of two months, the Rangers gradually stretched him out to the point where he was working five innings, and he made his much deserved big league debut in mid-September.

Rocker’s fastball still lacks great shape, but he lives off of angle and velocity to beat hitters at the letters, and he has an explicit sinker version with more tailing action. Speaking of explicit, Rocker’s slider is still X-rated. It sat its usual 84-87 mph last year and generated misses at a 65% clip (the average for big league sliders is 34%), in part because Rocker’s command of it is great. Rocker has good feel for locating his 90 mph changeup, and while that pitch isn’t especially nasty, he’s barely been healthy enough to work on it and it might blossom late. He also has a show-me mid-70s curveball.

As deliriously happy as we all should be that Rocker has managed to persevere through all of these injuries while being in a white-hot spotlight, his injury history has to factor into the way he’s graded here. It’s great that he was bumping 100 mph last year, but he did so across just under 50 total innings. I do think his fastball is still vulnerable to big damage even though it’s really hard, and he’ll be more of a fourth starter on a good Rangers team rather than the club’s ace.

Ashcraft came back from Tommy John with a vengeance in 2023 and earned a 40-man roster spot. He was utterly dominant across his first 50 innings of Double-A to start 2024 and was promoted to Triple-A Indianapolis where, after a couple of starts, he was put on the IL three separate times with recurring forearm issues, the last of which ended his season. He has arrived at 2025 camp with intact velocity, but injuries are an inescapable aspect of Ashcraft’s profile due to his history and the violent nature of his delivery.

When healthy, Ashcraft has good stuff and should be a meaningful contributor to Pittsburgh’s pitching staff. His bread-and-butter pitch is his 88 mph slider, which has impressive length and depth for such a hard offering. It generated miss rates north of 40% in 2024, as did Ashcraft’s slower, 82-85 mph curveball, which he uses more as a backfoot weapon against lefties. Though his arm angle creates relatively ineffective movement on his fastball, Ashcraft’s mid-90s velocity makes up for it somewhat. Similar to Quinn Priester, there might be some issues with Ashcraft’s fastball getting hit, or at least he may have to pitch off his breaking stuff more frequently against big league hitters and thus operate less efficiently from a strike-throwing standpoint. He has never had issues throwing strikes in pro ball but also hasn’t demonstrated starter-level durability because his career has been interrupted by injuries and the pandemic; his 73 innings in 2024 were comfortably a career high.

Ashcraft seems likely to be optioned at the start of the 2025 season (he has two options left, while most of the Pirates’ projected rotation either does not, or is named Skenes or Jones), but he should graduate at some point this season as he’s called upon in response to injury. He has the talent to be a no. 4/5 starter when healthy.

Curet has led the minors in strikeouts over the last two seasons with 303 tickets punched in just 223 innings. He’s been walk-prone during that time, and his fastball has some round-down elements in its shape and plane, but Curet’s delivery is so relaxed and easy that I anticipate he’ll continue to polish that as he matures. He’s only 22, but for two consecutive years, he’s shown he can sustain mid-to-upper-90s velocity across a starter’s load of innings. In 2024, his first year on Tampa Bay’s 40-man roster, he worked 119 innings, ran a 2.95 ERA and 3.76 FIP, and was still reaching back for 97-98 mph fastballs in September with Double-A Montgomery.

Curet’s fastball generated plus miss in 2024 even though it has suboptimal shape. When he’s locating it to the arm-side part of the plate, it has exploding rise/run movement. Curet’s slider has plus potential thanks to its rare velocity. It’ll touch 90 mph and often acts more like a cutter than a true slider, starting above the zone and bending down into it when it’s at its best. Even though it isn’t truly switched on as a chase-inducing weapon right now, it has still been able to generate above-average miss. Something as simple as altering Curet’s position on the rubber might help it look more enticing to hitters.

The real late-season development for Curet was his changeup, which he used twice as often in Montgomery as he did in Bowling Green. As you can imagine from a guy who has below-average command and is just starting to use a new pitch, Curet’s feel for locating it was inconsistent, but a good number of his changeups have huge tailing action and downward finish. The ease of his delivery makes this pitch very promising; it generated a 60% miss and 45% chase rate in August and September even though Curet had basically only just begun working with it. Curet’s fastball, durability (this guy’s legs are like tree trunks), and proximity to the big leagues drive a long-term mid-rotation projection. He’s entering his second option year and should make his big league debut at some point in 2025.

Williams added significant strength between his junior and senior years of high school, which is how he elevated his stock into the first round of the 2022 draft. He then dominated A-ball in his first full pro season before looking overmatched late in 2023 and early in 2024 at Double-A Binghamton. He was shut down with right wrist soreness in late April with the hope that cortisone and rest would allow him to heal, but instead he needed TFCC debridement surgery and missed four months. He was either out or compromised for too much of 2024 to really glean anything from his performance or underlying data. He went to Arizona for the Fall League, and I thought he looked fine there even though he K’d at a 30% clip. It felt like a season that Jett (and those of us evaluating him) should just flush and move on from.

Williams still swings with incredible verve and power for a 5-foot-6 guy. His top hand is incredibly strong through contact, giving him power back through the middle of the field. He has historically had issues with high fastballs, and those will likely persist due to the uppercut nature of his swing. Williams’ defensive fit is still not clear. I’ve had him projected to center field because of his speed, and due to the throwing accuracy issues he’s had from shortstop, which were present in 2024. Jett split time evenly between center field and shortstop in Arizona, and was running in the 4.1s for me there. He’s blazingly fast and should be fine in center with reps. For Williams to be an everyday center fielder would be mold-breaking in a sense; there really aren’t players this size who play out there every day. But Jett is already kind of mold-breaking because he’s immensely strong for a 5-foot-6 guy, and I think that he’ll get to enough power to play out there in an everyday capacity.

Wetherholt is a native of Mars, Pennsylvania, and in college, he hit like he isn’t of this planet. He was a career .370/.468/.625 hitter at West Virginia, a unanimous first team All-American as a sophomore and the top ranked player on the FanGraphs Draft Board entering the 2024 season.

Wetherholt’s swing often has huge finish through contact. A big bat wrap gives him a very aggressive angle of attack with the barrel, and feel for oppo contact saves him when he’s a little late, which was more common in 2024 (including after the draft), as he was less apt to pull the baseball than in 2023. His in-zone contact rate was in the 90-93% range the last two years of school, and then was 82% in a small A-ball sample after the draft. A thing to watch here in 2025 is whether or not Wetherholt can start pulling the baseball more like he did in 2023.

Wetherholt suffered a hamstring injury at the start of the 2024 college season and missed about six weeks. On defense, he can be slow to approach balls hit in front of him, and sometimes he struggles to bend and turn around the baseball quickly, hallmarks of a guy with a tight lower body. Wetherholt looked better in this regard once he returned from the hammy issue, but the general flexibility in his lower body is something to monitor. He played a mix of second base, third base, and left field as an underclassman, but was exclusively a shortstop in 2024, and his chances of remaining there are much better than they appeared 12 months ago. Staying at short would give his offense some room to breath if in fact Wetherholt’s newfound tendency to inside-out the baseball is a permanent aspect of his profile. He has average everyday shortstop projection.

Hence was selected in the shortened 2020 draft and was one of the youngest players taken that year. After he was brought along very slowly at the onset of his pro career, Hence maintained mid-90s velocity across 40-inning workload increases in 2022 and 2023 before experiencing a slight downtick early in 2024. He worked 96 frames in 2023, but was handled with such care in 2024 that he only threw 79.2, though Hence was as dominant as he’s ever been.

Tink’s changeup took a huge leap forward in 2023, and not only has it become his best pitch, but it’s now one of the better changeups in the minor leagues. He’ll also flash the occasional plus breaking ball, but not consistently. Hence’s fastball wasn’t finishing quite as well at the end of 2023 as it was when he looked like a Bryce Miller clone with better secondary stuff. Ideally, he’d continue to get physically stronger for the purposes of durability, an area where I think Hence has plateaued. He still looked very skinny in 2024, and his fastball both missed bats at a shockingly low rate and lost a tick compared to 2023. He’s a good on-mound athlete, but he’s on the smaller side, and added strength might help him have the stamina to finish his pitches more consistently. Hence has thrown strikes and projects to have a starter-quality mix. He hasn’t take the big leap I hoped (on the contrary, there are reasons to be worried about the velo dip), but Tink’s secondary stuff is just so good that he should be an effective fourth starter even if that’s a consistent issue.

Warren yo-yo’d between the bullpen and the rotation at Southeastern Louisiana and went unselected as a true junior in the shortened 2020 draft. He moved into the Lions’ rotation in 2021 and had a great season — 91 IP, 95 K, just 98 baserunners allowed — despite sitting mostly 90-91 mph. When play began in 2022, Warren had a new breaking ball and much more velocity, which he has sustained across the last couple of seasons en route to a couple of big league call-ups in 2024.

Warren had an elevated ERA in 2024, which was his second consecutive season with HR/FB rates twice the major league average. Some of that can be attributed to the hitting environment at Somerset and most of Triple-A, but it is a weird aspect of Warren’s sinker-heavy profile. The rest of what Warren brings to the table is stable and fairly exciting. He’s a kitchen sink type who can attack hitters in a myriad of ways, all with viable (and sometimes plus) big league stuff. Against righties, Warren uses a sinker/sweeper combination, and will occasionally run his four-seamer up the ladder. Against lefties, he becomes a four-seamer/changeup guy, with the occasional in-zone sweeper as a way of stealing strikes. Warren also has a cutter that, when he locates it, is brutal in on the hands of lefties; he barely busted it out during his half-dozen big league outings. Though his sweeper is easily his nastiest pitch, all of Warren’s pitches flash plus. He lacks surgical command, but his ability to get groundballs (his sinker generated them at a 63% clip in 2024) should bail him out of the occasional walk.

Guys with sinking/tailing stuff like Warren’s can tend to be more vulnerable to extra-base damage when they make a mistake, and it’s possible I’m underappreciating this aspect of his profile. But despite his 2024 ERA, Warren still looks like an big league-ready fourth starter. He has been remarkably durable and worked at least 120 innings each of the past three seasons, and he has five good pitches and a mature approach to their usage. Warren seems likely to start the season as the Yankees’ sixth starter, and is pretty clearly the most talented of the 40-man arms projected to begin the season in Scranton. He’s very likely to exhaust rookie eligibility in 2025 and entrench himself in the New York rotation for the next half decade.

Bloss was taken 99th overall in the 2023 draft out of Georgetown after spending his first three years of collegiate ball at Lafayette College. The Astros promoted him very aggressively; Bloss began the 2024 season at High-A and made his big league debut in June. About a month later, he was traded to Toronto as part of the Yusei Kikuchi deal, and he finished the season at Triple-A Buffalo. Bloss’ performance dipped down the stretch and he carried a bloated ERA at Buffalo, but I’m staying on him. Remember, not long ago this guy was facing Patriot League hitters, and now he’s staring down Gunnar Henderson.

Bloss is a high-waisted 6-foot-3 and has incredibly loose, long levers that, along with his big stride down the mound, help him generate nearly seven feet of extension. His fastball only sits 92-95 mph, but it has nearly perfect backspinning ride. Off of that Bloss works with two distinct breaking balls: an upper-70s curveball with great depth and shape that mirrors his fastball, and a mid-80s slider/cutter. The slider has tight, late movement, but lacks chase-inducing length right now. Bloss also has a changeup that, based on the fluidity of his arm action, should mature to average with time, though his curveball’s depth gives him a weapon against lefties right now. The rate at which Bloss has developed and, for the most part, succeeded is exciting, and he should entrench himself toward the back of Toronto’s rotation at some point in 2025.

Messick, who is third in the minors in strikeouts over the last two seasons, has been a remarkably consistent strike-thrower whose fastball has punched above its weight since he was at Florida State. In 2024, he split the season between High- and Double-A, pitched 133.2 innings, K’d 30.2% of opposing hitters, and posted a 2.83 ERA. Messick’s 92 mph fastball doesn’t have a ton of carry to it, but it does run uphill and can garner whiffs via its angle. His changeup is at least plus, and the loose, whippy nature of Messick’s arm action helps sell it to hitters like a podcaster hawking dietary supplements. Pitchers with plus command and plus changeups tend to overachieve, and the ultra-competitive, sneaky athletic Messick (who has shed a good bit of weight since college) is in that vein. He’s tracking like a contender’s fourth starter and could be up at some point in 2025, a little bit ahead of his chalk 40-man timeline.

Unpolished defense and hit tool question marks have long been Jensen’s prospect bugaboos, and in 2024, he showed signs of improving both enough to be elevated in the Top 100. He was sent back to the Midwest League and slashed a robust .271/.386/.435 with a 15.2% walk rate and 22.1% strikeout rate before he was promoted to Double-A Northwest Arkansas after the All-Star break; Jensen kept slugging, though his peripherals backed up a tad. Then he had a monstrous Arizona Fall League stint during which he slugged .800.

Jensen’s tendency to run deep counts, and the way his swing is geared for power, will probably lead to elevated K’s at the big league level, but his contact data has encouragingly hovered around the big league average throughout the last two seasons. He’s also patient and has rare juice for a catcher. Jensen’s swing is very explosive. He uses an enormous stride that spans nearly the entire batter’s box, and his bat path has bloodthirsty lift. At a position where having one good offensive tool is often enough, Jensen should clear the bar thanks to his power and on-base skills.

Jensen still needs to improve as a defender, but his size and athleticism give him a great shot to do so. His ball-blocking has already gotten much better, but his throwing and receiving both need to quiet down. You can see Jensen’s athleticism and flexibility when he throws, but it often takes him too long to get rid of the ball as he thrashes out of his crouch with inconsistent footwork. Jensen’s hands are also far too active and noisy as he prepares to receive pitches. These issues are pretty common for catching prospects this age, and are technical problems rather than an indication of a lack of talent. Already a virtual lock to be put on Kansas City’s 40-man after the 2025 season, Jensen’s big league ETA will be dictated by how quickly he can improve his issues on defense. He seems pretty likely to spend at least most of the next two seasons in the minors and then compete for primary catching duties once Salvador Perez’s contract expires.

Mack is a lefty-hitting catcher with a big frame, plus bat speed, and a grooved, uppercut swing that helped him hit 24 bombs in 2024, mostly at Double-A Pensacola. Though ‘Cola and a couple other Southern League ballparks tend to inflate home runs, Mack has real juice and big league physicality. At times his cut can be a little out of control, and Mack often swings over the top of secondary stuff, but he has rare all-fields power for a catcher and, even at age 22, there is still room for muscle on his frame. Mack has also posted above-average offensive lines at every level except for his 2023 campaign at High-A. Catchers sometimes play through bumps and bruises that impact their offensive production for long periods of time, and it’s plausible that was true of Mack in 2023. He’s going to swing and miss a ton, both because of how much effort his swing features and because Mack is not a patient hitter, but so long as he’s getting to his power, that’s fine for a catcher.

Mack still needs to develop as a ball-blocker. His crouch — an endangered species, as Mack sometimes catches from a traditional crouch rather than on one knee — can be a little high and make it tough for him to get to the ground in time to act as a wild pitch barrier. He is otherwise a good defender with a tremendous arm. Capable of popping sub-1.9, Mack hosed 34% of would-be basestealers in 2024, and as stolen base attempts in the big leagues climb, it helps to have a catcher with a 70 arm. He’s entering his 40-man platform year and is on pace to get his feet wet in the big leagues late in 2026.

Smith is an XL third baseman with rare defensive ability for a player his size. Built like an outside linebacker at 6-foot-3 and 225 pounds or so, Smith slashed .331/.420/.594 during his career at Florida State and showed substantial improvement to his strikeout and walk peripherals as a draft-eligible sophomore. The Cubs selected him 14th overall (he was seventh on our Draft Board) and Smith posted strong contact and power numbers after he signed. He slashed .313/.396/.609 in 134 PA, with an 84% zone contact rate (77% overall), 111 mph max exit velo, 107 mph EV90 (the big league average is 104-105), and 43% hard-hit rate. Those are pretty good, and they reinforced Smith’s fairly aggressive draft ranking. He was then traded to Houston as part of the Kyle Tucker deal.

Big all-fields power headlines Smith’s profile. He’s a super strong guy who can generate huge power with little mechanical distance. His swing changed during his sophomore year and he now looks like a more crouched Alec Bohm, with simple footwork, no stride with two strikes, a shallow load, and a bat path that tends to lift the ball less often than is ideal for someone with this kind of juice. Sometimes Smith’s lower half is so stagnant that it looks like it’s preventing him from getting to pitches on the outer edge; he ends up stuck in the mud and can’t reach out there. The same could be said for Smith’s swing overall, which detracts somewhat from his athleticism. He’s definitely strong enough to hit for power with a simple swing, though he doesn’t always look comfortable with the one he’s got right now.

On defense, Smith has rare bend for an athlete his size and at times makes incredible plays for such a big guy. He’s not twitchy or fast, but he’s remarkably graceful and capable of making accurate throws from all kinds of odd platforms. His hands are inconsistent, and if he keeps growing and getting bigger into his 20s (think age 21 Miguel Sanó, that’s where Smith’s frame is at right now), he’ll possibly lack the mobility to play third base. I’m more bullish about his ability to improve and remain there than the general consensus of amateur scout sources who provided feedback on the 2024 draft prospect list. In fact, I think Smith will be an above-average defender at third despite what will likely be below-average range. He projects as an everyday third baseman, though he might be slower to hit his ceiling than most high college draft picks due to the nature of his swing.

McDermott was drafted by Houston in 2021 and then was traded to Baltimore as part of the Trey Mancini multi-team swap a couple of deadlines ago. He has tallied more minor league strikeouts than any other pitcher since 2022, with 456 ponchados in 322 innings. In 2024, McDermott struck out a third of opposing batters at Triple-A Norfolk across 100 innings, a total limited by a scapula stress reaction in his right shoulder that cost him all of August. The shoulder injuries are starting to stack for C-Mac, as just a few days before Top 100 publication, he was shut down with a lat/teres strain suffered before Grapefruit League play even began.

McDermott has impact stuff, and on any given night he’ll show you four plus pitches, but his arms-and-legs delivery has proven difficult for him to corral, and he’s walked 14% of opposing hitters during the three-year span in which he’s led the minors in strikeouts. McDermott has a huge wingspan and creates plus extension down the mound, which helps his heater jump on hitters. It also contributes to the inconsistency of his arm swing and is part of why he sprays his fastball all over the place. He sits 94 with flat angle and ride, and has two nasty breaking balls, a 75-78 mph curveball and an 82-85 mph slider. McDermott is such a loose, whippy athlete that even though he’s deep into his mid-20s, I’m still of the mind that starter-level feel for location will come with time. Evidence to that end: His changeup took a big step forward in 2024, and he was busting it out as a right-on-right weapon late in the year. The fact that he’s had two shoulder issues in a relatively short period of time is a concerning bummer, but when healthy, McDermott should be a five-and-dive type of mid-rotation starter.

A transfer from UAB to Georgia Tech, Simpson was one of the more fascinating 2022 draft prospects because he had elite speed and bat-to-ball performance in college, but he was also a bad second base defender with bottom-of-the-scale power. Though he is still not hitting for any power, Simpson has had resounding success in pro ball. Every last bit of his superlative contact ability has translated, and Simpson is now a career .326/.394/.375 hitter after having spent most of 2024 at Double-A Montgomery.

Mid-minors defenses have been the Wile E. Coyote to Simpson’s Roadrunner. He is a flat out 80-grade runner who’ll run 3.8 from home to first. When he’s legging out a hustle double or going first-to-third, it barely looks like Simpson is touching the ground. This is elite, game-changing speed. On top of that, Simpson has posted elite rates of contact. His slappy approach has held up so far, and he’s in the Steven Kwan/Luis Arraez territory in terms of his in-zone and overall metrics. Simpson doesn’t have the Jedi-level feel for contact that those two have, but he tracks pitches very well, he’s short to the ball, and he moves the barrel around the zone well. Aside from the occasional double down the third base line or into the gap, Simpson produces almost no power; his lone pro homer is an inside-the-parker. There is some risk that Simpson ends up producing on offense like Myles Straw or Nick Madrigal, who both also made a ton of contact in the minors. His spray chart looks like a left-handed version of those guys, but the combination of that handedness edge and Simpson’s elite speed gives him a dynamic that those high-contact-but-low-impact big leaguers lack.

The other key (but still developing) aspect of Simpson’s profile is his defense. A bad second base defender as an amateur, Simpson has moved to center field in pro ball. His feel for the position isn’t great, and his reads and routes can take him in a couple of different directions even on routine plays. But when Simpson hits the afterburners to go get a ball in the gap, you can see how his speed gives him a shot to be a special defender out there. His range in incredible, and Simpson has just over 140 career games in center field under his belt. There’s a chance he develops into a plus center field defender while also being a premium contact hitter with elite speed. Simpson is a unicorn of sorts and should be a dynamic, table-setting offensive player who also plays a premium position well.

Diaz entered 2024 as arguably the best D-backs pitching prospect even though he didn’t obviously project as a starter. At the very least, the lightning-armed little righty seemed poised to race to the big leagues on the back of his plus stuff and play a meaningful late-season bullpen role for a contending club. This is largely what happened, but Diaz did a lot to solidify himself as a starting pitching prospect in our minds, mostly because of the way his breaking stuff looks like it will play against lefties. Diaz began 2024 at Double-A Amarillo, but pitched his way to Reno in June and then was called up to Arizona in July. He made four big league starts, went back to Reno for a month, and then returned to Phoenix in a long relief role in September. In total, he worked 132.2 innings across 28 games (23 starts), posting a 3.80 ERA, a 1.29 WHIP, 159 strikeouts and 59 walks. Diaz posted a 12% walk rate prior to his big league debut and then a very reasonable 8.7% the rest of the year. His fastball averaged 96 mph across the whole season and 97 mph when he was deployed in relief.

Though Diaz’s fastball command is spotty, its velocity, shape, and angle give it bat-missing margin for error in the strike zone, and it’s reasonable to hope that Diaz’s feel for repeating his high-octane delivery will continue to improve as he matures, and that his fastball command will follow. We now know that, even at his size, he’s capable of sustaining plus velocity across a lot of innings. His mid-80s slider and low-80s curveball each have vertically oriented movement and bat-missing depth. At times, the curve also has some arm-side action, which should help make it a platoon-neutralizing weapon and allow Diaz to navigate lefties without using a changeup. Ideally, Diaz will find a pitch with cutter-y glove-side movement at some point during his career just to give hitters a different direction to worry about, but what he’s working with now plays enough for him to profile as an inefficient, strikeout-heavy no. 4 starter. Over time, Diaz’s athleticism should facilitate polish in the areas that most need it and allow him to be a competitive team’s mid-rotation guy, the sort who you feel good handing the ball to in a playoff game.

Chace has a high-octane arm and checks a bunch of different data and scouting boxes. He has a very athletic drop-and-drive delivery, his arm action breaks the sound barrier, and his heater has exploding life to the eye to go with mid-90s velocity. The data corroborates this: plus extension, low release height, plus vertical movement on his fastball. When Chace is locating his fastball to the belt, hitters have no chance against him. He looks like Bryce Miller did at roughly the same stage, a fastball-heavy 21-year-old of medium build. There is going to be a dominant fastball here, and there are flashes of good secondary stuff that ideally can be polished so Chace can max out, but like Joe Ryan and Miller, when guys have fastballs this good, they tend to pan out.

Chace’s slider flashes late, hitter-freezing, two-plane bend, but it doesn’t do so consistently. His changeup has, at times, ridiculous tailing action and can steal strikes running back over the glove-side corner of the plate, but again this is rare. His release is pretty inconsistent generally, which is totally normal for a 21-year-old with this kind of arm speed, but also creates some relief risk. The Phillies could pull the ripcord with this guy whenever they want and put him in the big league bullpen, and he’d probably be really good right away. Building his innings count by 20 frames or so (he threw 80.1 innings in 2024) in his first option year would tee up Chace to work something closer to a viable starter’s workload in 2026. Either way, unless his command regresses to 2022-23 levels, Chace’s fastball is going to carry him to an important big league role of some kind within the next two to three years.

Hopkins is a converted outfielder who spent his first couple of collegiate seasons at the College of Charleston, where he didn’t pitch very much. It wasn’t until he transferred to Winthrop that he began to pitch regularly in a starter role, and he still managed to lead the Eagles in homers during his draft year even though Hopkins was becoming an “arrow up” prospect on the mound. A big-framed guy and exciting athlete, Hopkins’ stuff took a leap within his first year as a pro, and he quickly became Seattle’s best pitching prospect before he was traded to Tampa Bay as part of the Randy Arozarena deal and was promoted to High-A. Across both orgs he had a strong first full season — 115 IP in 25 starts, 10.41 K/9, 4.15 BB/9, 3.05 ERA — especially for a guy who was still hitting part of the time the prior season.

Hopkins has a low-slot slinger’s delivery akin to Tanner Houck or Camilo Doval. He’s a broad-shouldered 6-foot-4 and has a low-slot, drop-and-drive style, with his arm stroke happening suddenly at the very end of his delivery. This wreaks havoc on hitters’ timing and creates exploding rise-and-tail life up around the hands of righties. He has been up to 99 and, in his first year of focusing on pitching, threw a decent number of strikes. Obviously, with an arm slot like Hopkins’, his slider spells trouble for righties. This pitch has variable movement in the 86-92 mph range. Some of them look like cutters, while others have more length and depth.

It used to be that pitchers with deliveries like this were rarely found in a rotation, but that’s not really true anymore, and it’s becoming less true all the time. If Hopkins can develop a changeup and/or a well-commanded cutter, anything to flesh out his repertoire, he has a great chance to be a mid-rotation starter. He checks basically every athletic box on the scout card, and there are all kinds of late bloomer traits here. Pitching full-time is still very new to Hopkins and the Rays seemed to alter his style of attack after the trade, as he peppered the top of the zone more often. His groundball rate before the deal (59%) and after it (34%) help illustrate the effects of this. This is a very exciting pitching prospect whose floor feels like that of a nasty late-inning reliever. He has a mid-rotation ceiling if he sustains this velo and finds a third pitch.

Young managed to slash .271/.369/.390 at Double-A Arkansas in 2024 even though it’s a pitcher-friendly environment and he was dealing with a nagging wrist issue, which cropped up again in his first and only Fall League game. His underlying exit velos from 2024 are pretty underwhelming, but they’re still just shy of the average among big league shortstops (his contact rates are comfortably above) and were probably impacted by his wrist.

Young does enough on defense to project as a viable shortstop. His hands and exchange are sound, while his arm strength is right on the fringe on what’s permissible on the left side. He’s performed on offense even as he and the Mariners have made changes to his swing, which now includes a lower load. Young also grinds out tough at-bats. He has great plate discipline, spoils tough two-strike pitches, and tends to put the ball in play even when he chases. If he shows up to camp healthy this spring, there’s a chance he grabs hold of the Mariners everyday second base job at some point in 2025. He’s a low-variance everyday middle infield prospect who is unlikely to be a star.

Crooks has been a consistently above-average offensive performer at each level since entering pro ball, culminating in a 2024 at Double-A in which he slashed a BABIP-aided .321/.410/.498. His underlying contact and power data is closer to average — 73% contact rate, 104 mph EV90 — though Crooks makes consistently hard contact. His batting stance evokes Luis Gonzalez, and Crooks tends to work the opposite way against pitches that aren’t hung breaking balls. It’s a solid offensive skill set for a catcher, and Crooks is a very good one. Basestealers should call Crooks “The Informant,” as he is not on their side no matter his last name, and while he has above-average arm strength, his accuracy is remarkable. So, too, is his ball-blocking. Crooks’ size helps create a flesh wall behind the plate, he ability to backhand balls in the dirt is great, and his strength makes him a good receiver. He’s tracking like a glove-first primary catcher with solid average offense.

Brito was a 2023 Pick to Click who looked too rough around the edges on defense that year to justify putting in last year’s Top 100. In 2024, as Brito slashed .256/.365/.443 (.320 xwOBA, per Baseball Savant), his defense improved enough to consider him a viable second base defender. Primarily a middle infielder in Colorado’s org before coming to Cleveland as part of the Nolan Jones trade, the Guardians also tried Brito at third base in 2023, and then at a first base and in right field in 2024. It’s not as though Brito is suddenly a Gold Glove second baseman, but he’s consistent enough to play there in big league games, and he’s backed into having uncommon defensive versatility.

Brito’s offensive skill set hovers around average across the board. He has good bat control and some low-ball power from both sides of the plate, though his swing has more consistent lift as a left-handed hitter. Brito hunts fastballs so fastidiously that he tends to chase them, but his bat control allows him to get away with it. Overall, Brito’s contact and power metrics are right in line with the big league average among second basemen. He’s a platoon-neutral player who can hit from both sides of the dish, and now he’s viable at an up-the-middle position, and likely will be at one or two others soon. With Andrés Giménez gone, Brito has a shot to win Cleveland’s everyday second base job.

Horton was a draft-eligible sophomore who was seen as a “tip of the iceberg” prospect, as he missed his freshman year due to TJ and didn’t focus solely on pitching until pro ball. It seemed as though things were clicking for him at a different level toward the end of the 2022 college season, and the Cubs were emboldened to select him seventh overall that year. In his 2023 pro debut, Horton posted a .996 WHIP across 88.1 innings, reaching Double-A and sustaining the velocity surge he showed during his breakout junior year despite throwing more innings. That didn’t continue in 2024, as Horton’s velo backed up and was more in the 92-95 range before he was shut down with a shoulder strain in late May after just nine starts. He missed the rest of the season and was re-examined during the offseason to see if he was ready to begin a throwing program. His status for the start of 2025 is up in the air.

Horton’s delivery is fairly violent and indeed looks tough on his shoulder. Other aspects of his fastball are unexceptional, so it’s important for Horton to throw hard for that pitch to be effective. His secondary pitches are what drive his mid-rotation projection here. Horton’s slider and changeup both generate plus-plus rates of miss. His slider has rare velocity and two-plane tilt (it’s a weapon against both left- and right-handed hitters), and his screwball changeup gives him another way to get lefties out. Horton will probably work inefficiently as a starter unless his peak velocity returns, and will have to pitch off his secondary stuff a ton. He’s still likely to be an impact pitcher, but suddenly his list of career arm maladies has grown, forcing Horton toward the back of the overall Top 100.

Melton was one of the youngest college prospects in the 2021 draft as well as a plus on-mound athlete, so when he had a really rough season with an ERA just over 6.00, it was easier to swallow a return to San Diego State. In his fourth year as an Aztec, Melton reworked his arm action and climbed into the fourth round of the 2022 draft.

Melton and the Tigers have continued to make substantial alterations to his stuff, and he has had both bat-missing and strike-throwing success up through Double-A. In 2024, he was generating six feet, 10 inches of extension and sitting 95-97 mph with plus vertical movement from a low release height across 100.2 innings of work. Melton has added roughly five ticks of velocity to his breaking ball since college, and his splinker-style changeup (often mis-classified by automatic pitch tagging) generated plus chase and miss.

Melton is a strapping 6-foot-4, he throws strikes, and he has two plus pitches and several late-bloomer traits. He was young for his graduating class, was mostly a catcher in high school, missed a season due to the pandemic, and now has a fairly new delivery and breaking ball. He was homer-prone in 2024 (20% HR/FB rate), which is a big part of why he carried an elevated ERA, but that’s an unsustainably high rate. Melton was also shut down with a shoulder impingement at the very end of the 2024 season, but he was hitting 98 in a bullpen just before Top 100 publication and seems fine. He’s on pace to debut at some point late in 2025 and compete for a more permanent spot in the middle of Detroit’s stacked rotation in 2026.

Rojas hit so well during 2023 extended spring training that the Cubs sent him to Low-A before the complex-level season had barely began. He hit .268/.345/.404 in 70 games there, and the Cubs sent him straight to High-A South Bend when camp broke in 2024. There Rojas slashed .245/.310/.336 as 19-year-old. He has gorgeous hitting hands, great rhythm and timing, and advanced feel for all-fields contact. Though Rojas’ granular contact data is very strong (he had a 90% in-zone rate in 2024, for instance, which is great), there are very clearly two ways to get him out: backfoot breaking balls and elevated fastballs. He is very likely to require eventual adjustment to deal with at least one of them. He’s still a very exciting offensive prospect, especially for a shortstop, there is just less certainty in this aspect of his prospectdom.

Rojas has the athleticism, range, and actions to project as a viable shortstop, but he needs polish, as you might expect of a teenage shortstop playing a level above what is typical. Rojas’ internal clock is a little slow and he struggles with short hops right now, but the foundation to stay at short is there. He still has an everyday shortstop projection, it’s just a riskier version of it than was previously considered here. His medium frame means he’s unlikely to develop huge power — this guy doesn’t have Elly De La Cruz’s ceiling or anything like that — but he has the talent of an average regular via a blend of contact, power and average shortstop defense. Rojas was initially graded as a 45+ FV on the Cubs list, but as the entire player population was considered, it felt more appropriate that end slot in this area on the Top 100.

Nimmala was one of the youngest prospects in the 2023 draft and also one of the most projectable, both because of his big, broad-shouldered frame and because he’s new enough to baseball to merit deeper, skill-centric projection. He struggled mightily with breaking ball recognition as an amateur, and at his size, it seemed feasible that he might also need to move off of shortstop.

In 2024, Nimmala had his ass handed to him during the first several weeks of the season. He was hitting .167 in the middle of May and was demoted to the complex, where his swing was re-worked. It seems to have made a real difference. Nimmala’s leg kick and the position of his hands as they load were both altered. When he returned to the Dunedin roster, he hit .265/.331/.564 and stroked 13 bombs in his final 53 games.

This isn’t to say Nimmala is suddenly a lock to be an everyday infielder. He still struck out 29.7% of the time during his hot second half of the season, which is a scary rate at Low-A. His overall contact rate (69%) also wasn’t great, but there is at least precedent for power-hitting big leaguers to carry a rate that low and still be impact players. Nimmala already hits the ball very hard. He is a ferocious rotator and is able to generate considerable power because of the strength and quickness of his hitting hands, which are gigantic. Nimmala is able to create big power in a relatively short distance, and his swing isn’t overly noisy or hard to maintain. He’s also elevating the baseball at an Andy Pages-esque 21 degrees of launch on average, and he’s often on time to pull the baseball thanks to a strong top hand through contact. Toward the end of the year, Arjun showed glimpses of being able to cover the outer third and drive the ball to the opposite field gap with power.

Nimmala is also a terrific bender for his size and has a shot to remain at shortstop. That said, his feel for throwing isn’t great, his body doesn’t always sequence well from the ground up, and his mechanics can get out of whack. He needs to work on more consistently transferring his weight from one foot to the other, which he badly struggles with on backhand plays. The tools to be an impact power-hitting shortstop are here, and Nimmala will be 19 for basically all of 2025. He was always going to be a slower burn, and now he’s shown that he can pretty quickly make relevant adjustments.

As an underclassman, White was sitting in the low-90s, with a snapdragon breaking ball and a great physical foundation on which to layer velocity. He unleashed even more heat at PG National in 2022 (lots of 93-96 mph) and then shut things down for the bulk of showcase season. Leading up to the 2023 draft, White looked more muscular and mature in the body and held mid-90s velocity throughout the spring, albeit under a very conservative workload. The Marlins gave him just over $4 million as one of two first-round prep arms taken that year, the second straight draft where Miami coaxed a high school pitcher away from Vanderbilt. In 2024, White’s first full season, he carried a 2.81 ERA across 21 starts, mostly at High-A. He worked 96 innings and K’d 29.2% of opposing hitters while keeping his walks mostly under control. The strike-throwing aspect of White’s 2024 season is the chief reason he moved into the 100, after that had been a concern while he was an amateur. His fastball averaged 95 mph across the entire season, his curveball morphed into more of a sweeper (which helped it play as a back foot weapon against righties), and while White’s changeup doesn’t have great movement right now, his feel for locating it is pretty good considering he barely had to use it in high school. He’s in the early stages of charting a mid-rotation course.

As I noted on last year’s Nationals list, you can’t help but malaprop Sykora into “Sequoia,” because at 6-foot-6 and 230 pounds, Travis is the size of a tree. He overpowered high school hitters with a downhill, upper-90s fastball and promising split changeup as an amateur, and the Nationals gave him $2.6 million in the third round of the 2023 draft. Sykora made 20 excellent Low-A starts during his pro debut in 2024. In 85 innings, he posted a 2.33 ERA, a 1.87 FIP, a 39.2% strikeout rate (yow), and a 8.2% walk rate.

Sykora has a low-three-quarters arm slot, but his front side stays tall throughout his delivery. It’s a funky operation that gives him the option of running a two-seamer down toward his arm-side or elevating his fastball at the belt. Sykora did much more of the latter in 2024 while he held mid-90s velo all year. Even as a high schooler, his fastball command was fairly advanced for a pitcher his size and age, but a 8% walk rate in a 6-foot-6 guy’s debut season is even better than one could have hoped for. Sykora’s slider, which doesn’t spin very much but is aided by its natural downhill trajectory, gives him the means to attack east and west off his fastball, while his splitter combines with the elevated version of Sykora’s heater to attack north and south. The direction of the splitter’s movement has been all over the place since Sykora was in high school. At times it can look like a slider, and something about its inconsistency plays mind games with hitters. Both of his secondary pitches generated miss rates north of 50% last year. Just before the Top 100 was published, Mike Rizzo told reporters that Sykora will be out until close to the middle of the 2025 season; he had a hip procedure during the offseason and will start the year in extended spring training. It didn’t impact his grade here, and so long as Sykora’s stuff looks the same when he returns, he’ll still have mid-rotation projection.

The early portion of Celesten’s career has been defined by injury. He suffered a hamstring tear before the 2023 DSL season began, an injury that basically cost him the entire season except for a couple of games in Arizona during Fall Instructional League. Then his season was cut short in 2024 when a slide aggravated a wrist issue that had been bothering Celesten on and off for a while. He had surgery and has now only played in 32 actual games as a pro, though he was also scouted a ton during 2024 extended spring training. In those 32 games, Celesten slashed an amazing .352/.431/.568 and produced a 48% hard-hit rate even though his wrist was hurting. Celesten’s physicality stands out immediately and would stand out in a big league clubhouse. He probably weighs 15 or 20 pounds more than when he signed, and every bit of it is muscle; Celesten’s shoulders look like he’s shoplifting grapefruits up his sleeves. This allows him to make a remarkable amount of hard contact with an easy, low-effort swing.

Celesten’s left-handed swing has a beautifully balanced leg kick that takes advantage of his athleticism without getting out of control. His load from that side is pretty aggressive and deep, with the head of the bat tilted toward the pitcher as he prepares to unwind. You can see in the way Celesten’s lower body, hips, and wrists rotate throughout his swing that this is a pretty special and powerful athlete. His swing is currently geared for low-ball contact and he’s going to be tested by belt-high fastballs as he machetes deeper into the full-season pitching jungle, but if this guy ever learns how to alter the posture of his body as a means of covering the top of the zone so that his hands can continue to work with their natural loft, he’s going to be a problem. His right-handed swing is nowhere near as authoritative and is often late, but you can see the athletic elements of his cut from that side, too. Celesten’s swing is not actualized for lift just yet — he averaged just two degrees of launch in a small enough sample that it probably isn’t exactly right to say he’s a two degree guy, but he hits a ton of grounders, to be sure.

On defense, I’ve shifted my forecast for Celesten to second base. He was running in the 4.4s from the right side and the 4.3s from the left for me during the spring (I had no ACL run times from him because his contact quality has been too good for him to ever have to run hard), and I also think Celesten’s size at maturity will be bigger than the typical shortstop’s. Hopefully Celesten will stay healthy enough to have a full season at Modesto. He’s still a risky prospect because he simply hasn’t played very much, but his absolute ceiling would give the org something of a Ketel Marte do over.

Morgan was the Eric Hosmer of college baseball for his three years at LSU, playing slick first base defense while bringing a competitive edge and moxy to Baton Rouge. He didn’t produce anything close to the typical in-game power output of a big league first baseman, in part because his bat path caused him to drive the ball into the ground fairly often, à la Hosmer. In pro ball, Morgan’s swing and approach have changed pretty dramatically a couple of times already, and he has also begun using a bat with a counterweighted knob.

During the 2024 regular season, it looked like Morgan was more often taking max-effort swings and selling out for power. He reached Double-A and slugged .483 across three levels, but his middling raw strength and opposite-field tendency as a hitter (plus elevated chase rates relative to his career norms) suggested this was maybe not the best approach for him. In the Fall League, Morgan was more balanced, taking enormous hacks only in favorable counts. He was still stinging the ball in a way that indicates he’ll be a doubles machine, and he seemed less vulnerable to fastballs up and away than he did during the summer. We don’t have a way of truly knowing how Morgan will handle elevated big league fastballs until he faces them, but a more balanced, contact-oriented style of hitting is going to give him a much better chance of covering the top of the zone and being a more complete hitter.

What really tipped Morgan into the Top 100, though, is his defense. He does the splits at first base as easily as I change the channel from the CBS NFL game to the FOX game during commercials. He is at least the best first base defender I’ve seen in person since young Cody Bellinger, and maybe the best I’ve ever seen there, period. He looks bad in the outfield and shouldn’t play there. Morgan will produce like a second-division regular on offense, but he’ll make the whole infield better because of his ability to erase their mistakes on defense.

The primary return from the Phillies in the Jesús Luzardo trade, Caba has a chance to be the best shortstop defender in all of baseball at maturity. He is an unbelievable athlete with ridiculous body control and range, and a big arm for a 5-foot-9 guy. He’ll make the occasional overzealous throw that misses first base entirely, but he is otherwise a complete and sensational shortstop. Despite his age, he is basically a lock to be a special defensive player at arguably the most important position on the field.

Caba has also shown great plate discipline and contact ability in the lower minors. He’s a career .252/.398/.304 hitter across two minor league seasons and spent the last six weeks of 2024 at Low-A Clearwater while he was still just 18 years old. That line is underwhelming more due to the lack of power than anything else. Caba has accumulated many more walks than strikeouts during that span, and his granular contact data (5% swinging strike rate, 93% in-zone contact, 87% overall) is exceptional, especially for such a young switch-hitter. He might not have a huge offensive ceiling, however. Caba is four inches shorter than Zach Neto and his bat speed is only fair. There isn’t going to be big power here; in fact, it’s possible Caba’s lack of power will dilute the performance of his on-base and contact skills somewhat — he tends to keep infielders busy. A career similar to that of Jose Iglesias is fair to hope for Caba, while Andrelton Simmons (who had a more meaningful power peak) feels like the absolute ceiling.

Francisca is a compact, switch-hitting bat control prodigy who signed for $1.3 million in 2023. He hit his way from the Goodyear complex to Low-A in 2024 and, combined, slashed .326/.411/.474. He’s a fantastic athlete who has rare ball-striking power for an athlete of his size and age, capable of turning on low pitches with power and taking what is given in other parts of the zone. For Francisca to have such advanced barrel feel as such a young switch-hitter is very exciting.

Limited arm strength and range will likely limit Welbyn to second base over the long haul. He plays defense with a ton of effort, but he too often makes routine plays look spectacular out of necessity. Francisca’s swing is explosive enough that, despite being a tad undersized, I think he’ll eventually have enough power to profile as a first-division second baseman.

Paez is among the most entertaining pitchers in the minors, a whippy-armed lower slot guy with an incredibly fast arm action and great secondary stuff. The undersized, low-three-quarters righty began his pro career as a sinker merchant with precocious command, then in 2024, his secondary pitches and velocity both took a meaningful leap compared to 2023 and Paez retained his incredible command in the process. As a 20-year-old swingman working up to five innings per outing, Paez pitched 96.2 innings and posted a 10.52 K/9, 1.12 BB/9, and 3.17 ERA at (mostly) High-A.

Paez’s athleticism is evident in his delivery and in some of his data. He’s a wispy 6-foot-1 but generates six feet, nine inches of extension because of his enormous hop down the mound. For all of the effort with which Paez throws, he doesn’t miss his spot very often. He’ll bury his sinker in locations that make it impossible to elevate, run it back over the corner of the plate for a strike, use it to set up his excellent changeup with precise arm-side location, and occasionally run his heater up the ladder, where it can slip past certain hitters’ bats because of its angle. Paez’s slider, which spins it at 2,700-2,800 rpm on average, was four ticks harder in 2024 than in 2023, and averaged 82 mph. His ability to attack with lateral fastball/slider divergence and then pull the string with his changeup is very advanced. He might also have an uphill cutter at maturity to give hitters one more glove-side pitch to worry about.

Paez is a great athlete but he doesn’t have a great frame. He’s smaller than most starters, and he can be slow getting off the mound to field his position, which is a mandatory part of any sinker baller’s skill set. But he’s also one of the few pitchers in the minors who, statistically and visually, looks like he has a chance to develop elite command. The 2025 season is his 40-man platform year, putting him on pace to get his feet wet at the big league level as a spot starter in 2026.

Part of the 2023 Lucas Giolito trade with the Angels, Quero is a switch-hitting bat-first catcher who has had success as a young-for-the-level hitter at each minor league stop, including Triple-A at the end of 2024. He lacks a plus tool, but he’s a well-rounded hitter and a viable up-the-middle defender. It’s particularly difficult to sneak one by Quero when he’s hitting righty, as his swing is short and flat, which helps him make plus rates of contact from that side of the plate. He has more power as a lefty and is adept at dropping the bat head to make low-ball contact.

Quero’s defense is less mature, and his unexceptional athleticism is evident in this part of his game, which is currently below-average (but not awful) across the board. He has below-average pure arm strength, but has posted a 25% CS% rate (basically average) the last couple of seasons thanks to his accuracy. Keep in mind that while Quero has been around for a bit and has been a fringy defender for much of that time, he’s been pushed through the minors aggressively and has been catching upper-level arms at age 20 and 21 the last couple of seasons.

The presence of Kyle Teel and Korey Lee in the org clouds Quero’s future somewhat because he is the worst defender of that group and therefore the one most likely to move off the position. It’s possible Lee won’t hit enough for this to matter, and that a year or two from now Quero and Teel will be one of the more potent young catching tandems in the league. The White Sox still have at least a year for this stuff to sort itself out before they have to make any kind of actual roster decisions related to this potential logjam. Quero is on track to be added to the 40-man this offseason, while Teel’s chalk 40-man timeline is for post-2026, though his promotion pace has tracked ahead of that. Though he probably won’t be a star, Quero is a well-rounded young hitter who should hit enough to be in the lineup every day, even if half the time he’s a first baseman or DH.

If you’re looking for a Mason Miller character in this year’s prospect crop, Henriquez is probably your guy. He’s an ideally built 22-year-old who throws 100, it’s just that Henriquez’s body and arm are too explosive for him to control right now. He missed 2023 recovering from TJ and was put in the bullpen after just five Low-A starts early in 2024. He raced through the minors as a reliever and debuted in late September, but he struggled with walks (just shy of 13% on the year).

At some point things are going to click for Henriquez and he’s going to be a dominant closer. He touched 102 last season and sat 98-99. Automatic pitch tagging thinks Henriquez’s slider is a cutter, in part because it’s so hard (it’ll touch 94) and in part because Henriquez doesn’t locate it to his glove side consistently enough for it to have long, slider-y movement. When he does snap off a good one, it has incredible two-plane movement and depth for a pitch traveling nearly 90 mph most of the time. Days after the Dodgers’ World Series parade, Henriquez was bundled up at an Arizona Fall League game, just to hang out and watch baseball. I like that. He’s immensely talented, he’s been to The Show already, and it wouldn’t surprise me if he’s the Dodgers’ best reliever at some point in the next year or two, and then beyond.

Peete was a 2024 Pick to Click who has clicked for an unexpected reason: It looks like he’s going to make a successful transition to center field. A high school shortstop whose size likely would have been a prohibitive long-term factor at that position, Peete was error-prone at short in 2024 and, in the middle of the season, the Mariners shifted him to the outfield on a part-time basis. It’s not as if Peete instantly became Kevin Kiermaier out there, but his first step and range were surprisingly good. Like Lourdes Gurriel Jr., Peete has taken some of his infielder skills out there with him, and his exchange on throws is uncommonly quick. Unsurprisingly, his routes need some polish, but Peete boldly made some spectacular plays out there last season. He’s already better in the outfield than he is at short, where errors of all sorts were common for him in 2024. Part of me wants Peete to keep playing some infield, if only so that he keeps having opportunities to handle the baseball as much as possible as a way of improving his hands, but part of me wants to see the Mariners commit to the center field thing full-time.

Of course, the reason I thought Peete would break out in 2024 is because of his immense, frame-driven power potential. He has an ideal baseball player’s build at a broad-shouldered 6-foot-2, and he put on an absolute show during BP at the 2023 Combine. He came to pro ball with hit tool risk, and that still exists. He posted a 67% contact rate in 2024 and still struggles to cover the outer third of the zone because of how early his front side drifts open. But despite Peete’s lever length, he’s often on time to pull. It’s kind of amazing how often he’s able to snatch pitches riding in on his hands, and he showed glimpses last year of being able to bend at the waist so that he can cover that outer edge with power. He’s still growing into his body and should add more raw juice as he matures. He made the 100 more on upside than certainly, as he has a shot to be a 25-homer center fielder.

Klassen developed from a hard-throwing sideshow into a high-upside mid-minors starter in about a year under the Phillies’ tutelage, then was traded to the Angels as part of the Carlos Estévez deal. He walked nearly a batter per inning in his draft year at Minnesota, but coasted through A-ball with fewer free passes in his first pro season. Klassen had a sub-1.00 WHIP when he was traded to Anaheim, and improved his control while also adding a cutter and polishing his curveball. Still, his walk rate exploded after the Angels acquired him, and chances are that he is going to be a reliever in the end.

Klassen is a super whippy and bouncy athlete who generates huge arm speed. His delivery requires a ton of effort and violence to produce upper-90s heat, and he throws a lot of non-competitive pitches. But improving his breaking stuff (his power curveball is now comfortably plus) and adding a third pitch (his 90-92 mph cutter probably eventually will be, too) is a huge one-year leap for Klassen to have made when there were times in his draft spring when he looked absolutely awful. Klassen has mid-rotation upside if he can hone his command and is a late-inning relief fit if he can’t. His rapid progression in this area is encouraging and, even if it doesn’t continue, he’s going to be an impact arm of some kind. It’s fine to value him toward the back of the Top 100.

Some readers might recall that the fall prior to their draft year, it was Taylor who was slated to be LSU’s Friday night guy the following spring, while Paul Skenes, fresh from the transfer portal, was the team’s presumptive number two. A draft-eligible sophomore, Taylor blew out and needed Tommy John right before the start of the 2023 collegiate season and, as a result of his injury and a meager statistical track record that included just one walk-prone season, he fell to the second round of that year’s draft.

Taylor was only able to squeeze in 19.1 innings during the 2024 regular season once he was finished rehabbing, and came to the Arizona Fall League to pick up reps. At times he looked great there, flashing four average or better pitches, including a plus-flashing changeup that wasn’t part of Taylor’s college repertoire at all. Taylor sat 96-98 range early in outings and 94-98 overall. His fastball has vertical shape and plus ride, which pairs nicely with the shape of a 83-ish mph curveball that has fair depth but often lacks bite. Taylor’s 84-90 mph slider and 87-89 mph changeup are his two nastier secondary pitches. Breaking ball consistency will be key for Taylor moving forward. His slider’s finish is inconsistent, but when it’s right, it’s plus at that velocity. His changeup is going to give him a weapon to neutralize lefties that’s better than his curveball; the bottom falls out of it just as it reaches the plate, but again, it’s a brand new piece of Taylor’s repertoire. Much of Taylor’s profile is risky. For one, we don’t know whether he’ll be able to sustain plus velocity across a starter’s workload yet. But he has the makings of at least three plus pitches and the ceiling of mid-rotation starter.

What kind of role can Whisenhunt’s all-world changeup carry him to if the rest of his skill set is just okay? Though Whisenhunt has improved in a few key areas, his strike-throwing is still on the fringe of what tends to be viable for a big league starter. His walk rate improved quite a bit in the second half of 2024 (from 12.3% to 9.8%) but was still worse than all but eight major league starters who worked at least 120 innings last year.

There are other encouraging signs here, though. Whisenhunt held his usual velocity all year even though he exceeded the 100-inning threshold for the first time. He had previously only peaked around 60 innings, first as a college sophomore and then again in an injury-shortened 2023. Whisenhunt’s breaking ball, which was once a flaccid curveball, is now a serviceable 82-85 mph slider. Most importantly, he has an elite pitch. His changeup is good in any count — hitters can know it’s coming and still be fooled by it. It has generated elite miss rates for multiple seasons, including against Triple-A hitters in 2024. A Devin Williams type of outcome would be plausible for Whisenhunt should he prove unable to start. He stands a good shot to debut late in 2025 and compete for an Opening Day roster spot in 2026.

The A’s frequently have late-market bonus pool space left to target Asian and Cuban players in the international amateur space, and that enabled them to sign Morales, who they inked for a whopping $3 million. Morales began his A’s career in the DSL, but he was so dominant that he was sent to Arizona after just four outings and ended the 2023 season at High-A Lansing having pitched across four different levels. Morales began 2024 in extended spring training with a shoulder impingement before he was sent out at the very end of April. He ended up working 81 innings across 22 starts at High-A Lansing and posted a 4.22 ERA, 24.9% strikeout rate, and 10.7% walk rate. Morales continues to look like an absolutely electric athlete with all-world arm speed, but he’s still more a thrower than pitcher.

The raw material Morales brings to the table is exceptional. He has an ideal pitcher’s frame: a broad-shouldered 6-foot-3, tapered at the waist, with oodles of physical projection, like a young Zack Wheeler. His arm speed looks like it should break the sound barrier and produces easy, upper-90s cheese. Morales also has a hellacious two-plane curveball in the 81-84 mph range, and you can go wild projecting on his changeup because of his athleticism and arm speed.

But Morales’ pitchability and on-mound poise need to improve. He works at a breakneck pace that often feels counter productive. He gets the sign from his catcher and lets it rip; he doesn’t seem to be executing any kind of plan or competent sequencing, and his command is pretty scattered. Morales and the A’s have plenty of time to develop his feel for these things, as his 40-man timeline doesn’t start until after the 2026 season.

Morales has this grade and a reservation on the Top 100 ranking because of his upside, which is considerable. He looks and moves like a top-of-the-rotation starter, and his stuff gives him a late-inning relief floor if he only barely develops as a strike-thrower. Were he a college prospect, Morales would be a top five pick (give or take) in most drafts because of his raw ability. Oakland’s track record of optimizing pitchers isn’t the best, but scouting and predicting aren’t the same thing. Morales isn’t racing to the big leagues and is definitely more of a Las Vegas A’s prospect than a Sacramento A’s prospect, one who will probably spend most of the next couple of years trying to grow and improve as a craftsman. He has a shot to become an All-Star starter down the road.

Ah yes, high school pitchers. Aren’t they fun? Meyer hasn’t had anything close to his peak high school velocity so far in pro ball, as he sat mostly in the low-90s throughout the 2024 season and struggled badly with walks. Despite this, he was still really hard to hit, and he surrendered just 42 knocks in his 74 innings. I’d argue it’s encouraging that even though Meyer’s velocity was down from its mid-to-upper-90s peak, nobody could touch his stuff when it was in the zone. Meyer checks nearly every scouting and analytical box. His 6-foot-5 frame is lanky and projectable, his arm works loose and free, he has a lower-than-average release height, and he can create huge action on his secondary pitches. All of these things were still true of Meyer in 2024. His slider and changeup still flashed plus, and he presents a very exciting physical package. Obviously, how Meyer looks in his second full season will be important, but for now, I think it’s fair to chalk up his 2024 to the grind and rigors of a pro season, which are simply much different than what the young man experienced in high school.

Isaac has some of the most exciting power in pro baseball. A formerly pudgy high school first baseman, Isaac completely reshaped his body, and in a 2023 season spent mostly at Low-A became one of the more exciting power-hitting prospects in the sport, as he slugged .521, posted elite peak exit velocities, and struck out at a very reasonable 21.2% clip as a 19-year-old. Isaac had some underlying swing-and-miss issues (a 68% contact rate, lower than all but a couple of big league first basemen), but the guys who succeed in spite of this (the Bryce Harper, Brent Rooker, Kyle Schwarber types) all do so with gargantuan power, which Isaac has.

Isaac broke camp with the High-A Bowling Green squad in 2024, and was running a 69% contact rate through May before he completely collapsed. By the end of the season, he had a sub-60% contact rate, which is not viable at the big league level. Isaac was getting absolutely worked by pitches in on his hands. His swing is just too long for him to get the bat to that location, and this issue will only get worse as Isaac faces upper-level pitchers who throw harder. There has to be intervention and adjustment here to get Isaac to shorten up or he won’t hit enough to be a big leaguer. His raw power, however, is elite. This is a 21-year-old with 40-homer power who has already made one significant change (his conditioning) as a pro. If Isaac — who has other hitterish elements in his ability to make in-flight adjustments to breaking balls and power fastballs away from him to left field — can get back to being a nearly 70% contact hitter, he’s going to be a monster. Even if he can just get into the 65%-ish area, he’ll be able to have a Chris Carter-type career. This grade is more about valuing Isaac’s ceiling than it is a representation of his current skills. He’s Schrödinger’s Cleanup Hitter whose early-2025 mechanical look is a very important thing to monitor.

Quero suffered a torn right labrum diving back to first base in the very first game of the 2024 minor league season and missed the whole year. He was coming off a 2023 spent at Double-A Biloxi during which he slashed .262/.339/.440, doubled his career home run total with 16 bombs, upped his previously concerning walk rate to 10%, and earned a 40-man roster spot. The labrum issue puts Quero’s impact arm strength at risk, and we won’t know that it’s still there until we see him throw again in 2025. He has an ultra-short arm action and was often popping around 1.80 at the end of 2023. The other aspects of Quero’s defense need work. He often gets caught in between wanting to block or backhand pitches in the dirt to his right, and Quero is a fairly noisy pitch framer, but overall he’s much more advanced than most catchers his age and he probably would have been fine had the Brewers needed him at some point in 2024.

Quero has a power-over-hit offensive profile and will take some hellacious and wild swings. He gets right on top of the plate and is looking to pull. This approach can leave him vulnerable to stuff on the outer edge, which he sometimes struggles to reach, but so far it has worked for him; Quero has never struck out more than 19% of the time at any minor league level. His contact merics from 2023 — an 85% in-zone contact rate, 75% contact overall — would rank near the middle of the primary catching pack across the last couple of seasons, but Quero is still pretty chase-prone. Even with the uptick in walks in 2023, his swing rates (56-57% the last few seasons) have been way up there with the Mario Felicianos, Francisco Mejías and Jorge Alfaros of the world, predecessors whose monster tools have been severely undercut by their voracious approaches. Yainer Diaz had a rock solid 2022 debut with similar rate stats, and Quero is a better defender than him or Mejía (identical rate contact stats), so his floor should be higher. A big part of Quero’s above-average projection comes from his game-changing arm strength, a key component to understand the second he’s catching in games again.

Farmelo had the second-fastest 30-yard dash at the 2023 Draft Combine and showed impressive BP power, but his swing was a bit of a mess and seemed to change constantly throughout his high school career. I was relatively low on him prior to the draft, but the Mariners made his swing better pretty quickly after he signed. He still has a lot of extraneous movement in his hands, but Farmelo looked good during backfield activity and then during Modesto’s 2023 postseason run. Assigned to Modesto again in 2024, Farmelo was slashing .264/.398/.421 across 221 plate appearances when he blew his ACL while making a slightly awkward catch in the outfield. A typical ACL rehab puts him on the shelf until the middle of the 2025 season.

It’s a developmental blow to a prospect who is much more talented than he is polished. Farmelo can create big power in a short mechanical distance at the dish and he has pretty good bat control, but he still has a bunch of pre-swing movement in his hands that impacts the consistency of both. It’s hugely positive that despite this, Farmelo was consistently pulling the ball with power before he got hurt, including fastballs. That’s not often the case with hitters this size or who have funky swings. Farmelo has the footspeed to play center field and makes some incredible plays deep in the gap, but he’s very raw from a procedural and fundamentals standpoint, things like fielding the ball on the ground and where/how hard to throw the baseball. Farmelo has enormous ceiling as a power/speed center fielder if he can season his defensive ability, and the ACL tear robbed him of reps.

Farmelo has a big, physical 6-foot-2 frame. His speed is great on its own, but it’s absolutely incredible how fast Farmelo is for his size. Whether that’s still true on the other side of the ACL tear is also going to have a huge impact on his potential outcomes. This is a rare player who looked like he might have actual five-tool potential, but unfortunately, what was an already risky profile has now seen that risk heightened by severe injury.

Ryan was a two-way player at UNC Pembroke and one of the more exciting pitchers on the Padres backfields during their 2021 instructs period, when he hadn’t yet pitched in an affiliated game. A plus on-mound athlete with a great arm action and a carrying fastball that was in the 93-95 mph range, he was an exciting, tip-of-the-iceberg dev project for a Padres org that had had recent success with two-way and conversion arms, most prominently Luis Patiño. Then the Dodgers plucked him away in a trade for corner role player Matt Beaty in late March of 2022, and we started to see parts of the iceberg that lay beneath the surface during Ryan’s first full season as a pro pitcher. He was more in the 95-97 mph range throughout 2022 and was dominant (if a little wild) across just shy of 50 total innings. In 2023, Ryan held mid-to-upper-90s fastball velo under the stress of twice as many innings. He posted a 3.33 ERA in 97.1 innings with Double-A Tulsa. Shoulder fatigue shelved him for most of the first half of 2024, and though he looked totally fine upon his initial return and made his big league debut at the end of July, he blew out at the end of the season and had Tommy John in August. It will keep him out for the entire 2025 season.

In addition to the plus velocity, healthy Ryan has three plus-flashing breaking balls in a mid-90s cutter, an upper-80s slider, and a mid-80s curveball with late vertical bite. Ideally Ryan will be able to refine his changeup over time; he was using it less than 10% of the time when he blew out, often in even counts. Its results weren’t great, but he’s a great athlete who is relatively new to pitching, so you can project on that offering. His curveball has enough depth to act as his go-to bat-missing weapon against lefties until his changeup improves.

The visual report here is pretty ironclad. Ryan’s build is a little bit more slight than the prototypical big league starter, but at 6-foot-2, he isn’t small. He has sustained premium velocity over 100 innings of work, his breaking balls are plus to the eye and grade out as plus on paper, and while his command isn’t great, it’s sufficient for Ryan to start and might continue to improve as he gets experience pitching. Ryan was a 55 FV pitcher and looked like one of the better all-around pitcher prospects in baseball before his unfortunately timed TJ added volatility and a prolonged waiting period to his profile.

Tiedemann had a breakout 2022 pro debut during which he climbed all the way to Double-A and, across just shy of 80 innings, struck out 38.9% of hitters and walked just 9.6%. In 2023, vague arm soreness impacted his workload, and then in 2024, Tiedemann was shelved with a shoulder injury early and blew out his UCL not long after returning from the shoulder issue. He had TJ in late July, putting him on track to miss most or all of 2025.

When he has been healthy, Tiedemann’s stuff has been excellent. He relies heavily on a wicked, mid-to-high-90s four-seamer thrown from a deceptively low lefty arm slot that seems to make hitters in either batter’s box uncomfortable. He pairs it with a huge sweeper that has a boatload of horizontal movement, so much in fact that at times it’s easy for hitters to lay off of it. Still, it’s a great strike-getting weapon because it starts in the lefty batter’s box and finishes on the arm-side corner of the plate. Tiedemann’s changeup is also pretty good, though more because his command of it has progressed; on pure stuff, it’s only fair. He already has two plus pitches and one that pretty comfortably projects to be above average, and even while dealing with arm discomfort in 2023 and 2024, he was able to strike out well over a third of opposing hitters. Aspects of Tiedemann’s delivery are unique in a way that makes him look reliever-y, and repeated years of arm trouble add to that risk, but even if he ends up in the bullpen, he’s going to be such a dominant reliever that he’ll still belong about this high on a prospect list. The 2025 season is Tiedemann’s 40-man platform year, and it will be interesting to see whether the Jays deploy him in the AFL or instructs as a means of determining whether or not to roster him, though doing so would expose him to the eyes of rival scouts who might be foaming at the mouth to pop him in the Rule 5 and see what happens.