6 MLB Prospects Primed to Explode up the Rankings

With hundreds of great MLB prospects around the league, it’s always difficult to properly rank them. There are five prospects that could see themselves rise up the ranks in 2017.

As teams finish up their rosters and prepare for the coming season, MLB prospect lists start to come out from all the well-known websites. In fact, here at Call to the Pen we’ve already done exactly that. The names at the top of the lists always draw a good amount of attention. There are also prospects in the middle or bottom of the rankings that could see a huge rise in their prospect profile in the coming season.

With swaths of top prospects graduating in the past year, there is plenty of room at the top of the prospect rankings for new players to step in. Some of those that did graduate during the 2016 season fell into the same category as these players. They may not have been among the top ten, but their skills, and at times age, allowed them to rise up in the rankings and into the major leagues. Alex Bregman, Jameson Taillon, Gary Sanchez, and Andrew Benintendi are great examples.

A few of the prospects on this list fall into that category of under-appreciated prospects that could break into the big leagues in the coming season. Others on the list are in the lower levels of the minor leagues, who will use 2017 as a way to turn their raw skills into production. Usually these players are much younger, which makes it harder to predict how well they will perform in the future. That causes them to appear lower on prospect lists that contain players from all levels. This season could serve as a maturation process for a lot of players in the single A level as they make their way into the much tougher double A leagues.

As with any prospect list, there will be deserving names left off. This list is bound to be wrong in at least one place because it’s such an objective belief that they will rise up the rankings. However, in an effort to include more names, the list was expanded just slightly from five players to six.

Perhaps there was tons of evidence that players like Bregman and Benintendi would explode during the 2016 season, but the fact remains that not many believed they would see such a rise in effectiveness during this past season. The same applies to the players on this list. They clearly have the tools to push them to be among the top prospects in all of baseball, but not many believe that they’re quite at that level yet. The 2017 season is a great opportunity for all six of these players to do exactly that.