MLB: Top Prospects Who Could Be Traded This Season
By Tim Boyle
Which MLB top prospects are most likely to get traded this year before becoming stars with their current team?
MLB.com released its annual list of top prospects on Saturday. The list gives a future preview of what to expect from many franchises. However, in some cases, the top prospects may not stick around. Many of them will get traded before ever reaching their full potential with the team that drafted them.
As is the case every year, the best teams competing for a playoff spot will often deal prospects at the trade deadline. We don’t know for sure which teams will be in the hunt for the postseason just yet. This doesn’t mean some of those prospects listed in MLB.com’s top 100 aren’t clearly already on the trade block.
Many teams have top prospects at positions already filled with big league players. Because of this, even the best of prospects sometimes become expendable.
It’s not uncommon to see top prospects traded on a regular basis. In the last 365 days, several of baseball’s best young prospects have been dealt. In the top five alone, three are with different franchises than they started with. There’s little reason to doubt these young players will continue to swap franchises in order to improve the big league squads they had hoped to one day represent.
The season has yet to start, the trade deadline is months away, and the top prospects list isn’t even a week old. Despite this, we can already estimate which future MLB stars could be on the move this season.