KISSIMMEE, FL - JANUARY 28: Baseball gloves and a baseball lie in the dirt during the Jim Evans Academy of Professional Umpiring on January 28, 2011 at the Houston Astros Spring Training Complex in Kissimmee, Florida. Jim Evans was a Major League Umpire for 28 years that included umpiring four World Series. Many of his students have gone on to work on all levels of baseball including the Major Leagues. (Photo by Al Bello/Getty Images)
KISSIMMEE, FL – JANUARY 28: Baseball gloves and a baseball lie in the dirt during the Jim Evans Academy of Professional Umpiring on January 28, 2011 at the Houston Astros Spring Training Complex in Kissimmee, Florida. Jiim Evans was a Major League Umpire for 28 years that included umpiring four World Series. Many of his students have gone on to work on all levels of baseball including the Major Leagues. (Photo by Al Bello/Getty Images) /
As MLB gets on track in the second half, let’s look at how the top prospects have shifted over the first half
Last offseason, Call To The Pen contributor Benjamin Chase presented a top 125 MLB prospect list, and he will provide a midseason update to that list here.
This list will include recent draft picks, but it will not include the most recent international free agents that were signed on July 2nd as there is just too little truly known about those players right now. Of course, as you’ll see, a few players from the 2016 IFA class make the list, and they have had minimal playing time in pro baseball, but that’s still something to view compared to the showcases of those just signed.
We will be releasing the list 10 at a time, with an extra list on Friday of 25 players to watch in the second half of the season that could jump into the top 50 by the end of the season.
This list is compiled by Ben through his own viewings on these prospects and contacts with scouts, team officials, and other writers in the industry who have had a chance to see the players that he has not yet seen to get scouting reports on those guys. In general, most players have 3-5 reports to put together to review.
Players that are in the major leagues and have expired their rookie eligibility or are expected to do such this season are not included in this list, so guys like Bradley Zimmer, Sean Newcomb, and Clint Frazier are not included on this list as they are up for their teams and seemingly in a role that would portend them expiring their rookie eligibility, and Ben wanted to highlight those players who will retain prospect status by the end of the season most likely.
The White Sox acquired Lopez as part of the trade that sent away Adam Eaton this offseason to the Washington Nationals. Lopez has always had concern about his size at 6′ tall and producing triple-digit velocity as to whether he would be able to hold up as a starter. In the offseason, he was ranked as the #31 prospect with Baseball America, #45 with MLB Pipeline, and #30 with Baseball Prospectus. At Call to the Pen, he was all the way up to #10 overall.
Lopez has a dominant pair of pitches, with a fastball that reaches triple digits and a swing-and-miss curve that leaves batters swinging at air. Lopez has surprisingly long limbs for a guy who is generously listed at 6 feet tall, and that helps to give him plane on his fastball and his hard curve.
Lopez’s change will be his determining factor as a future starter or reliever, but he should be able to be dominant in either role.
The 11th overall selection in the 2013 draft, Smith has always had a thick build but not the power numbers to match until 2016, when he banged out 29 doubles and 14 home runs with AA Binghamton in the Eastern League. The most notable thing with Smith all along in his development has been his zone recognition as he’s never even come close to even a 20% strikeout rate while most power hitters threaten 30%.
Smith is also quite agile around the bag for a guy who’s listed at 6′ and 250 pounds. He’s putting up his best power numbers of his career at this point, but that’s also within the Pacific Coast League, a notorious hitter’s league typically, so that should be taken into consideration.
Right now, Smith has little left to prove in the minors, however, as he’s shown he’s defensively and offensively able to handle first base for the Mets whenever they’re ready to turn it over to him.
48. Royce Lewis, SS, Minnesota Twins
This year’s #1 overall selection was tagged by many as being a “low money” selection, but he is a tremendous talent in his own right. Lewis was widely regarded as the best available high school bat in the draft this season, projected to stay up the middle, whether that was at shortstop/second base or in center field.
Lewis was highly-regarded by many teams in the draft, and it’s been shown why he was highly regarded by his performance out of the gate with the Twins’ affiliate in the Gulf Coast League, where he’s hit .316/.400/.526 with 6 doubles, 2 home runs, and 6 stolen bases while playing shortstop each game.
Lewis is just 18, but his level of athleticism is an exciting influx into the Twins system and could quickly rocket up this list over the next year as he gets his bearings in the pro game.
Long and lean when he was signed out of Cuba, Alvarez had as many detractors as he had supporters when the Dodgers signed him for a reported $16M in the winter of 2015-2016.
Alvarez has a loose delivery that generates high-end velocity with ease, popping off triple digits deep into ball games when he’s been allowed to get deep into the game. Alvarez has a slider that he can work with two different grips to get a wipe out effect or a hard, snapping effect.
After his first pro experience last season when he threw 59 1/3 innings with a 2.12 ERA and 1.03 WHIP with a 21/81 BB/K ratio, Alvarez was ranked the #26 prospect by Baseball America, #49 by MLB Pipeline, and #23 by Baseball Prospectus.
Alvarez finished his fall instructional season injured, and he reportedly did not do well maintaining conditioning during the injury, showing up to spring training out of shape, which led to him opening the season in extended spring for a week and having multiple extended breaks between starts, including some time in the bullpen.
Alvarez was going to have his innings managed regardless this season, likely sticking around 100 innings, so getting some bullpen work is not a surprising thing. His stuff hasn’t been as sharp this season, but he has kept the walks down and kept the ball in the park. A positive finish to the season could jump him back up the rankings.
While his family name certainly brings up positive memories for those of us who enjoyed watching the offensive fireworks of the mid-1990s Colorado Rockies, featuring Bo’s father Dante Bichette, Bo was not as highly regarded as one might think due to some concerns with his swing, falling to the Blue Jays in the 2nd round of the 2016 draft in spite of having one of the more prolific high school careers in the state of Florida, which is an impressive resume typically.
Bichette had a high leg kick coming out of high school along with a stocky frame that many felt would fill out to the point where he’d need to move off of shortstop. To his credit, Bichette has worked on his swing to calm it and worked hard on his conditioning and his defensive reads to be able to work at shortstop.
Bichette may have a ton of natural ability, but he’s also developed a reputation as a “grinder” due to his work ethic. That kind of reputation on top of his impressive offensive performance (.384/.446/.619 combined between low A and high A with 32 doubles, 3 triples, 11 home runs, and 13 stolen bases) have pushed Bichette forward as a legit top prospect in the game.
A guy that is all over the map right now, Tatis has a father who, while he had an 11-year big league career and hit over 100 major league homers, is really remembered for one game during his monster 1999 season when he hit two grand slams in the same inning off of the Dodgers’ Chan Ho Park.
Tatis, Jr. originally signed with the Chicago White Sox in July of 2015, but he was traded as part of the James Shields trade last June before he’d even made his professional debut. He opened with the Padres Arizona League team and played 12 games with the team’s Northwest League affiliate to finish the season. Altogether, Tatis hit .273/.311/.432 with 17 doubles, 3 triples, 4 home runs, and 15 steals in leagues where he was often the youngest player by a significant amount.
This season Tatis has been one of the most dynamic performers in the minor leagues, hitting .269/.366/.492 in the full season Midwest League with 16 doubles, 6 triples, 15 home runs, and 20 stolen bases. While he’s walked in just over 12% of his plate appearances, he’s also struck out in 25.7% as well.
Tatis does project well to add power to his 6’3″ frame as he ages, and while he’s made 19 errors at shortstop this season, he’s shown the ability to handle the position much better than most had imagined was possible originally. He has a plus arm that would allow for a transition to a high-level defensive third baseman if he needed to move off of shortstop in the future.
Some ranking services have come out with Tatis as high as top 20 in their midseason list, while some don’t include him on their top 100. I would wager that by the end of the season, the scouting consensus will catch up enough to where he’ll be a guy pushing for top 20 overall.
When looking at the 2015 draft class, I was asked my opinion on Kingery after the Phillies took him in the 2nd round. I compared him to another college product from the state of Arizona, who is one of those “unicorn” type of comparisons that you’re not supposed to make as a scout, Dustin Pedroia.
Kingery is plenty taller than Pedroia, who is listed at 5’9″, but is more like 5’6″ in actuality, roughly 4″ shorter than Kingery, who is a true 5’10”. From the moment he stepped onto the field for Lakewood in low-A in his draft season of 2015, it was clear that he would be a plus defender at second base, and he’s even improved at that, becoming one of the better defenders at the keystone in all of the minor leagues.
This season, Kingery caught the attention of many casual fans when he led the minor leagues in home runs for much of his time in Reading. While he’s not a true home run threat, his production in the minors that would average out to roughly 35 doubles and 15 home runs over a major league length season is a reasonable expectation of the type of power to be expected from Kingery. That said, he’s continued to knock out home runs since his promotion, with 4 in 15 games in AAA, and on the season, he’s now eclipsed a 20/20 season, with a combined line of .311/.369/.595 with 20 doubles, 5 triples, 22 home runs, and 23 stolen bases. He’s also been a guy who has kept his strikeout rate under 20% as he hit for good gap power with good bat control.
Kingery is 23, so he’s one of the older guys on this list, but he’s the type of hard worker with consistent contact and high-level defense that should have a productive major league career for some time.
While he wasn’t under the radar coming out of the Dominican Republic after signing for $1.5M with the Nationals, Soto wasn’t exactly a well-known prospect on the national stage coming into the 2016 season.
Soto just went out and hit .368/.420/.553 between the Gulf Coast League and New York-Penn League over 51 games with 14 doubles, 3 triples, 5 home runs and 5 stolen bases to get his big bat on the radar of many prospect ranking services, though the more notable thing was how frequently his name was mentioned this offseason in trade rumors – for Andrew McCutchen, for Adam Eaton, and for nearly every closer available on the trade market.
Baseball Prospectus was the only major national service that had Soto in the top 100, with a #57 ranking overall on him. Call to the Pen had Soto ranked #119 in the preseason top 125 that came out in early January.
Soto has a prototype right field profile, with some additional skills tacked on. He has the big power and big arm, but he also has excellent zone and pitch recognition, which should allow him to provide good contact rates and on base as well as power numbers from the left side.
He is just 18 and has been injured for much of the first half after opening the year on a tear in low-A (.360/.427/.523 in 23 games), so he could hop up even further in rankings with a strong finish to the season.
The previous high-dollar mark for a Brazilian international signee before Eric Pardinho this summer ($1.4M to the Blue Jays), Gohara was signed by the Mariners in August of 2012 for $800,000 (some reports say $880K, some say $800K) with a big arm from the left side. However, after four seasons in the Mariners minor league system, he had not yet worked his way out of low-A ball before being traded to the Atlanta Braves this offseason in a deal that sent Mallex Smith to Seattle (and eventually to Tampa Bay for Drew Smyly).
Though he had not seen progress before 2016 out of A-ball, he made some major strides before the season. Having let his weight get up to as high as an estimated 310 pounds, Gohara showed up to camp in 2016 having lost over 40 pounds and through the course of the season continued working to lose another 10-20 pounds. He’s found that throwing at 240-260 pounds allows him to keep the effort required to get the velocity on his fastball and bite on his slider that makes him so dominant, yet also allows him to be agile on the mound and athletic enough to repeat his delivery consistently.
The results were obvious in 2016, as Gohara put up a 1.81 ERA and 1.15 WHIP across two levels and 69 2/3 innings, striking out 81 hitters and walking only 23. He then went to the Arizona Fall League, where he was used primarily out of the bullpen, topping triple digits with his fastball, and posting a crazy 3/19 BB/K ratio over 11 2/3 innings against some of the best prospects in the game.
The Braves assigned Gohara initially to their high-A team in the Florida State League, where he quickly made it obvious that he was ready for a move up. Even though he struggled in his first start in AA and spent some time on the DL with Mississippi, he’s also kept up his tremendous performance there as well, and on the season, he’s thrown 76 2/3 innings, with a 2.47 combined ERA, 1.17 WHIP, and a 27/84 BB/K ratio.
Gohara is already at his career high in innings, so it’s very feasible that he only has ~30-40 more innings to throw this season, so he could end up working out of the bullpen some or skipping some starts or simply shut down once he hits the innings thrown for the season.
, Flaherty finds himself as the one of the trio on the list.
Flaherty has been brought along step-by-step by the Cardinals, with success at each level, though not overwhelming stuff that his high school teammates boast. Flaherty doesn’t feature an upper-90s fastball, though he has excellent location with his fastball that sits in the low-90s and can touch 94-95. His slider and change up are both plus pitches with elite arm deception so hitters have no clue what’s coming until it’s already on them.
Flaherty opened this season with AA Springfield and was absolutely dominant before getting the promotion to AAA Memphis in the Pacific Coast League. As would be expected in the hitter-friendly league, Flaherty has seen more balls leave the years, but his underlying numbers continue to be extremely good, and overall this season, he’s thrown 94 innings with a 2.30 ERA, 1.03 WHIP, and a 22/97 BB/K ratio.
Flaherty may not profile as a dominant “ace” starter, but he has the type of stuff and mental make up that he should be able to have success in the middle of a rotation for quite some time.
Anyone that surprised you? Anyone you disagreed with so far? Any of the evaluations that surprised you? Comment below, and come back the rest of the week for the rest of the list!!
