Baseball America released their 2014 top ten prospects for the Pittsburgh Pirates today. The write-up and the top tools can be seen here. The scouting reports for subscribers can be found here. Below are the rankings, along with some thoughts.
1. Gregory Polanco
2. Jameson Taillon
3. Tyler Glasnow
4. Austin Meadows
5. Nick Kingham
6. Alen Hanson
7. Josh Bell
8. Reese McGuire
9. Harold Ramirez
10. Luis Heredia
Ben Badler describes the system as “stacked”, which you can definitely see in the top ten list. The top eight prospects have legit shots of being top 100 prospects in baseball next year. You can really see how stacked the system is by looking at BA’s list of the top players age 25 and under. That includes Gerrit Cole (who rated number one) and Starling Marte (third, between Polanco and Taillon).
There are probably going to be a few debates over the positioning of the top ten prospects. The first debate would be Gregory Polanco vs Jameson Taillon. I had Polanco number one in the system in our mid-season rankings, but he ended up number two in the site rankings. I’d imagine there will be a lot of different orders for prospects 4-8, although all of those guys are the same talent level which will keep them in the same range for most of the upcoming prospect lists. Harold Ramirez and Luis Heredia would have been easily top three prospects about five years ago, and now they round out the top ten.
