Baseball Prospectus released their Pittsburgh Pirates top 10 prospect list today, complete with their rankings, evaluations, and fantasy impacts for each player. The list is available for free, and all of the other information is for BP subscribers.
Mitch Keller was the top prospect, followed by Austin Meadows and Shane Baz. Cole Tucker and Ke’Bryan Hayes rounded out the top five, with Kevin Newman coming in sixth. Luis Escobar, Taylor Hearn, Kevin Kramer, and Will Craig rounded out their top 10.
That’s the free stuff. I’m not going to give away too much of the paid stuff, although I do have a few notes:
**They had a Good/Bad section for each player. The good for Mitch Keller was that he looked a lot like what you’d want if you’re building a number two starter from scratch. The bad was that this excluded the changeup. However, it appears the information used here was outdated. The article references that Keller threw only two changeups in an August start, and they looked like bad two-seamers. It also recommended a new grip.
As I wrote a few weeks ago, Keller was actually in the process of changing his grip during that time, and wasn’t yet comfortable with the pitch. He didn’t get comfortable throwing it until right before the Eastern League playoffs. He’s shown improvements to the pitch since then, getting more and more comfortable with it. It seems that the BP evaluation was based on a pitch that he literally just started throwing, with the idea that this was the changeup he had all along.
**I was surprised to see Will Craig in their top ten. Without giving too much away, and with the rankings far from complete, I can tell you that he didn’t draw any consideration for our top ten, and wasn’t even in the same tier as the prospects around that ranking. The surprising thing is that, in the good section, they admitted having trouble finding things to say, ultimately settling on the possibility of a mechanical tweak letting him put it all together to add power to his strong hit tool.
**They had Dario Agrazal, Jake Brentz, Oneil Cruz, Yeudy Garcia, Steven Jennings, Jordan Luplow, Travis MacGregor, Braeden Ogle, Lolo Sanchez, and Conner Uselton in their “Next 10”, with those names listed alphabetically.
**Pirates Prospects contributor John Eshleman had a section for lower level guys, and pointed out Domingo Robles as a guy to watch. The reasons were similar to the ones in John’s article on Robles over the summer.
**The “Top Talents 25 and Under” list had Josh Bell ahead of Keller, Tyler Glasnow right behind Meadows, and Trevor Williams and Chad Kuhl behind Newman to round out the top ten. There was also a note that a “Top Talents 27 and Under” list would be strong, with the additions of Gerrit Cole, Gregory Polanco, Jameson Taillon, Felipe Rivero, and maybe even Adam Frazier.
