Baseball America posted an update to their top 100 prospects list yesterday and they now have three Pittsburgh Pirates ranked. Their earlier rankings had just Mitch Keller and Austin Meadows.
The new ranking essentially means that they have a new #3 prospect in the system for the Pirates. Keller held his ranking at #12, while Meadows moved up ten spots to #31 and they introduced Calvin Mitchell to the top 100, ranking him 99th.
Mitchell has had a strong season in Low-A ball and he’s only 19, celebrating his birthday a month before the season started. He was our Player of the Month in April, but couldn’t keep up that blistering pace in May. He went from a 1.043 OPS that first month to .791 last month. That’s still a good number when you consider his age and the fact that it’s 89 points over the league average OPS. Mitchell started off June with his seventh home run of the season last night.
Right now it seems a bit early for that type of jump in the rankings. BA had Mitchell ranked 14th in the system coming into the year. So there were a lot of names to pass in just under two months of play. Ideally, you’d like to see more from a corner outfielder whose value comes solely from his bat, before ranking him that high. That being said, you couldn’t ask for more from Mitchell at this point. He has a .319/.379/.544 slash line coming into play today, good for fourth in the South Atlantic League in OPS.