Baseball Prospectus released their list of the top 101 prospects in baseball over the weekend. They have three Pittsburgh Pirates on their list.
The top prospect in the system according to their top 101 is 2022 first round pick Termarr Johnson, who ranks 31st on the list. MLB Pipeline recently named Johnson as the top second base prospect in baseball.
Henry Davis ranked second among Pirates, coming in at 46th overall. He’s followed in the 55th spot by Endy Rodriguez. These two were flipped on the list of top catching prospects by Pipeline last week, with Rodriguez ranking fifth overall and Davis ranking sixth.
I was a little surprised that Baseball America only had four Pirates on their top 100 list last week. We soon heard that Quinn Priester was among the players who just missed, while Bubba Chandler was named as a prospect who could jump into the top 100 this season. BP had an article of ten players who were considered for the list, but there were no Pirates.
We usually do a top 100 aggregate list at the end of the top 100 prospect list season. It appears that the next one up is MLB Pipeline. They will be releasing their list on Thursday night. We will take BP, BA, Pipeline, along with Fangraphs, ESPN and The Athletic lists, and average the six out for one list.
I wouldn’t be surprised if none of the six lists match up (order/amount of Pirates). These two lists both seem light, though three of the top 55 prospects for BP is always nice to see. I personally couldn’t make a top 100 list due to not knowing prospects from other teams well enough, but I was expecting 5-6 Pirates per list. That’s based on feel for these lists over many years of following them, but that “feel” doesn’t take into account that a year could have a strong crop of prospects.
That might not be the case here, they might just be down on the Pirates prospects. That I don’t know. We will see once all of the lists come out.