Baseball America released their list of the top 40 prospects for the Pittsburgh Pirates on Thursday afternoon. We already knew the top six from this list after seeing their updated top 100 prospects list in mid-January. This list has ten more prospects than they have posted in the past.
As a quick reminder, the top six (in order) are Oneil Cruz, Henry Davis, Nick Gonzales, Liover Peguero, Roansy Contreras and Quinn Priester. Those are all covered in the link above. I won’t go into their entire list, but I’ll point out some interesting ones here. The link for the top 40 also includes the best tools around the system, as well as brief scouting reports for each player.
The rest of the top ten in order has Endy Rodriguez, Michael Burrows, Jared Jones and Carmen Mlodzinski. While the top six prospects in the system seem to be agreed upon by everyone, even if the order is different, it seems like Endy Rodriguez has established himself as the seventh best prospect in the system. The only player I’ve seen mentioned ahead of him was Jared Jones once.
The three high profile high school players taken in 2021 all made the 11-15 group, with Anthony Solometo ranking 11th, Bubba Chandler 13th, and Lonnie White Jr placing 14th.
Travis Swaggerty (15th), Diego Castillo (16th), Jack Suwinski (24th) and Canaan Smith-Njigba (28th) were all added to the 40-man roster over the off-season.
Connor Scott and Kyle Nicolas, who came over from the Miami Marlins in the Jacob Stallings deal, ranked 26th (Scott) and 29th.
Oliver Mateo is an interesting back-end of the list player. He ranks 37th and only has reliever upside. It’s high upside, but he’s also far from reaching it. He has a 100 MPH fastball and a slider that ranks as a 70 grade pitch, though his control is below average.
