Since the days that Mark Prior emerged as the top prospect in all of baseball (those days didn’t last long, since Prior made his Major League debut so soon after he was drafted), the Chicago Cubs have languished in the bottom half of baseball when it came time to rank farm systems.
But we all sensed something developing this past season – buzz. Cubs prospects were finally getting buzz at a national level, and more than just the one or two that seems to be compulsory for every team.
And now, with organization rankings emerging, our sense that things had improved is confirmed: Keith Law has ranked the Cubs’ system as the 7th in all of baseball, noting that the Cubs have “hit on several top draft picks under scouting director Tim Wilken as well as a couple of later-round finds, but the system is led by 19-year-old Dominican shortstop Starlin Castro, who is already in Double-A.”
Law has also listed his top 100 prospects in all of baseball, and the Cubs landed four on the list. Castro starts things off for the Cubs at number 12, where he is Law’s top shortstop prospect in baseball. Josh Vitters comes in at number 30, and pitchers Jay Jackson and Andrew Cashner round things out at 50 and 79, respectively.