With the lockout over, MLB Pipeline has finally been able to start rolling out it’s prospect updates and rankings and content (i.e., any of the stuff that touches on 40-man roster guys). We’ve touched on some of it over the past week, but they just dropped the big one: the updated, pre-season top 100 prospects list.
https://twitter.com/MLBPipeline/status/1504615534486245377
The list follows a setup we’ve seen other times throughout this rankings season: Brennen Davis in the top 25, and then one other Cubs prospect just sneaking onto the back of the list. In this instance, it’s Davis at 15 and Cristian Hernández at 92.
It’s hard to argue with these lists for now, because the Cubs’ next-best prospects (whichever you choose) generally have to show out a bit this year for the pundits to really buy into them as top 100 types. Whether it’s Hernández or Owen Caissie or Kevin Alcántara or Pete Crow-Armstrong or James Triantos or Caleb Kilian or Jordan Wicks (and on and on), you can make the argument that top 100 upside is there, pretty easily. But for a variety of reasons (lack of pro experience, mostly), they’re just not going to show up on these lists until the performance is there at higher levels.
With that, I believe rankings season is a wrap, and we’ll be getting back into it at midseason, when hopefully a whole lot of Cubs prospects have further broken out, and these lists feature, say, four or five Cubs names pretty consistently.