The Prospect 50 (Part I)

So here’s what we’re doing: We’re ranking the 50 most hyped prospects of the century so far. I’m basing my list on three things:

1. Pre-draft/signing hype

2. Minor-league hype

3. Team hype

The first two are pretty self-explanatory, but I thought it was important to add the third. When I did the original list, I think there were five or six teams that were not represented. You can probably guess which teams were missing. And it occurred to me that part of prospect hype — and, specifically, prospect hope — revolves around the specific teams and their fans. In 1991, for example, while the national hype machine rolled for Oakland pitching phenom Todd Van Poppel, there was just as much excitement in Seattle about Roger Salkeld, in Minnesota for Willie Banks, and in Baltimore for Mike Mussina.

As such, all 30 teams are represented on my list.

Let’s do this!

No. 50: The Next Mike Piazza

Yankees prospects are almost always overrated. Here are all the Yankees Top 10 Baseball America Prospects that they developed this century*:

• Nick Johnson, No. 5, 2000

• Drew Henson, No. 9, 2002

• Phil Hughes, No. 4, 2007

• Joba Chamberlain, No. 3, 2008

• Jesús Montero, No. 3, 2011

• Anthony Volpe, No. 10, 2022

Obviously, the jury is still out on Volpe, but it’s difficult to say that any of the others lived up to the hype. Hughes was an All-Star one year. Nick Johnson had a couple of good years with Washington. But developing superstars is a tough racket.

Everybody was sure that Jesús Montero would be a masher. The knock on him was his defense as a catcher; but no one doubted the bat. In 2010, as a 20-year-old playing all the way up in Class AAA, he slugged .517. The thing that blew scouts’ minds was how he combined pure hitting brilliance with massive power potential. The Piazza comparisons were everywhere, but Montero had 35 pounds on Piazza. In 2011, as a 21-year-old, he made his big league debut and hit .328/.406/.590 in 18 games for the Yankees.

A few months later, the Yankees traded Montero to Seattle in exchange for Michael Pineda.

“He may very well be the best player I’ve ever traded,” Brian Cashman told reporters. And while that sounded good at the time, there’s no way that Cashman really believed it. Here’s how you know: The instant he traded Montero — I mean, in the very same press conference — he talked about how the team now had an excess of pitching and might want to deal one for a bat.

Also, he’d already tried to trade Montero for Cliff Lee.

A general manager once told me that the most important scouting a team does is not of another organization but instead of its own. You have to know more about your own players and have a better handle on their realistic prospects than any other team or else you will get fleeces. While scouts swooned over Montero, I think the Yankees realized that he might not reach his potential and that his trade value would never be higher. Montero played a full season in 2012 for Seattle, posted a 94 OPS+, and by 2014 he showed up 40 pounds overweight and was released in March.

No. 49: Can Anyone Be This Good?

In Jeff Francoeur’s first 23 big league games, he hit .432, slugged .827 and mashed eight doubles and eight home runs. It was mind-blowing. He was not baseball’s top prospect then — he topped out at No. 14 on BA’s list, in part because of his impatience at the plate — but everybody saw him as the player with the most star power. “Winner written all over him,” Atlanta manager Bobby Cox said.

And then he got off to that crazy start.

“He’s like Roy Hobbs,” Atlanta pitcher Tim Hudson said, which led to a funny exchange between Francoeur and Sports Illustrated’s Michael Farber. Frenchy knew all about the movie, but he was unfamiliar with the book, and Farber explained that in the movie, Roy Hobbs strikes out.

“That,” Frenchy said, “is why books suck.”

The Sports Illustrated question on the cover — CAN ANYONE BE THIS GOOD? — is probably the ultimate example fo Betteridge’s law of headlines: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” Shrewd people around the league knew it even then. “He’s been hot,” Brewers manager Ned Yost said. “But give the league a little time to figure out how to pitch to him. Then we’ll see how good he is.”

The league did figure him out, and Francoeur had a nice but perhaps disappointing 12-year career where he compiled a little less than 7 WAR. I say, “perhaps disappointing” because he always seemed to be having the time of his life and made lots of friends along the way. Everybody loved Frenchy.

No. 48: The Great Rocky Hope

The Rockies have had woefully few top-level prospects this century. Ian Stewart was an interesting third base prospect for the Rockies around 2005 — he topped out as the No. 4 prospect in the game — and there was some thought he could be Gold Glove third baseman and a Todd Heltonesque hitter.

Franklin Morales was Venezuelan left-handed pitcher who could, if he pushed it, throw his fastball in the upper-90s. He was a Top 10 prospect in 2008.

There were a couple of high draft picks — Greg Reynolds was the second overall pick in 2006, Jon Gray the third pick in 2013 — though neither ever broke into the Top 10 prospects list.

And there’s Brendan Rodgers. I chose him because there were a lot of people who thought Rogers was the best player coming out of the 2015 draft. He was a high school pick, and high school picks obviously have a lot to overcome to get to the big leagues, but Rodgers seemed to have the whole package — above-average power, good athleticism, great attitude, etc. He did win a second-base Gold Glove in 2022, but the bat just hasn’t come around. He’s trying to hang on with the Houston Astros. And the Rockies effort to find their next homegrown superstar continues.

No. 47: Boston’s Next Batting Champion

In 2018, that magical season for the Red Sox, a 23-year-old Andrew Benintendi hit .290/.366/.465 with 41 doubles, 16 homers, 21 steals, 103 runs scored and 87 RBI. The funny thing, is that I think pretty much every scout thought that was the very baseline of his ability. At the very worst, they thought, he’d be the kind of guy who would hit .290, bang 40 doubles, steal 20 bases, and score 100 runs.

At his best, they thought, he’d be George Brett.

That will almost certainly be the best season of Benintendi’s career.

Baseball is a cold game. Benintendi was not overhyped like some other No. 1 Baseball America Prospects — like, nobody thought he would become Mickey Mantle or Ken Griffey Jr. But the thought was that he was so complete a talent — high average, line drives everywhere, good power, good speed, terrific defense — that failure was not an option.

And in his nine-year career, he’s flashed all of it. He won a Gold Glove in 2021. He was an All-Star in 2022. He’s hit 20 home runs a couple of times. He hit .300 one year. He’s consistently been an above-average baserunner. he hasn’t failed. He’s a good ballplayer. But superstardom wasn’t in the cards. And it just reminds you how special George Brett really was.

No. 46: Too Small, Too Freaky, Too Dominant

The Kansas City Royals had the first pick in the 2006 draft … and they had absolutely no idea what to do with it. They had a plan, maybe, and then general manager Allard Baird was fired weeks before the draft. Then they had another plan, maybe, and Atlanta’s Dayton Moore was hired to be the new general manager. Then they had a plan, sort of, because Dayton said he wouldn’t be involved with the draft out of loyalty to the Braves. The whole thing was head-spinning.

At different points, the Royals seemed sure to draft Andrew Miller, Brandon Morrow or Brad Lincoln. They kicked the tires on Evan Longoria but really wanted a pitcher. I’m not sure if they were on Clayton Kershaw or Max Scherzer (they certainly should have been on Scherzer since he went to school at the University of Missouri, a short I-70 drive West, but I never heard his name mentioned by anybody).

Eventually, they went bananas and took Luke Hochevar, who had been drafted by the Dodgers the year before but didn’t sign. It was a head-scratching decision made by an organization in chaos.

But here’s what I remember most: No matter who I talked with, they made it 100% clear that they were NOT going to take Tim Lincecum.

He was just too scary for an organization like the Royals to take a chance on.

Look at that thin body. Look at that wacky windup. OK, yes, he threw in the high 90s and, yes, he had what one scout called the best curveball in the draft since Kerry Wood and, yes, he dominated in college and dominated in the Cape Cod League … but have you ever seen a more likely candidate for Tommy John surgery? No, it wouldn’t be the Royals taking a chance on that guy. In fact, nine teams wouldn’t take the chance. The Giants drafted 10th. The Giants took Lincecum.

And for the first five years of his career, Lincecum was an absolute sensation. He went 69-41 with a 2.98 ERA over those five years, he won two Cy Young Awards, received votes in two other years, and he led the league in strikeouts three times.

He did fall off the cliff after those five years, alas. It wasn’t one big blowout injury that sent his career in a spiral … he kept on making starts. But his velocity dropped into the 80s. His already freakish mechanics began to come apart. He struggled to find a way forward. In 2012, he walked 90 batters, threw 17 wild pitches and gave up a league-leading 107 earned runs. He made one postseason start and got battered around pretty good (though he did pitch well in relief on the Giants’ run to the World Series title). And it went down from there.

But when Tim Lincecum was right, wow, he was electric.

No. 45: A New Hope

Yoenis Céspedes made the most jarringly wonderful (or wonderfully jarring) entrance since, well, you probably have to go back to Harry Lime in “The Third Man.” In 2011, he and six others pulled off a daring escape from Cuba, an escape built around a 23-hour speed boat ride to the Dominican Republic. And when he arrived, he got together with a Dominican agent named Edgar Mercedes, who set things up so that Céspedes would become a free agent, which would create a huge bidding war since Céspedes had already been a Cuban baseball star for eight years.

That’s when they released, “Yoenis Céspedes: The Showcase.”

It’s thoroughly, utterly and completely bananas and glorious and fantastic. It begins with a blaring musical sound and then Star Wars word crawl that actually, yes, leads off with the words “A New Hope”

Then a voice begins narrating in Spanish while these English words run away …

“It is a period of big change in Major League Baseball. Baseball players are leaving their countries from all parts of the world in hope of the dream to play in the Majors.

“During these times many have tried and few have made it. But now, one player has left his homeland to show the world how they play baseball in Cuba.

“The owner of the homerun record in Cuba, he sets out for a new challenge and to show that he can perform at the highest level, the Major Leagues.

“Nicknamed “El Talento” [The Talent] or “La Potencia” [The Power] for his five tools and style of play, teams from all over the world have waited for Yoenis Céspedes. Now he has chosen the Dominican Republic to showcase his abilities to the world. While the hopes and dreams of the Cuban Nation look to Yoenis to fulfill his destiny …

Those final words run away, a sentence fragment that will never be completed, and over the next 18 minutes, we see some highlights of Céspedes hitting home runs, of Céspedes leg-pressing 1,300 pounds, bench pressing 350 pounds, jumping very high, running a 6.3-second 60-yard dash, dancing with his family and, obviously, roasting a pig over an open fire.

Scouts have signed so many players without even knowing whether they could roast a pig.

And the bidding war began. The Yankees were in it. The Cubs were in it. The Tigers. The White Sox. The Marlins even got into the bidding; they felt like Céspedes was their reason d’etre. The Marlins had not managed to win over Miami, and along comes along a Cuban baseball superstar with all the tools? Miami had to have him.

And then, you know what happened?

The Oakland A’s outbid all of them.

Yeah. The Oakland A’s.

Céspedes spent an uneven seven-plus year career doing ridiculous, magical and delightfully kooky things. In 2016, he bought a 270-pound hog from a county fair. That same year, he would come to spring training games in a new exotic car every day. He won a Gold Glove. He hit 35 home runs in a season. He got MVP votes in three different seasons.

And he made this bobble/throw combination for the ages:

So I don’t think anyone should call Céspedes’ career “disappointing.” Yes, injuries ended things prematurely (so much so that even last year, he was talking about a comeback). True, he did not end up the superstar that so many had hoped for. But he brought so much color and life to the game. People will remember Yoenis.

No. 44: The Player to be Named Sooner

Something happened to Dansby Swanson that has not happened to any other player in baseball history — he was traded just a few months after he was the first pick in the draft. The Diamondbacks, who had taken him No. 1, had improved in 2015 (after, obviously, having the worst record in baseball in 2014), and they made the classic blunder of thinking they were actually good, like playoff good, like one-player-away-from-contending good. They dealt Swanson and others to Atlanta for potential ace Shelby Miller. One scout told Keith Law it was the worst trade he’d ever seen.

Now, after Miller got hurt and blew up, lots of people think of it as the worst trade they’d ever seen.

To me, it’s a fascinating example of hype … and lack of hype. Arizona obviously loved Swanson when they took him No. 1 overall. They knew he was going to be a good player. He was a brilliant defensive shortstop at Vanderbilt, where he led the Commodores to a College World Series championship. He was a line-drive hitter with above-average speed and, as Baseball America put it, “off-the-charts makeup.” He had come back from injuries. Everybody looked to him as a leader. No prospect is a can’t-miss, but Swanson was about as close to it: He was very unlikely to fail. And he hasn’t failed at all. He’s a two-time Gold Glove winner, a two-time All-Star, a league-average hitter with a bit of power. He’s a rock.

But, six months later, they traded him away … I think because they knew he was also unlikely to become a generation-defining player, a Hall of Famer, a Cal Ripken-esque star. He hit with some power, but not crazy power. He ran well but not 50-stolen bases well. He played superb defense, but he wasn’t going to do Ozzie Smith flips. His basement and his ceiling were not far apart from each other, and so many teams just don’t get as excited as they should about players like that. So many teams love the roulette wheel players, the ultra-talented players who will flounder 37 out of 38 times, but every now and again will hit Black 22.

There’s no way the Diamondbacks would have traded one of those Roulette Wheel No. 1 overall picks. But they felt free to trade Swanson. It’s a real blind spot.

No. 43: The Name

First, there’s the name. It’s not easy to come up with an ideal baseball name. Sure, now everybody can look at “Mickey Mantle” or “Joe DiMaggio” or “Sandy Koufax,” as perfect baseball names, but how much of that is the Secretariat effect — where the name sounds utterly perfect because of the athlete behind the name.

Spencer Torkelson … that’s just a beautiful baseball name. It’s a collection of syllables that oozes with light-tower power.

Torkelson went undrafted out of high school. Scouts were well aware of him. He was a three-sport star at Casa Grande High in Petaluma, Calif., and a bunch of good players have gone to Casa Grande through the years, including Jonny Gomes. That’s a regular stop on the scouting tour. But they just didn’t see it with Torkelson, and so instead he went to Arizona State where he promptly broke Barry Bonds’ freshman home run record. By his junior year, Torkelson was so dominant that teams rarely even pitched to him. The Tigers took him first overall in the Covid draft of 2020.

Things move fast in baseball. Because he spent time in the minors in 2024, there are people already calling Torkelson something of a bust (despite his 31-homer season of 2023). But he’s still 25 years old, and he still has that absurd power, and he’s still named Spencer Torkelson.

No. 42: Mr. Smile

Best I can tell, Cleveland has had two Baseball America Top 10 prospects this century — CC Sabathia way back in 2001 (No. 7) and Francisco Lindor in 2015 (No. 9). There just hasn’t been that much hype surrounding Cleveland’s top minor league players. And yet, they’ve developed all these under-the-radar stars like two-time Cy Young winner Corey Kluber, Cy Young winner Shane Bieber, all-star Steven Kwan, brilliant relievers like Cade Smith and, obviously, future Hall of Famer José Ramírez.

The thing that stuck out about Lindor right from the start was the joy. It was so infectious. The smile just beamed. The passion just ran through everything he did. He won the shortstop Gold Glove in his first full season in the big leagues, and I’m not sure if his defensive numbers confirmed that choice but, wow, you watched him play, and you couldn’t help but think, “That guy is an amazing, amazing, amazing shortstop.”

That year, he hit .300, he stole 19 bases, he banged 15 home runs, he won the Gold Glove, he finished ninth in the MVP balloting … and it still felt like he was underrated. That’s because Cleveland went to the World Series, and though they had lots of good players you just knew that Lindor was the heart.

I remember getting into a big argument with a friend of mine about Lindor and Carlos Correa. I had written that if given the choice of any of the brilliant young shortstops of the day — Lindor, Correa, Corey Seager, Trevor Story, Addison Russell, Xander Bogaerts, Marcus Semien — I would take Lindor because of that extra something he has, charisma, aura, presence, charm, whatever that word is.

My friend was furious. He was a big Astros fan and he made it clear that not only was Correa better, that it was not even close.

They both have had terrific early careers. It’s still not clear which one will end up on top. I’ll stick with Lindor, though.

Funny thing: If there was a knock on Lindor as a prospect — and there were not really many knocks — it was that he seemed a bit slight and was unlikely to hit for much power. Funny … Lindor might end up hitting 500 home runs in his career. He has a real shot at it: He already has 248 and has hit 30-plus home runs five times already.

No. 41: Milwaukee’s Best

It makes me very happy that the consensus top two prospects in baseball going into the 2024 season were both named Jackson — Jackson Holliday and Jackson Chourio — and that neither of them might even be the best Jackson since there’s Jackson Merrill in San Diego.

Chourio is still hype in progress — he’s coming off a pretty dazzling rookie season that promises bigger things. He’s one of the fastest players in baseball. He hits the ball very hard. He might fulfill that 30-30 potential Baseball America presaged this year, as a 21-year-old. He turned 21 seven days ago.

Oh yeah. He’s also hitting almost .500 in spring training so far.

I was trying to decide if Chourio is the most hyped player in Brewers history. I think he is the most hyped of the 21st century — I guess you could argue for Ben Sheets or maybe Prince Fielder or Rickie Weeks, but Chourio ranked higher on the prospects lists than any of them did and the imagination runs wild when thinking about how good he can become.

B.J. Surhoff was the first pick in the 1985 draft, and there was quite a lot of hype surrounding him.*

I guess the winner, though, is Robin Yount. He was the third pick in the famous 1973 draft — David Clyde was the first pick, Young and Dave Winfield went back-to-back at three and four — and he was in the big leagues at 18. Yount spent most of his early years trying to live up to that hype, and it so frustrated him that for a time he considered (or at least said he considered) quitting the game and becoming a professional golfer.

Not to give out any spoilers, but it all turned out all right for Yount in the end.

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