2018 Red Sox Prospect Rankings

FYI, major league teams don't use Baseball America rankings to make personnel decisions.

Now, SoxProspects.com rankings, on the other hand...

Mlb appears to have new posting for prospects.  Most of the top ten fall into line with sox prospects. BUT, Mata is 14th on the mlb list. where he is 3rd on the sox list. That seems to be a big difference. He is very young and under weight. Still in A ball. He could turn out to be Roger C or Casey Kelly. Always interesting to see what one group see's and another one does not. Scouting is a lot more detailed now than years ago. Metrics play a role now. But, I still go back to the story about the dodgers going to see an outfielder in the negro leagues and the scout coming back saying that.  forget him he can not hit a curve. The outfielder was Willie Mays. I was never high on Anderson E, but lots of people were. Deep john who was on this site thought Kopech was the second coming of Koufax. He still may be. Just brought up Mata because he had such a wide elval difference.

A couple things. First, MLB's current list is the end-of-year 2017 list. We discussed at some point how we thought they were low on Mata given his performance this year, but keep in mind, their 2018 lists go up in February. He could move up then. Second, its not terribly clear how many direct looks the MLB.com scouting team get on each prospect that they rank. They do a top 30 for each team, so 30 x 30 = 900 prospects. I never got the sense that their rankings were solely based on firsthand looks. I think they rely on many secondhand reports to be honest. So that being said, I'm not sure it comes down to what the SP guys saw that the MLB guys did not. It simply may be a difference in the amount of scouting information used to evaluate that one player, where I would presume in the case of Mata, we simply know more here. I do think most publications will have Mata in the Red Sox top 10 this offseason though, with the majority of those placing him in the 4-7 range.

No Ockimey in BA’s top 10? Interesting. He’d be in mine.

The threshold BA uses is 130 at-bats and Marco is at 109. But the biggest issue is that they don't use service time, and given that he was on the MLB roster all season, he's at a year and 109 days of service time. Technically, he actually exhausted his rookie eligibility in 2016. When he got hurt, we made the judgment call to graduate him given the massive amount of service time he was going to wind up with while on the 60 - it would feel really, really weird ranking him, and I think he looks really, really weird on a prospect list.

And I agree with the point James makes above. My guess is Ockimey, Beeks, Chatham, Dalbec are their next four in some order. If you read the scouting reports, it's very clear that there's a drop after the top four. I was originally struck by how highly Darwinzon was ranked, but then after reading the scouting report, I don't disagree with anything he has in there, and just realized that it all depends where you fall on various guys' projections in that 5-14 range. If you're bullish on Darwinzon straightening out his control and developing his secondaries, sure, 6 is reasonable - in fact, in both the BA piece and the Globe, Speier mentions that he started throwing a slider in his last start that looked like it could be great - if you buy in that he suddenly has a wipeout slider, sure, I get him at 6. The projections for all of the pitchers, save Groome, are basically variations of "floor of a reliever, can be a 3-4/4-5 if X, Y, and Z develop", which sounds right.

Tons of interesting stuff in here. Some of the most interesting nuggets to me were:

On Groome:

On Chavis:

On Houck:

On Darwinzon:

If the slider is real for Hernandez that's crazy exciting

I get Cedrola at 9 if you think he has three plus tools right now, like they do (defense, speed, arm). I think that's really generous, myself.

The most important point in the whole piece is in the U25 list:





So basically it's the top 4 and then chaos, which sounds right to me and squares with how we have them graded. Looking forward to adding MLB and FG's lists to this table.

I'm not the biggest fan of his stuff, but here's Sickels' list:

www.minorleagueball.com/2018/1/11/16880690/boston-red-sox-top-20-prospects-for-2018

 I don't know if he is normally this optimistic but he seems bullish on the pitchers he had in the top 10, 8 pitchers in the top 10. Maybe they will finally develop a few.

BBA releases their 2018 rankings. Groome drops to 83 and Chavis up to 85. Interesting that they’re so close. Shows the bad, injury hampered year that Jay had and how much Chavis has improved.

Michael Kopech the only remaining ex-Sox on the list, at #11.
www.baseballamerica.com/minors/top-100-mlb-prospects-2018/?amphtml=1&__twitter_impression=true