Jason Parks of Baseball Prospectus has released his mid-season top 50 prospects list, and has three Pittsburgh Pirates prospects listed. The three players are Jameson Taillon, Gregory Polanco, and Tyler Glasnow.
Taillon is the highest ranked, coming in at number ten overall. Polanco wasn’t far behind him, ranked at number 12. Parks included a “Prospect Trajectory”, giving an idea of where each guy could move when the off-season rankings came out. He noted that Taillon’s trajectory is down, due to struggles in the upper levels at the age of 21 (talking about his changeup/fastball command development). He also noted that Polanco could move higher, and finish as a top ten prospect. This might be the first time I’ve seen someone consider Polanco to eventually be the top prospect in the system. That’s a debate we had in our mid-season rankings, and something we’ll probably revisit after we see what Polanco does in Double-A.
Tyler Glasnow came in at number 46, and also had a trajectory to move up with a strong second half. Glasnow was given an ETA of 2015, while Taillon and Polanco were given 2014.
Parks also listed Luis Heredia and Alen Hanson as candidates for the 51-75 part of the list. Heredia is a bit surprising, since he hasn’t done much to improve his stock, and missed some time after showing up to Spring Training out of shape. However, maybe that’s not so surprising, since BP has been higher on Heredia than most, ranking him number 53 in the pre-season.
