Over at Minor League Ball, John Sickels has released his list of the Pittsburgh Pirates Top 20 Prospects. No surprises at the top, as Gregory Polanco sits in the first spot, followed by Jameson Taillon, Tyler Glasnow and Austin Meadows. Sickels has the same ten prospects in the top ten that almost every other list has, just a slightly different order. In spots 5-10, he has Nick Kingham, Josh Bell, Alen Hanson, Luis Heredia, Reese McGuire and Harold Ramirez.
In the second group of ten, he has Barrett Barnes, followed by catchers Tony Sanchez and Jin-De Jhang. Sickels calls the system one of the better ones in baseball and he thinks it can take a step forward next year. He also ranks players by letter grade, giving Polanco an A-, follow by four B+ grades. Everyone in the top 20 rates as at least a C+ grade.
You can check out other top twenty lists here with MLB Pipeline and our own personal top twenty list from the 2014 Prospect Guide.
Some other links of note with prospect rankings include Jonathan Mayo’s composite list of top 100 prospects and Fangraphs’ top 15 Pirates list.