Baseball America released their top 100 prospects list on Thursday night. We now have five major prospect lists available, so it’s time to average out the lists to see where the top Pirates prospects rank. We are using Baseball America, MLB.com, FanGraphs, Baseball Prospectus and Keith Law. All five lists can be found in the link above.
The Pirates had a total of seven players get rated in the top 100 and all of them made at least three lists. Below, you will find their average rankings, along with the high spot and low spot for each player. If a prospect didn’t make the top 100, we ranked them 101st overall so we could figure out their average ranking. The exception is FanGraphs, who listed 200 prospects. For Josh Bell(#103) and Nick Kingham(#111) we just used their actual ranking. For Alen Hanson and Reese McGuire, we rated both of them 143rd because FanGraphs only rated guys in order from 1-142, then put the last 58 players in one group based on their similar future value (see article) using the 20-80 scouting scale.
Now that you know the rating system, here are the average rankings for each prospect:
Tyler Glasnow– His high ranking was #12 by MLB and FanGraphs. His lowest ranking was 21st place by Baseball Prospectus. His average ranking was 15th overall.
Jameson Taillon– His high was #26 by BP. Low was #66 by FanGraphs. Average was 38th place.
Austin Meadows– His high was #30 by FanGraphs, while his low was Baseball Prospectus, who has never been high on him. BP didn’t rank him in their top 100, so his average rating was 50th. Using all the rankings except BP, he would have an average ranking of 38 just like Taillon.
Josh Bell– His high was #34 by MLB and low was #103 by FanGraphs. Bell averaged 64th place, which wasn’t far away from each of his other three rankings.
Nick Kingham– His high was #67 by BP and he didn’t make two lists (Law, BA). His average rating was 91st place.
Reese McGuire– BP had McGuire 59th overall, Law didn’t rank him at all and as mentioned above, FanGraphs had him in the 143-200 club, so there are some big differences in opinions. His average ranking was 93rd place.
Alen Hanson– His high was 89th by Law, while he didn’t make BA or BP. Factoring in the low rating for FanGraphs, his average comes out to 105th place.
While some lists differ slightly from this particular order, there is a consensus among top prospect rankings that these are the best seven prospects in the Pirates system.