Over the last two days, Keith Law has been releasing his list of the top 100 prospects in the game. He has four Pittsburgh Pirates on his list, including three players ranked higher than anywhere else. You can see those lists here for the top 1-50 and here’s the top 51-100. He also posted a small group of the players who just missed the list, but there were no Pirates among those prospects.
Only one other source this winter didn’t have Mitch Keller as the top prospect for the Pirates until today. Keith Law not only ranked Ke’Bryan Hayes as the best prospect on the team, he has him as the 18th best prospect in baseball. We did a quick average of the rankings in our last article for a top 100 prospects list. That has been updated below. Prior to today, the average spot for Hayes was 50th best prospect, with a high of 46 and a low of 55. So this is quite a different opinion on him, putting him among the very elite prospects in the game.
Mitch Keller didn’t do poorly in this ranking, receiving the 24th overall spot. Prior to today, he was as high as 18th overall and his low was 26th place, so this ranking by Law was more in line with everyone else. Going by Law’s list, Keller would be the top prospect on a total of 17 teams.
Travis Swaggerty ranks 47th on the list today. The 2018 first round pick ranked 82nd for Baseball Prospectus and 87th for MLB Pipeline, while Baseball America didn’t have him in their top 100. Just like with Hayes, it’s clear that Law has a more favorable opinion of him than anyone else we looked at for top 100 rankings. Using today’s list, Swaggerty would be the top prospect for ten teams.
Finally, Oneil Cruz was ranked 78th overall by Law. That just edged out his previous best of 79th place by Baseball America. Pipeline had him 96th and Prospectus had him 91st. Using Law’s list, Cruz would be the top prospect for five teams.
Here are the average rankings for these four players. I used 101st place for Swaggerty on the BA list and put a + next to the ranking to indicate that his number could be higher. For what it’s worth, BA has Swaggerty as the fourth best prospect for the Pirates, one spot behind Cruz, who they have 79th overall. That probably means that he didn’t miss the top 100 by much.
Mitch Keller
BA – 26
BP – 18
MLB – 19
KL – 24
Average = 21.75
Ke’Bryan Hayes
BA – 49
BP – 55
MLB – 46
KL – 18
Average = 42
Oneil Cruz
BA – 79
BP – 91
MLB – 96
KL – 78
Average = 86
Travis Swaggerty
BA – 101+
BP – 82
MLB – 87
KL – 47
Average = 79.25+
The only other Pirate to make a top 100 list was Calvin Mitchell, who ranked 97th for Baseball Prospectus. Jonathan Mayo for MLB Pipeline said that Cole Tucker was among five players who just missed their top 100.
