Inbox: Dissecting Top 10 position lists

The anticipation is building and we can hardly contain ourselves. Our Top 100 list will be live on Saturday (Be sure to tune into the MLB Network special airing at 3 p.m. ET.) and we’ve been rolling out our Top 10 by position lists over the past two weeks to whet your appetite. On Wednesday, for example, it was the Top 10 shortstops, a particularly deep list.

The hope, of course, is that these lists get people talking and wanting to debate. Sure enough, the call for questions this week elicited several inquiries about prospects on (and not on) the lists. We’re sure there will be plenty more, and stay tuned for a Twitter chat once the Top 100 is unveiled, but for now, this week’s Inbox is dedicated to your Top 10 by position queries.

I put these two questions together for a reason, but let me start out by saying that I am a believer in the process we use to come up with our rankings. Of course, there’s no such thing as perfect and each of us directly involved (myself, Jim Callis and Mike Rosenbaum) have personal favorites we might want to pound the table for. But overall, I usually stand back after we’ve finalized our order and feel really good about the consensus we reach.

As I was looking through all of our early rankings and our personal lists, the one that stood out a little for me was Tyler Stephenson, the Reds' catching prospect who did not make the Top 10 catchers list. He was mentioned, however, as the “one to keep an eye on” at the end of the story about the list, so it’s not like he’s that far off. I will say that in our initial personal rankings, I was the high man on Stephenson, whose 2019 performance and strong showing in the Arizona Fall League stood out to me. And to his credit, Mr. Rosenbaum highlighted Stephenson in a story about prospects primed to break out based on some statistical indicators.

I wouldn’t run him too high up the list, mind you; he’d be at or near the bottom of that top 10. But it’s worth noting that this is one of the deepest catching crops I’ve seen in all the years I’ve been in the prospect-ranking business, so it’s not like there are catchers on the list who I think have no business being there.

Speaking of deep lists, man do we have a ton of good shortstops. Gimenez isn’t even the top shortstop in his own organization (that honor belongs to Ronny Mauricio, No. 10 on the list), but he’s pretty darn good. He looked really strong when I saw him in the AFL. He’s always been able to defend, but there were concerns about his ability to impact the baseball and a lack of strength. He drove the ball more consistently this past fall. I know it’s a small sample size, but it gave me more confidence in his long-term prognosis as a big league regular.

I say all this to assure you that not being on this particular top 10 list is no slight. There are a ton of really good shortstops just on the outside looking in because of how deep it is (See the question below for another example.). Without giving too much away, though, I’d say there are about four or five shortstop prospects who stand between Mauricio and Gimenez. There’s not a whole lot separating them and a case could be made for all of them, including Gimenez, to be included in the top 10.

I’ll begin by letting you know that you’re going to find a lot of variances among the many publications and people who put out prospect rankings. It is, after all, subjective, even if we try to be as thorough as possible in terms of talking to as many scouts as humanly possible, we’re all going to end up with different results.

With that out of the way, I’ll continue by saying that we consider Groshans a shortstop. That’s where he played exclusively before he got hurt in 2019 and that’s where we’ll keep him until the Blue Jays move him, or at least it becomes abundantly clear that he’s going to move to third. I’ll refer you to the answer above about Gimenez regarding the shortstop depth among top prospects as the reason why Groshans didn’t make our top 10. I will say that if we were listing him as a third baseman, he’d be on that top 10, probably around No. 6, right after Josh Jung.

A trio of Rockies finish off our Top 10 first basemen list, with Michael Toglia at 8, Grant Lavigne at 9 and Tyler Nevin at 10. I don’t want to brush off the question, but there’s a bit too much unknown to know for sure who the future big league first baseman will be.

Nevin will get there first and I do think his feel to hit and approach at the plate will serve him well in the big leagues, assuming he stays healthy. But something tells me he’s not going to end up being a guy who plays one position every day. He entered pro ball as a third baseman, and continued to play there in 2019, along with getting some work in the outfield. He could end up profiling as a super-utility corner type, one who will force his way into the lineup because of his bat.

If that’s the case, then it’s between Toglia, the Rockies’ first-round pick in 2019 and Lavigne, their pick in Competitive Balance Round A in 2018, and it’s hard to know exactly what either will be. Lavigne’s pro debut was outstanding and raised the level of expectations for the New Hampshire high schooler, but he really struggled during his first full year in a hitting-friendly park. There’s plenty of time for him to get headed back in the right direction. Toglia, meanwhile, has a total of 145 pro at-bats to his name and while he showed off his power during his debut, he was otherwise just OK. If you’re going to force me to pick, I might give the slight edge to Toglia as the more advanced college product out of UCLA, but not by much.