Red Sox place two on Baseball America’s top 100 prospect list

Well, we are officially in top-100 season, and it all happened very quickly. I woke up this morning surprised to find that Keith Law released the bottom half of his top 100 prospects list — a list that Michael Chavis made — for the morning crowd, and then just a few minutes after I finished writing up that post Baseball America released their own top 100.

These days, there are a million different outlets who rank prospects and put out their own versions of the top 100. The best method, of course, is to consider the rankings of every list given the different evaluation methods from each creator. Everyone has their favorites, of course, but the best way to get a full picture is to consider as large a sample as possible. That being said, it’s clear which list has the most prestige year in and year out, and that’s Baseball America. When you think of top prospects, you think of this publication. So, with that in mind, here’s a look at their top-100 prospects for this upcoming season.

The Red Sox, unsurprisingly, got two players onto this list. As I mentioned in the post regarding Law’s rankings, that should be the case on just about every list this year. The order is going to be the same just about everywhere as well, with Jason Groome being the more highly-regarded prospect than Chavis. Baseball America did indeed go that way, with Groome being ranked 83rd and Chavis being ranked 85th.

The order is the one we expected, but I am certainly surprised at how close these two are. With this ranking, it is essentially a toss-up between who is the better prospect. On the one hand, I can see the case for it. Groome now has a little over a season as a professional under his belt and he hasn’t really shown much of the potential he carried heading into his draft year. Chavis, on the other hand, has the same first-round pedigree and is coming off a season in which he was one of the best hitters in all of minor-league baseball. Chavis will also be starting the year in Double-A whereas Groome is expected to begin 2018 in Low-A Greenville. That being said, most still agree that Groome has much more special upside and that has led to him essentially being the unanimous top prospect in the organization. That is still the case for Baseball America, though these rankings suggest they could go either way. Overall, it seems BA is a bit lower than the consensus on both of these players, though they are certainly much lower on Groome (relatively speaking) than Chavis.