Keith Law’s top Red Sox prospects are out

With just a couple more weeks remaining until players are going to be down at Fort Myers for workouts, we are still in the midst of prospect season. On Thursday, Keith Law released his top Red Sox prospect list. You can see it (and the rest of the American League East’s lists) here, but note that as is the case with all of his posts it is behind the ESPN Insider paywall. We’ll withhold some of the details out of respect for that paywall, but Law did rank 17 prospects. Here is how that shook out.

1. Jason Groome
2. Michael Chavis
3. Tanner Houck
4. Bryan Mata
5. Sam Travis
6. Alex Scherff
7. Jake Thompson
8. Cole Brannen
9. Travis Lakins
10. Darwinzon Hernandez
11. Mike Shawaryn
12. Nick Duron
13. Tyler Esplin
14. Josh Ockimey
15. Bobby Poyner
16. Danny Diaz
17. Joan Martinez

So, there are certainly a lot that stands out about this list. Starting at the top, if you’ll recall Law has been the highest on Groome among the major evaluators thus far, ranking him 30th among all prospects in baseball. Chavis also made the top-100 list and Tanner Houck made his “just missed” list. Mata coming in at number four is no surprise at all, and Sam Travis coming in at fifth isn’t a huge surprise either, though I’d disagree with the ranking.

Beyond that is where things start to get very interesting. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen excitement about Scherff — he’s made every other top ten list we’ve seen — but this is the highest we’ve seen him ranked. Thompson is also at his highest ranking. Generally speaking, Law is very high on Boston’s 2017 draft class with four members of the class in his top ten.

Lakins coming in as a top ten prospect is also a bit surprising. Law notes that he believes Lakins’ stuff is good enough that he could become a number two starting pitcher, though health has made that increasingly unlikely. Once we get beyond the top ten, we start to see a whole lot of names we haven’t seen elsewhere. Duron is someone who hasn’t really been on the radar at all until this ranking. Esplin is another 2017 draftee who had an intriguing professional debut. Diaz was one of the top international amateur free agents from last summer, and Martinez is a reliever prospect who still has some improvement to make before really being close to making an impact.

With a new list in tow, let’s update our table to keep up with all of the various rankings from this winter.