MLB Roundup 1/27: Vladito is the consensus number one prospect in baseball

Looking at top 100 lists

The Red Sox farm system is not something to write home about these days, which we know. I’ll have some more about their standing on the major top-100 prospect lists that have come out this week later in the morning, but (Spoiler Alert!) it’s not super great. Obviously, given that they just won the damn World Series and have a core full of recently-graduated players, it’s understandable.

For right now, though, I want to take a look at the top prospects around the rest of the game. Nothing really happened in terms of real news on Saturday, and MLB Pipeline released their top-100 list, so this seems like the perfect time to do this. So far, MLB Pipeline, Baseball America and Baseball Prospectus have all released their lists to this point, and there is one major characteristic in common: Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is the best prospect in baseball. Putting aside how incredibly washed I feel seeing all this praise for the son of a player I grew up watching, this is no surprise. Guerrero has nothing left to prove in the minors and should have been in the majors already at this point. He’ll certainly be up after a few weeks this year after “working on some defense” aka having his service time manipulated. Vladito has an otherworldly bat that can play anywhere, so even if he doesn’t stick at third base he has every chance in the world to be a bona fide star. That he is in the American League East is not ideal.

As far as what comes after this, Fernando Tatis Jr. of the Padres — yet another son of a player from my childhood — is close to the consensus number number two in the game. He ranks right behind Guerrero on MLB and BA’s list, but BP has him third with the Angels’ Jo Adell ranking second. Other than those two, Eloy Jimenez of the White Sox, Royce Lewis of the Twins, Nick Senzel of the Reds and Forrest Whitley of the Astros are the consensus top ten prospects in the game among the three lists. You can check out the lists for yourself for more takeaways, but for our purposes the fact that Guerrero, Bo Bichette (yet another son of a player from my childhood) and Wander Franco are all elite prospects in the AL East is a big deal.