2020 Red Sox Top Prospect Voting: Another year, another top 20

Welcome back to what is possibly (probably?) my favorite part of the entire season on this site: Top prospect voting. If you’re new here, over the next couple of months we will, as a community, go one by one down the top prospect list voting for each spot until we’ve created our top twenty. I’ll get to the procedure in a minute, but this will be run twice a week (Tuesdays and Wednesdays) and should run until right around Opening Day. I think I did my math bad (I have a bachelors in math, if you can believe it) and it will go a little over. No big deal.

Before we get to the particulars and start with the voting, though, it is tradition to start off by looking at the list from last year. Here is the final top 20 from 2019:

1. Michael Chavis
2. Darwinzon Hernandez
3. Triston Casas
4. Bobby Dalbec
5. Jay Groome
6. Tanner Houck
7. Durbin Feltman
8. Bryan Mata
9. Antoni Flores
10. Mike Shawaryn
11. C.J. Chatham
12. Nick Decker
13. Brandon Howlett
14. Jarren Duran
15. Travis Lakins
16. Danny Diaz
17. Denyi Reyes
18. Nicholas Northcut
19. Alex Scherff
20. Gilberto Jimenez

Looking back to what happened over the season, this is an interesting list. Some, including the number one guy, lost eligibility. Some had huge breakouts and will vault up the board. Others disappointed and will fall off completely to be replaced by some who just missed the list and others who weren’t even on the radar.

Now, on to the actual voting. Those of you who have been around for a few years know that I always want to try a normal poll to conduct these, but it just never works. It always gets taken over by some jabronis who want to ruin the fun for everyone. So, we handle this the old fashion way. If you venture down to the comments, you’ll find comments from yours truly that say “Vote for Player X here.” I’ll also include some facts and stats for each player as well as a link to their Sox Prospects page.

In terms of who is eligible, we are going by rookie eligibility as tracked by Baseball-Reference. If you have a question about whether or not a player is eligible, go to their Baseball-Reference page and there is a section right at the top that has their rookie status. For example, while Darwinzon Hernandez is included on Baseball America’s list, he exceeded his rookie status at Baseball-Reference and therefore is not eligible for our list.

To cast your vote, just rec the comment. That is, click the star button that says “rec” next to it. Now, in order to do this you do have to register with the site (don’t worry it’s not going to, like, ask for a credit card or anything). Again, I would prefer to do a regular poll but it’s just been proven to be a mistake too many times. Voting will go right up until I write the following post, which is generally around 10:00 PM ET the night before. I’ll close comments once voting is closed. If there happens to be a tie, my general strategy is to whine on Twitter about it until the tie is broken. If that doesn’t work, the winner will be whoever ranks higher on the consensus rankings gathered from the major national sites.

So, with that, let’s get under way. See you in the comments.