Red Sox Top Prospect Voting: It begins

We are somehow here. It simultaneously feels like the season just ended and there’s no way another season could be upon us already and also like we haven’t seen baseball in five years. But as of now, spring training and the regular season is still set to start on time, and that means it’s time for us to kick off our annual season preview traditions. To kick things off we turn to my favorite series we run all year: Our community top prospect rankings.

For those who are new to the site or who have perhaps forgotten — I can’t imagine how that would be. It’s not as though there’s anything else happening in the world right now — we’ll give a quick refresher on the process. While I would love to just drop a poll at the bottom of this post and let people vote that way, it just never works. I try it every year, and within the first two or three polls someone messes around and ruins the process for everyone. It’s not worth the hassle, unfortunately.

And so we go the old fashioned way down in the comments. After reading this post (and every subsequent post in the series) you can scroll down to the comments section to vote. I will have seven names, listed alphabetically by last name, in separate comments down there along with some pertinent information about the player. Note that for the stats section, I’m just using 2019 stats for everyone who didn’t play in the majors last summer, for obvious reasons. To vote, you simply click the “rec” button with a star next to it for that player, and that records your vote. The player with the most recs takes that spot in the voting. In the event of a tie, I will use our consensus rankings to break it.

If you do not see the player you wish to vote for listed, leave a comment of your own saying “Vote here for Player X” and I will circle around and rec it myself to count the vote. Please don’t ask me to add more than seven players. I need to draw a line somewhere or else I’ll eventually have like 25 names there and nobody has time for that. And if the Red Sox acquire any new prospects in the midst of this series, we’ll go back and retroactively rank them after the fact.

In order to participate you do need to be a member of the site. Again, I would love to just do a normal poll that anyone could vote in, but as I said that always gets messed up. The good news is you don’t have to pay or anything like that to become a member. Simply go up to the top of the page and click on the little man button between the search bar and the Facebook icon. From there to sign up you just need to choose a username and password and provide an email address and you’re good to go. It will, however, take 24 hours to be able to comment and vote in this process.

The good news on that front is that these votes last a few days each. The way this will work is that every subsequent post in this series will profile the previous round of voting’s winner, and then we’ll vote for the next spot in the comments of that profile. (So on Friday we’ll profile whoever wins this vote, and in that comments section you’ll vote for number two, and so on.) We’ll run them every Tuesday and Friday, with voting ending at midnight before the next profile is written. So, for a Tuesday vote you will have until midnight Thursday into Friday. For a Friday vote, it’s midnight from Monday into Tuesday.

So, that’s all we got. I hope you enjoy this series as much as I do and I hope there is some fun debate down in the comments, as is usually the case. In case you missed it on Monday, we ran a broad overview of the farm system. And below you can see last year’s list, which went beyond 20 because we needed to pass some time while baseball was on hiatus. Here’s hoping we won’t have to do that again. See you Friday with our number one ranked prospect!

1. Jeter Downs

2. Triston Casas

3. Bobby Dalbec

4. Bryan Mata

5. Noah Song

6. Gilberto Jimenez

7. Jay Groome

8. Jarren Duran

9. Thad Ward

10. Tanner Houck

11. Matthew Lugo

12. C.J. Chatham

13. Connor Wong

14. Nick Decker

15. Cameron Cannon

16. Marcus Wilson

17. Aldo Ramirez

18. Brayan Bello

19. Ryan Zeferjahn

20. Chris Murphy

21. Chih-Jung Liu

22. Bryan Gonzalez

23. Antoni Flores

24. Durbin Feltman

25. Brainer Bonaci

26. Pedro Castellanos

27. Brandon Howlett

28. Luis Perales

29. Ceddanne Rafaela

30. Chase Shugart