Tomorrow is the day that the most popular Top 100 prospect list will come out. Baseball America will be releasing their Top 100 list and have a nice long chat session and I am sure that I will be covering the list and discussing it here as well. The Cincinnati Reds have had four players show up on various Top 100 lists already this offseason with Robert Stephenson, Billy Hamilton, Phillip Ervin and Jesse Winker all showing up.
While the talent levels vary from year to year in various leagues, I am just going to look back at the past few years lists for both the Top 100’s and the league Top 20’s to see how many players from each year made the top 100 to try and get an idea of who will show up on the Top 100. Here is the breakdown over the pervious two seasons.
| Prospects ranked in the Baseball America Top 100 by league | ||||||
| Year | AZL | PIO | MWL | CAL | SL | IL |
| 2013 | 3 | 2 | 9 | 4 | 12 | 3 |
| 2012 | 0 | 0 | 12 | 13 | 10 | 5 |
The rookie levels tend to only have a few guys from each league make it in the good years, while the A-ball leagues are very much reliant on the given talent spread in a year as they went from 13 in the 2013 list from 25 the year before. The Southern League was about half of the list and the International League total was low, but for a good reason. The Baseball America league Top 20’s include players who have graduated their prospect status as long as they entered the year with it in tact, so plenty of players were on the Top 20 list who weren’t eligible for the Top 100, leaving players ranked in the second half of the list inside the Top 100, but still failing to have many players listed. It is also worth noting that the Top 20 lists don’t always reflect the same order that players will appear in the Top 100. Some players are ahead of others in the Top 20, but behind them or even unranked in the Top 100.
The Reds were shut out of the AZL Top 20 in 2013. The Pioneer League saw two Reds, Phillip Ervin at #2 and Ben Lively at #6. The past two years suggests that Ervin has a chance to make the list, but that Lively doesn’t have much of a choice. Robert Stephenson and Jesse Winker were both in the Top 10 for the Midwest League. Winker ranked 9th, which puts him on the border of the last two seasons for making the Top 100. Yorman Rodriguez came in at #13 on the California League Top 20 and in 2012 that would have put him in the right area, but in 2013 it would have left him far outside of the range. Rodriguez came in at #20 in the Southern League as well, out of the range for the past two seasons to crack the Top 100. Billy Hamilton ranked 10th in the International League. While the league has only placed 8 total players in the last two years, as noted plenty of players on the list weren’t elgible for the Top 100 and each year players ranked in the second half were found on the Top 100.
While we could have likely just all assumed that Robert Stephenson and Billy Hamilton were safely on the Top 100 and that Phillip Ervin and Jesse Winker had a chance, taking a recent historical look at where guys ranked in their respective leagues gives us a different look at the odds in which players could be found on the list.