The Baseball America top-10 Braves prospects for 2012 is out, here's the list:

1. Julio Teheran, rhp
   
2. Arodys Vizcaino, rhp
3. Randall Delgado, rhp
4. Andrelton Simmons, ss
5. Sean Gilmartin, lhp
6. Edward Salcedo, ss/3b
7. Tyler Pastornicky, ss
8. Zeke Spruill, rhp
9. Christian Bethancourt, c
10. Brandon Drury, 3b

They listed Salcedo as Adrian Salcedo, who is actually a Minnesota pitching prospect -- a pretty big mistake by Baseball America. Other than that the list looks good. That's about the same group of prospects that the Talking Chop top-10 will contain, though we don't have Drury quite that high. That's actually an ambitious ranking by Baseball America for the rookie-ball infielder. They don't usually give out high rankings to players at that level, and their writeup on him doesn't really glow with excessive praise.

Simmons at number-4 is another aggressive ranking, but there has been a lot of buzz about him recently, and he is moving rapidly up prospect lists. I wonder if he will make their top-100 prospects in all of baseball. The more I hear about him the more I like him (and I already liked him more than most), and the higher I push him up my prospect list.

In their writeup they bring up an interesting point about the Braves spend-thriftiness on prospects the last couple of years:

Atlanta has spent just $7.6 million on DeMacio's two drafts, which ranks ahead of only the White Sox in bonus spending over the last two years. Those drafts have yielded Simmons, the system's best position prospect, and 2011 first-rounder Sean Gilmartin, its best lefthander. The Braves also remain active on the international front but aren't in the market for the big-bucks prospects like they were when they signed Teheran for $850,000 in 2007.

This approach doesn't seem to have caught up to them yet, but we'll see if it does, and whether these college players they've been taking either pan out and become impact players that are needed to win championships, or if they just become Major League role players.