One of the most fun times of the year for us here at Talking Chop, at the very least on the minor league side, is prospect ranking time. Normally, this is the period of time where we take all of our observations and information gathering from the minor league season and we try our best to predict how the upcoming season is going to go for each guy.
This season is a little different as we have far less information and, most importantly, we don’t have a minor league season to go off of for our rankings. This led to a difficult ranking process and a few of the minor league guys got together to talk about their processes in the latest episode of the Road to Atlanta podcast.
One factor that went into how we ranked guys was how we expected the team was going to use them during the 2021 season. This is obviously an imperfect science given we haven’t seen the guys in camp yet and, more importantly, the most deserving player doesn’t always get promoted as roster status and service time both have big impacts. Our fearless leader, Kris Willis, took a stab at what the roster currently projects to look like and what changes could still be in store.
MLB News
The Braves didn’t make news over the weekend, but there are certainly a fair bit of rumblings on the free agent market. The Dodgers continue to remind us that they have an embarrassment of riches as, with one of the most loaded rosters we have seen, they are looking at acquiring DJ LeMahieu. The New York squads are still very much in the bidding for LeMahieu, but LA getting involved is both demoralizing as well as interesting.
On the international front, RHP Tomoyuki Sugano who has had a strong career in Japan, appears close to making a decision as to where he is going to play in the majors. It looks like as many as five teams are known to be interested in the 31 year old, so this could come to a head quickly with some real money getting thrown around.