Every year, we rank the best prospects in Major League Baseball; some will play in the majors in 2024, while others will advance through the minor leagues in time for the next campaign.
I won’t spend too much time laying out the background for the numerous words that follow, but I’ll highlight two noteworthy themes right away:
First, there’s a consensus from everyone I spoke with across the industry that there’s a notable and uncharacteristic drop-off in the area of the list around Nos. 40 to 50, which is why I put the 50/55 Future Value (FV) break right there. I’m used to having a deep group of players my sources are arguing for at the end of this list but nobody really did that this time, so I resorted to including more players from the loaded 2023 draft than I expected.
The second trend is the large number of recently drafted players making the list. What’s the reason for that drop-off in the middle of the rankings? Nobody was really sure. Maybe teams are pushing players to the big leagues faster, creating a temporary vacuum behind them? Maybe talent is cyclical and after a historically strong draft class — possibly the best in a few decades — this is the calm before the storm of a bunch of those players rising up the list together, once they get full seasons to prove themselves. In anticipation of that being true, I was very aggressive with 2023 draftees coming off strong debuts.
Click here for a brief summary of other important terminology used in the ranking as well as the tool grades on the 20–80 scale that are used extensively throughout this list and are the industry standard in baseball. We begin our coverage of 2023’s top prospects with today’s list. On Friday, we will rank every MLB farm system, and the following week, we will release our team-by-team prospect lists for both leagues.
Moving on, let’s rate baseball’s Top 100 prospects heading into the 2024 MLB season, beginning and concluding with a former major league player’s kid.
