Revisiting the Top 100 Prospects of the Zips

All-Star Week is the traditional midpoint of the baseball season — though not the mathematical one – and with the MLB Draft adding a bunch of new prospects to the minors, it’s a good time to look back at the ZiPS prospect list from this past winter. Some prospects have excelled in the majors and some, well, not so much, but that’s why we call them prospects and not certainties. Interpreting minor league statistics properly has always been a challenge, but it’s more so these days with an unusual divergence in offensive levels between the majors and high minors, especially the Triple-A leagues. An .850 OPS that may have been impressive in the International League a few years ago isn’t that mouth-watering these days, while an ERA around four is unusually promising. ZiPS, naturally, has to translate minor league performance as part of predicting how players will fare in the majors, and now that we have public Statcast data for the minors, there’s even more to dig into in 2024. For each player in last winter’s ZiPS Top 100, I’m listing quick lines for their translated minor league performance (lower-case m), any major league performance, and lastly, a combination of the two to get one 2024 line (noted with a c).

ZiPS Top 100 Prospects – 1-25 Hitters

As I’ve said before, Jackson Holliday might actually be underrated at this point. I got a lot of complaints about the “bearish” .255/.341/.381 projection for him coming into the season, but ZiPS (and I) shared the belief that people were coming too quickly on him. He’s still extremely likely to be a fantastic player, but considering he’s a 20-year-old who blasted through four levels of the minors, it’s not the weirdest thing ever that he’d see a consolidation season. That .336/.332 OBP/SLG isn’t really that far behind his projection, especially considering ZiPS expected the major league offensive environment to be better than it has been this season. Coby Mayo has had the better season but still wouldn’t come close to passing Holliday if I rerolled the full top prospects right now. James Wood actually has surpassed Holliday, though that will only last until he exceeds the rookie maximum and sheds his prospect status; he was legitimately excellent in the minors this year. The sheen has come off both Wyatt Langford and Evan Carter a little bit, while Jackson Chourio and Masyn Winn have performed about as advertised. As movers go, Adael Amador and Pete Crow-Armstrong look like the two who will take the biggest hit of this group before next year’s rankings (if PCA hasn’t graduated). There hasn’t been as much ink about Emmanuel Rodriguez as I would have expected this year, even before he injured his thumb last month. The Texas League, unlike the Triple-A leagues, is a pretty low offensive environment, with a league OPS of just .705, so his actual 1.100 OPS is pretty impressive.

ZiPS Top 100 Prospects – 1-50 Pitchers

Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Shota Imanaga have both performed as well as ZiPS expected. While that’s hardly going out on a limb for Yamamoto, whom everyone liked, ZiPS was in on Imanaga very early. Paul Skenes, of course, has been fabulous, even more so than his top-notch translations from April and May. I’d only describe two of the pitchers on this list as unmitigated disappointments so far in 2024, at least from a projections standpoint: Both Ricky Tiedemann and Dylan Lesko will take pretty big hits in the next rankings. Andrew Painter will slide quite a bit as well, but it would be pretty churlish to call a pitcher a disappointment for being injured.

ZiPS Top 100 Prospects – 26-50 Hitters