TomahawkTake’s Mid-Season Top 30-ish Atlanta Braves Prospects – Honorable Mentions
Opinions vary widely on the Braves Top Prospects, but that should tell us that the farm system depth is real as we gather a consensus from our writers.
Now that the 2016 North American (Rule 4) MLB draft is complete, the July 2 International Market has mostly settled, and the August 1 trade deadline is over, it’s time to finally see if we can rank the minor leaguers in the Atlanta Braves farm system.
This is a task that definitely has challenges. Here we have a franchise that recently had highly-ranked players such as J.R. Graham, Aaron Northcraft, Edward Salcedo, Tyler Pastornicky, Randall Delgado, and Zeke Spruill. It was sometimes tough to come up with even 20 names for a couple of years as we wondered whether some could ever get to the majors.
Now we have a different kind of difficulty: making guesses as to how high these new arrivals can go… and when I started asking, I received 50 names in response.
This is a testimony of the scouting department and the players… but as always, this is a starting point. The finish line is (hopefully) the development into quality major league players.
With the names on this list, it feels like there is a greater chance of this now than at any time that I can recall as a lifetime Braves’ follower.
The Ground Rules
There are a number of players that we excluded, for reasons of being on the major league roster for a long-enough period of time:
8 of our writing staff submitted entries. Each player was scored 1-30, and scores were averaged. Those left off one list or another were given a semi-arbitrary score of 33.
As mentioned, there were twenty other names that were mentioned, yet did not crack our Top 30. These are identified as Honorable Mentions, and that is the subject of this post.
This list is not intended to compete with the Top 100 rankings that Ben Chase has graced us with – in fact, he was a contributor to this work. Ben goes into considerable depth in an effort to put “eyes on” to everyone he ranks. But this is an effort to get a snapshot of how the farm stands at this point – with more voices contributing.
The parameters have changed from Ben’s last updates: we’ve expanded the search criteria to all new members of the organization, though some (especially the international kids) haven’t played much yet. There are other factors, too: many of the new draftees (especially the college talent) should be dominating the Rookie leagues, and thus it’s hard to know how challenged they are just yet. As a result, we made our best guesses based on the information at hand, but as always, the process is fluid.
So with all of those disclaimers, let’s see our team has come up with!
Next: Honorable Mentions Group 1