Emergent outfielders, some high-risk arms, and a lot of big leaguers: Looking back on the Orioles' 2018 top prospect list

In an effort to self-reflect on a big part of my offseason calendar as well as how far the Orioles have come, we begin a look-back on their Baseball America prospect lists, starting with 2018.

This whole exercise got off to a terrible start, if we’re being honest with ourselves.

I’ve had it in my mind to go through past editions of the Baseball America top-30 prospect lists that I put together for the publication over the years as an exercise in self-flagellation, self-reflection, and general analysis on the processes that have evolved over the years and are leading to this year’s rankings.

The only problem was I couldn’t figure out when I started to write them. My first year on the Orioles beat was in 2016, and in my mind I did the rankings that year, too. Turns out I did not! But I began after the 2017 season, a year where Austin Hays was a clear-cut No. 1, and many of the names that came to define the beginning of the Orioles rebuild were making their mark.

There were some good calls, there were some bad calls, there were a lot of players I smiled at the thought of in both nostalgic and derisive ways. There was a lot in there.

But for all those reasons I set out to do the exercise, it proved worth doing. We’ll begin with the rankings ahead of the 2018 season, my first for Baseball America.

The Top-10

1. Austin Hays (60/Medium) 2. Ryan Mountcastle (55/High) 3. Chance Sisco (50/Medium) 4. Hunter Harvey (60/Extreme) 5. DL Hall (60/Very High) 6. Tanner Scott (50/High) 7. Cody Sedlock (50/High) 8. Anthony Santander (50/High) 9. Cedric Mullins (50/High) 10. Chris Lee (45/Medium)

(Note: BA assigns risk factors to players to help further distinguish them within their future grades. A 50-grade player is an average big leaguer.)

Notable names outside the top-10

Maybe because the Orioles were on the verge of a rebuild and everyone in the system got a chance, or maybe because it wasn’t as bad back then as it seems, there are a lot of big leaguers on this list, including Keegan Akin (No. 11, 50/High), Alexander Wells (No. 13, 45/Medium), Mike Baumann (No. 14, 50/High), David Hess (No. 15, 45/Medium), DJ Stewart (No. 16, 45/High), Zac Lowther (No. 17, 45/High), Jimmy Yacabonis (No. 23, 40/Medium), Yefry Ramirez (No. 26, 45/High), Austin Wynns (No. 29, 45/High), and Stevie Wilkerson (No. 30, 45/High, still called Steve at that point).

That’s a lot of players who made it. Not too far off where the grades or order are concerned either. I will probably look back on a lot of these and feel like I was a half-grade heavy, and where the two who remain relevant in the Orioles’ major league fold are concerned (Akin and Baumann), that may prove right. Baumann could still be a high-leverage relief arm, and maybe if you squint a back-end starter, but Akin is probably settled as a low-leverage reliever at this point.

Nailed it

There’s an element to something like this where it’s an opportunity to brag, only none are really jumping out. I guess in terms of grades, Mountcastle being a bat-first, first-division regular is pretty close, though reading the report back I badly regret focusing so much on his positionally uncertainty. All the talk around Mountcastle’s defense at the time wasn’t wrong, it just took away from the fact that he’s a really talented hitter.

Hall being essentially the same grade five years later is crazy, but he still has the potential to be a mid-rotation starter with elite stuff or an All-Star reliever, so it holds. I think there’s also something to be said for having Santander listed given how rough he looked in his Rule 5 year, and he’s turned out to be better than I had him. Mullins’ report reads really well, though when I put him as a plus defender I was probably envisioning left field, and his abandoning switch hitting made his average hit/power a reality. Hard to pat myself on the back there.

Blew it

When this list came out, there was a lot of feedback regarding Lee being at 10 instead of Akin, who behind the top-10 cutoff was at No. 11 with a higher grade, albeit with high risk. My thinking, if I recall at the time, was I’d rather have Lee’s stuff than Akin’s deception, and obviously did not pan out.

It speaks to the stress that still comes with deciding who is No. 10 and who is not, but ultimately doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of the list. They were level with one another, and the wrong one was ordered ahead.

The real miss here was Mike Yastrzemski, who wasn’t ranked despite having an .832 OPS in the high minors and still being the kind of talented grinder that in retrospect makes it obvious he’d be in the big leagues. I don’t really know why the shine came off of him, to be honest. Looking back, I don’t even have a lot on him in my notes. It seems like he’d been kind of passed over and outshined, and fell by the wayside. Thankfully, that doesn’t matter to players’ futures and he got his chance anyway.

A couple other big leaguers weren’t ranked here, including Yermín Mercedes (who wasn’t going to crack any list of mine) and a 22-year-old named Félix Bautista, who was somehow still in the DSL and struck out over a batter per inning with a 1.016 WHIP. Easy to see now that he was going places.

Ranking draftees is hard

That 2017 draft featuring Hall, Adam Hall, Lowther, and Baumann turned out to be a fine one, but the system at that stage meant everyone not named DL Hall was lumped around the middle. That didn’t turn out to be wrong, though Lowther and Baumann would certainly distinguish themselves later in their careers. Fifth-round prep outfielder Lamar Sparks was ranked 25th, mainly because dreaming on an athletic prep center fielder is fun, but injuries kept that from happening.

This is going to be a recurring section, mostly to point out what a crapshoot it is, but there’s really nothing remarkable about this group.

A weird thing I remembered while reading these

I suppose it’s not weird now considering most Orioles pitching prospects are on some kind of piggyback program, but Tanner Scott and fellow hard-throwing reliever Jesús Liranzo being used as starters to give them more game action and between-start time to develop their pitches was certainly a throwback to a different time and place in the Orioles’ player development cycle. It’s not totally strange to try and get relievers stretched out to pitch more in the minors. What is strange is not feeling like even a regular reliever’s schedule can allow a talented pitcher to work to get better. Now, in the era of TrackMan and Rapsodo and high-speed cameras, Scott would have been able to develop his secondaries and refine his delivery on a daily basis if the plan called for it, and done so without the rotation sojourn that came this year.

The main takeaway

For a first go-around, this isn’t terrible. Then as now, I kind of viewed players as in tiers, and tried to make sure at least everyone was here he belonged in that sense. Sisco didn’t turn out to be a big league hitter, but that top-three was a tier, then there were some high-octane, high-risk arms, and then some interesting outfielders, then the top-10 and next-10 continued with a lot of interesting arms and also Jomar Reyes.

While trying to find out what year I actually started doing these rankings (by searching my email), I found some notes to friends in the industry that were basically torturous reads about whether so-and-so is in the right place. They told me to focus on the reports, and make sure the grades were right, and they were correct to do that. I feel the reports are good, not great. I am probably close on tool grades but everyone’s major league role might be a half-grade too high, something I tried to cover with risk adjustments at the time.

Mostly, though, I look at this list and see a lot of players who could have had different careers had they been drafted a few years later or the staffs that now populate the Orioles’ minor league dugouts were in place then. All the pitchers who spent years working on fastball location without emphasizing the rest of their pitch mix, all the hitters who didn’t have the means to address deficiencies in controlling the strike zone the way Orioles prospects do now. That there were so many big leaguers on this list anyway is a testament to those players and the work they did with the staffs to get there, but there seems like a lot of missed opportunities on this list.

To that end, another takeaway I had was just how many big leaguers ended up in this top-30. Some of them were more obvious, but a Wynns or Wilkerson or even a Yacabonis might be easily overlooked for some higher-ceiling prospect or Latin American teenager (though the Orioles didn’t exactly have those then). My hope is that major leaguers are recognized for what will ultimately make them that in coming lists, but fear that may not be the case.

Going forward: I don’t often do this, but considering there are a few more of these coming, I’d love to know in the comments if there are any other facets of these old rankings worth exploring as I dig through them in the coming weeks. Let me know below, and thanks as always for getting to this point.