A new era: Reflecting on the Orioles' 2020 prospect list, highlighted by the inclusion of Adley Rutschman and plenty of pitching improvements
Changes in how the Orioles drafted players and developed pitchers meant there were new names and new information to consider when putting together this list after the 2019 season.
It became a much different proposition to write about Orioles prospects in the 2019 season after Mike Elias and his team got a chance to start influencing player development.
Ranking them, however, changed at a little slower of a pace. That 2019 season brought on a progressive pitching overhaul under minor league pitching coordinator Chris Holt on the Orioles’ farm, and many of the good things that happened that year came through that.
There was also the selection of Adley Rutschman as part of a potentially transformational draft class that also featured Gunnar Henderson, Kyle Stowers, and Joey Ortiz – but there wasn’t a lot to go off with that group yet.
Mostly, it was just the same players I’d seen and written about for years doing things slightly differently and performing better. In some cases, the changes were meaningful, and reflected in the rankings and reports. In others, the performance got worse because they were trying new things, and the rankings and reports couldn’t penalize them for that. And of course, there were a handful of players ranked because they had been in the past.
Earlier this month, we looked back on the 2018 and 2019 Orioles prospect lists for Baseball America and what lessons could be learned in hindsight. (Those can be found here and here.) This week, it’s the 2020 offseason list – before the pandemic stopped the game in its tracks.