Today, Baseball America unveiled its pre-season top-100 prospects list, complete with updated scouting reports and some connected content. If you’re a prospect hound, it’s a good day to do some reading.

For the Chicago Cubs, it is a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, five top-100 prospects is always nice, with a sixth just outside. Good showing. But when you consider where the Cubs have been, and when you look at past rankings, you also notice a continuation of the prospect re-framing we’ve seen elsewhere: the opinions on almost every top Cubs prospect – except for the ones they’ve traded – has softened. You can also see the softening in the list of all prospects who received at least one top-100 vote at BA. There are a lot of orgs with a lot more prospects who at least received SOME top-100 consideration.

I’m sure there’s a bit of homer in me that I just can’t shake enough to be completely dispassionate, but I have trouble accepting how and why the 2024 season was a reason for guys like Matt Shaw, Moises Ballesteros, Owen Caissie, or even James Triantos to fall or stay mostly flat from where they were in mid-season updates. Even with a guy like Jefferson Rojas, falling from a near-top-50 to BA type to off the list might make sense on a very superficial look at the stats, but when you consider his batted ball data (very strong), his continued ability to stick at shortstop, and his age/level, I don’t see how 2024 could’ve changed opinions THAT much.

The guys on the top-100:

35. Matt Shaw, 3B
54. Cade Horton, RHP
62. Moises Ballesteros, C
64. Owen Caissie, OF
71. Kevin Alcántara, OF

Infielder James Triantos, who’d previously snuck inside the top-100, is now in the group of 15 prospects who just missed. So six in the top-115, or something like that. Jefferson Rojas was the only other Cubs prospect to get at least one top-100 vote from the BA staff.

The “answer,” such as there is one about these guys staying flat or falling back, is mostly about other prospects arriving on the list or rocketing up. So it’s not as if I don’t understand how this all works, and I’m not even necessarily saying BA is wrong on each of these guys. It’s more that I look at a guy like Ballesteros, for example, and even with the legitimate questions about his catching ability at the big league level, there is simply zero chance there are 61 prospects in baseball I’d rather have before Ballesteros. Maybe I’m just too optimistic on the catching possibility, or just too high on the bat.

Speaking of which, among the notes on Ballesteros: “Ballesteros’ bat makes him an extremely interesting catching prospect, but he does need to prove he can stick behind the plate. He’s stayed on top of his conditioning enough to make that a plausible possibility, even if some scouts remain skeptical.”

Hey, I’ll take it. This is a just-turned-21-year-old catching prospect whose bat keeps getting better, and for whom you would completely expect the catching skills to lag in a relative way. That’ll be the big thing to watch for him in 2025 in the first half: has the offseason work and conditioning made him look all the more playable behind the plate? It’s hard to overstate the difference in value he could provide the Cubs over the next five+ years if he can catch at a passable level and if he cannot.

Anyway, this is just the state of things in the national perception of the Cubs’ farm system. The top group is solid, but not overwhelmingly so. Trades and graduations have thinned the group considerably, and the Cubs are going to need to have some additional breakouts this year from guys who aren’t generally on the “future top-100 type” radar.

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