Welcome to the regularly updated Top 50 Impact Rookies for 2014. This ranking tool grades freshman players based on their projected MLB impacts for 2014 so it will vary significantly from typical Top 50 or 100 prospects lists.

#1 Xander Bogaerts | Red Sox (3B/SS)

April 10: With Boston’s decision not to resign veteran shortstop Stephen Drew, Bogaerts was handed the starting shortstop gig in Boston at the age of 21. The regular playing time — as well as his advanced feeling for hitting — makes him an early favorite for the Rookie of the Year award in the American League (along with the Yankee’s Japanese import Masahiro Tanaka). Read the rest of this entry »

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages…I’m going to have a hard time concentrating today. As you can see in the byline below this article, I am a shameless pro wrestling fan — with WrestleMania XXX coming up this Sunday, I’ll do my best to prevent my subconscious from letting this turn into an endless stream of irrelevant wrasslin’ references. Let’s take a swig of beer for the workin’ man and get this show on the road, shall we?

Roenis Elias is making his first major-league start tonight, and he’s a pretty interesting guy to talk about. The 25-year-old Cuban has lively raw stuff and a decent track record in the minors over the last couple seasons, but no one went into Spring Training expecting him to crack the major-league rotation. However, with Hisashi Iwakuma and Taijuan Walker on the shelf to open the season, and veteran reclamation project Scott Baker pitching so poorly in March that the Mariners released him, the left-handed Elias finds himself making the jump from Double-A to the big leagues.

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When it comes to analyzing minor league players, it is certainly important to consider both the statistics they compile and the connection between that performance and the visual/mechanical elements of their process behind the numbers. However, if there’s one group of prospects who can be effectively analyzed (in a shorthanded fashion) from a purely statistical standpoint, it’s probably first base prospects. In general, they’re below-average defenders–none of the 25 qualified first basemen in 2013 posted a positive FanGraphs Defense value, after all–and as a result, they are held to extremely high offensive standards. Evaluating a first base prospect, then, often comes down to a simple method: If he hits, he’s interesting, and if he doesn’t, he’s not.

Applying this crude method to White Sox first base prospect Rangel Ravelo probably would lead many toward the second conclusion. Ravelo’s not entirely off the radar–he hit .312/.393/.455 with High-A Winston-Salem this year as a 21-year-old, enough to slot him into the final slot on Baseball America’s top 30 White Sox prospects. But he’s a first baseman who is a career .298/.359/.402 hitter–that’s a meager .104 Isolated Power and just seven home runs in 1179 plate appearances since being drafted in sixth round in 2010 out of a Florida high school.

The logical conclusion to draw, then, is that Ravelo, while perhaps a talented hitter, is never going to have the power required to make an impact given what’s likely to be little defensive ability. Then again, maybe the visual/mechanical aspect still retains importance for first basemen, because it paints a very different picture of Ravelo than his production does.

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The 2014 Baseball America Prospect Handbook left outfielder Taylor Dugas off the Yankees’ Top 30 prospect list, and the New York system isn’t particularly well regarded, coming in 18th in BAs system rankings and 23rd in Baseball Prospectus’. It’s not hard to understand why he was omitted: Dugas turned 24 earlier this offseason and has yet to play in the upper minors. Across 172 games in three different levels in the low minors, he has a career .351 slugging percentage. The 5’8″, 170-pound lefty swinger certainly isn’t built to grow into a lot more power than that, either.

But those who consider Dugas an afterthought rather than a prospect are missing the boat.

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Abraham Almonte has overcome a veritable minefield of obstacles on his way to the majors, the most obvious of which being his height. Originally signed by the Yankees as a 17-year-old, the diminutive Dominican stands just 5’9″. Upon acquiring him, the Yankees tried Almonte as a second baseman in rookie ball before quickly shifting him to the outfield.

For the next seven years, he worked his way slowly through the organization, finally reaching Double-A in 2012. By that point, Almonte was generally viewed as a quick, switch-hitting outfielder who lacked the power to play in a corner spot at the major-league level and had never hit .300 in the minors. He was still more than just organizational depth, but not enough of a prospect to land on any top prospect lists.

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The Marlins, as bad as they are, have an entertainingly wanton disregard of service time considerations for their top prospects. Marcell Ozuna is one example of this philosophy (or lack thereof). In late April of last year, despite having no chance of either contending or selling tickets, Miami called up Ozuna, who had logged a grand total of 47 career plate appearances above A-ball. For those of you wondering, Ozuna will now very likely get the Super Two tag on him, making him arbitration-eligible in 2016.

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With the proliferation of analysis available to fantasy players, the gap between the worst and best owners has shrunk. It’s much more rare to see an owner put together a truly awful draft or auction today than it was even ten years ago, simply because it’s seemingly impossible to use the internet without stumbling across some scrap of fantasy analysis. Even Jimmy from accounting, who knows next-to-nothing about fantasy baseball, can print off a few cheat sheets and put together a team that isn’t a total abomination.

Much like its real-life counterpart, fantasy baseball is a game in which one must constantly be searching for new market inefficiencies. One theory that I’m a big proponent of is capitalizing on reactions to small samples, specifically bad ones. As it turns out, Travis d’Arnaud is just the example I was looking for.

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The Marlins haven’t made the playoffs in a decade or had a winning season since 2009; morever, their record has declined every season  since they last broke even, culminating in a 100-loss season last year in spite of the presence of feared slugger Giancarlo Stanton and a solid pitching staff led by phenom Jose Fernandez. The spell of losing understandably puts pressure on Miami’s farm system to produce, and one member of their organization upon whom a considerable amount rests is 2013 first-rounder Colin Moran. A highly-touted college third baseman out of UNC, Moran was selected sixth overall in the past draft and was polished enough to immediately flirt with the .300 mark in full-season ball; he also was deemed polished enough for the Arizona Fall League after just 42 games of professional experience. In this piece, I’ll look at how Moran projects and if he can eventually help a Marlins team that hit just .231/.293/.335 this past season.

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To paraphrase (horribly butcher?) A Tale of Two Cities, prospects are the best of times and the worst of times for ottoneu owners. At least based on the number of questions I get about them.

The joy of ottoneu is you can sign that Double-A SS with the big bat and hope he develops into a star. The problem is how to find the right prospect. For every Mike Trout, there is an Andy Marte. Actually, for every Trout, there are about a billion Marte’s. And the chances are you, like me, are not a prospect evaluator, which makes it awfully hard to tell the difference.

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One of my strongest beliefs as a prospect/minor league writer is that there is far too much absolutism in most discussions of prospects in the online community. Part of the reason for this is simply a matter of demand–as you read about a minor league player (or, really, any player) at a place like FanGraphs or RotoGraphs, you’re likely interested in some sort of bottom line about how good the player is and might be. As such, there is a lot of pressure on the arbiters of the players to come up with a concrete answer–to make an actual prediction of their futures. In reality, though, prospecting is all about shades of gray, particularly in the low minors, which are my main focus. Just about every player in full-season ball has something going for them, but likewise, almost every player below Double-A has several aspects which need refinement before he has a chance at big league success. Predicting the eradication of those problems and the amount to which the strengths are realized is largely an exercise in probability, not one of guessing “good,” “bad,” or “okay” and clinging to it…to say nothing of the factors of injuries, regression, and the like. Any glance at a top prospect list from five years ago, regardless of the authors or their credibility, should drive this point home soundly–many of the top players go on to struggle, whereas several off the list entirely go on to have excellent careers.

For all of my relativistic outlook, though, occasionally I run into a player who’s just so impressive that my mind can’t help but jump directly to concrete thoughts of stardom. Of the couple hundred pitchers I saw in person last year, nobody evoked those thoughts more strongly than Cardinals pitching prospect Alex Reyes.

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