Braves place 9 players in Fangraphs’ 2017 Top 100 Prospects List

We have reached the end of prospect season...well, the end of the top 100 lists anyways.

The latter parts of the offseason are littered with top 100 prospect list roll outs between MLB Pipeline, Baseball America, Baseball Prospectus, Keith Law, and Fangraphs among others. All of the lists are usually very different and by all accounts subjective. Some lists make fans happy, others make them mad (very mad in some inexplicable cases), but the goal behind all of them is to give a sense of where the talent hierarchies are in the minor leagues and give one barometer for how much talent teams have on the way.

This offseason, the Braves have performed exceedingly well on these lists with lots of prospects getting Top 100 nods. The last of these lists, written by Fangraphs’ Eric Longenhagen, is no different.

The Braves put 9(!) prospects on Eric’s list with Dansby Swanson (4), Ozzie Albies (11), Ronald Acuna (35), Kolby Allard (41), Kevin Maitan (48), Ian Anderson (54), Max Fried (62), Luiz Gohara (70), and Mike Soroka (93). All of these players had received top 100 nods from at least one other publication this offseason with Keith Law’s list being the closest to Eric’s at first glance.

There are some surprises here with the exclusion of Sean Newcomb (his stock has certainly suffered this offseason across baseball) as well as the note that Cristian Pache was the last bat cut from the top 100. Whether Newcomb bounces back with a strong 2017 will be a big storyline this coming season along with Pache potentially breaking out in a big way (spoilers: I will be in Rome quite a bit to start the year).