Five Braves farmhands make ZiPS’ Top 100 prospects list

As Fangraphs’ Prospect Week continues, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projection system has chimed in with its own list of Top 100 prospects. You can read the full article here: https://blogs.fangraphs.com/zips-2021-top-100-prospects.

Braves’ prospects making the list are:

• Ian Anderson at #5 overall. Anderson’s sparkling debut no doubt punted him up towards the top of the list. He’s also almost-not-a-prospect, but I guess since he retains his rookie eligibility for the start of the season, he’s fair game for the list.
• Cristian Pache at #18 overall. Minor league defense is very hard to translate into major league defense, and the immediate outlooks on Pache offensively aren’t very high, but it’s somewhat nice that a statistics-based model still sees Pache as delivering a boatload of career value.
• Braden Shewmake (!!) at #29 overall. ZiPS and other top 100 lists overlap a fair bit, but not here. The Braves’ first-round pick from 2019 has fewer than 300 professional PAs to his name, and has only 50 at Double-A, so this is high system-based “praise.” Mr. Szymborski indicates that the incorporation of college-level data into ZiPS give Shewmake a strong floor.
• Drew Waters at #42 overall. This is really close to his top 50 ranking on Eric Longenhagen’s more traditional/scouting-based Top 100 list.
• Tucker Davidson at #75 overall. Another guy like Shewmake that didn’t appear on the other Fangraphs Top 100 list, Davidson’s strong 2019 at Double-A probably shunted him towards appearing on this list, and he had some real good numbers at A-ball as well.