Other than Triple A, which has another week-plus to go, the 2021 minor-league season is now in the books. So it’s time for the return of the annual Prospect of the Year award, given to the prospect who showed the best performance in the minor leagues in 2021. It was an epic year for prospects having huge seasons in the minors — I could have written up 20 guys with cases to be at least considered for the honor, and an omission here doesn’t mean a player had a bad season.
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While the process of selecting the top prospects was ultimately subjective, I focused primarily on legitimate prospects who performed well relative to their age, level and experience in pro ball. In short, the younger a player was relative to the other players in his league — especially when compared just to the players in his league with a chance to have some impact in the majors — the more impressed I was with a strong performance. What a player did in the majors, if he was called up, was irrelevant for this list’s purposes.
So, given those criteria, here is my overall Prospect of the Year for 2021, as well as several other players who had outstanding seasons and deserved notice. I also gave a separate award to the 2021 draftee who had the best pro debut.
Prospect of the Year: Bobby Witt Jr., SS, Kansas City
The Royals had no fewer than three legitimate candidates for this honor, with Nick Pratto (.258/.381/.577 between AA/AAA) and M.J. Melendez (.278/.380/.612, also between AA/AAA) also having huge seasons and turning their careers around after disastrous campaigns in High A way back in the before times of 2019. But Witt edges both of those players, as he’s a year younger, and a superb shortstop to boot. Witt hit .295/.369/.570 for Double-A Northwest Arkansas, which is a reasonably good place to hit, and then hit .288/.358/.612 after a midyear promotion to Triple-A Omaha, with 32 homers, 34 doubles and 26 steals in total this year so far. The second pick in 2019, Witt has already answered a lot of the questions surrounding him in high school — notably how he’d fare against a consistent stream of better pitching his own age, since the competition he faced as an amateur was not great — and all three of those Royals prospects are ready to take the next step to face big-league pitching. The future in Kansas City is extremely bright.
Runner-up: Adley Rutschman, C, Baltimore
The No. 1 pick in 2019, Rutschman finally got his chance to play regularly — he did play briefly after signing, but scouts said he looked exhausted from the long spring — and he was a star at two levels, raking at Double A and hitting even better after a promotion to Triple A, with a .314/.411/.525 line for Norfolk. He walked 72 times against just 81 strikeouts in 2021, hit 22 homers, and oh, by the way, continued to play plus defense behind the plate. I know what you’re thinking — we’ve been here before, praising a switch-hitting catching prospect in the Orioles system, but every once in a while, the reboot is better than the original. I’ll be utterly shocked if Rutschman doesn’t make a bunch of All-Star teams, and would be extremely disappointed if the Orioles play a service-time game next year rather than just making him their Opening Day catcher. He’s ready.
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Pitching prospect of the year: Grayson Rodriguez, RHP, Baltimore
Rodriguez had the best performance this year of any pitching prospect in the minors, although it does come with a small caveat — the Orioles are so cautious with their pitchers that Rodriguez didn’t throw more than 89 pitches in any outing all season, or face more than 22 batters (once), so he wasn’t pacing himself to go deeper into starts like most pitchers would. That said, he was untouchable at two levels: In 23 outings, he gave up three runs or more just four times, never walked more than three batters in a game, and struck out at least a third of the batters he faced in 19 of those outings. He’s been up to 101 mph this year with progress on his off-speed stuff, although the fastball is, at least for now, still his best pitch and one that looks like it’ll miss bats in the majors. With D.L. Hall missing most of this year with an elbow issue after a dominant start, Rodriguez stands alone among the Orioles’ pitching prospects, and there really wasn’t another starter anywhere in the minors this year who could boast a performance as good as his.
Others of note
Jose Barrero, SS, Cincinnati
The exigencies of the 2020 season led to a major-league debut for Barrero that was at least a year ahead of schedule, and it showed in 26 strikeouts in 68 at-bats. Struggling to that degree didn’t faze him at all, apparently, as he hit .303/.380/.539 between Double A and Triple A this year, hitting more homers (19) than he did in 2018 and 2019 combined (14). He’s a true shortstop who can run and is projected to hit, and now there’s some more power to his projection as well, which could make him an occasional All-Star once the Reds hand him the job for good.
Daniel Espino, RHP, Cleveland
When Espino was drafted in 2019, there was much talk among scouts about his size (he’s a 6-foot right-hander) and the health of his arm, but the Panamanian-born pitcher took the ball for 20 starts this year without incident. All he did was punch out 41 percent of the batters he faced, the best rate of any qualifying starter in the minors. He’s been up to 100 with a slider that projects to be a plus pitch and can reach the low 90s, as well as a fringy curveball that he needs to use less. Like Rodriguez, Espino hasn’t worked deep into starts, topping out at 91 pitches this year, but unlike Rodriguez, that’s at least in part because Espino has been inefficient with his pitches, walking a man every other inning in his first 18 starts before finishing with two zero-walk outings. While there’s still some effort to his delivery — not helped by Cleveland’s efforts to try to shorten up his arm action, costing him deception — the club has to at least let him work as a starter until something shows he can’t do it. If he ends up a reliever, he would likely be dominant.
Riley Greene, OF, Detroit
The Tigers were aggressive with Greene from the get-go, taking him fifth in 2019 out of a Florida high school and sending him to full-season ball to finish the summer. After the lost year of 2020, they promoted him all the way to Double A this spring, even though he was just 20 and had only 24 games of experience above short-season. His response was to rake: .298/.381/.525 for Erie, and then, after a mid-August promotion to Triple A, a .296/.382/.552 line so far for Toledo. He’s also gone 15-for-16 in stolen base attempts and has played the majority of his games in center field, where he’s looked better than I ever would have expected. A better defender will probably push him to a corner in time, but he won’t have to move there through any failings of his own. He’s actually three months younger than Witt, and had arguably a better season at the plate, but Witt gets the edge for his position and greater defensive value.
M.J. Melendez, C, Kansas City
I can’t adequately express how overmatched Melendez and Pratto looked in 2019 — at least, not without using some family-unfriendly language. Their approaches were horrible, and in Melendez’s case, it looked like he was guessing every at-bat, so occasionally he’d hit something very hard, but more often you’d get a strong breeze from his at-bats. He punched out in 39.3 percent of his plate appearances that year, but he cut that almost in half this year, whiffing just 21.5 percent of the time, even with a midseason promotion from Double A to Triple A. He led all minor-league hitters with 38 homers, part of a Royals romp through that particular category; four minor-league hitters aged 25 or younger had at least 30 homers this year, and three were Royals prospects — Melendez, Witt and Pratto. Melendez also has a cannon of an arm, along with erratic glovework that has improved over 2019. The Royals’ current catcher has had a hell of a season, but that position should be Melendez’s in the very near future.
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Julio Rodríguez, OF, Seattle
Rodríguez played only 74 games this year around his time playing for the Dominican Republic Olympic team. But when he played here, he was outstanding, hitting a combined .347/.441/.560 between High A and Double A, even boosting his walk rate after the promotion. He also stole 21 bases, which is … um, carry the two … 21 times his stolen-base total from 2019. Rodríguez’s approach and the length of his swing looked like they might be an issue for him over the long term coming out of that last minor-league season, but he’s had no trouble at all hitting more advanced pitching this year, and I’m not sure he’d even benefit from going to Triple A at this point.
Anthony Volpe, SS, NY Yankees
Volpe did the same thing as Nick Yorke (see below), mashing at both levels of A-ball, and actually outproducing Yorke with a .294/.423/.604 line, including 27 homers, 33 steals in 42 attempts and above-average defense at shortstop. He’s a year older than Yorke, which probably gives Yorke the edge in ranking their performances, but Volpe is the better prospect because he has the edge everywhere but in hit tool. He also finished ninth among all minor-league hitters in walks this year with 78, and he was younger than everyone above him on the leaderboard.
Nick Yorke, 2B, Boston
I just saw Yorke for the first time last week, catching one of two three-strikeout games he had in the season’s final series, but that was just a soft ending to a tremendous season for the surprise first-round pick from 2020. Yorke was rehabbing from a shoulder injury and had barely been scouted since the previous summer, so teams that had him in at all had him in the second or third rounds — or later. All the 19-year-old did in his pro debut was hit .325/.412/.516 between Low and High A, with nearly as many walks as strikeouts. (I saw 4.3 percent of his strikeouts for the entire season in just that one game, in fact.) His swing is really good, simple, direct, likely to produce a lot of line-drive contact, although probably no more power than we saw this year. He’s fringy at second base but won’t have to move off the position unless his shoulder flares up again. I’d be lying if I denied that seeing him swing through multiple fastballs in the zone bothered me, but the full season of production has to trump the one-game look here. Everyone killed the pick when Boston took Yorke — myself included — but it’s worked out beautifully.
Honorable mentions: Francisco Álvarez, C, NY Mets; Orelvis Martinez, SS, Toronto; M.J. Melendez, C, Kansas City; Andy Pages, OF, LA Dodgers; Nick Plummer, OF, St. Louis; Nick Pratto, 1B, Kansas City; Alek Thomas, OF, Arizona; Jordan Walker, 3B, St. Louis.
Top draft debut: Jay Allen, OF, Cincinnati
Quite a few of this year’s draft picks have gotten off to great starts in pro ball, even though several teams were aggressive with assigning college hitters they took to full-season leagues (which is a great move, in my view). Outfielder Colton Cowser, the Orioles’ first pick at No. 5, went off for Low-A Delmarva, hitting .347/.476/.429. Shortstop Matt McLain, the Reds’ first pick at No. 17, hit .273/.387/.424 with 10 steals for High-A Dayton. The Reds’ second pick, outfielder Jay Allen, gets the nod for the best pro debut of a draft pick from this year, hitting .328/.440/.557 in the Arizona Complex League, just edging out the Cubs’ James Triantos for the honor. The late draft meant that most draftees played only 15 to 20 games, so they’re all small sample sizes, but Allen showed the best combination of hitting, patience and power of this year’s pool of draft picks, given the limited time they had on the field. Also worth mentioning are Harry Ford (Seattle), Brady House (Washington), Benny Montgomery (Colorado), and Kahlil Watson (Miami), all first-rounders with great debuts in the complex leagues this year, but in fewer games than Allen played.
(Top photo of Bobby Witt Jr.: Scott W. Grau / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
