The 2014 NationalsProspects.com Watchlist

With the completion of the Rule 5 draft, what we hope to be a break in the trades, it’s time to unveil the fourth edition of our look at the Nationals prospects that we’re keeping an eye on, a.k.a. watching. This is my alternative to doing a large mixed list, which, like cable news, may generate a lot of viewers and discussion but serves little purpose otherwise.

My apologies to the longtime readers, but a few caveats for the folks who are unfamiliar with how this works…

• It’s not a depth chart — Players are listed first by the highest level at which they played significant time, then alphabetically. This mostly applies to the pitchers and outfielder nowadays, but folks should not infer that the player at the top of the list is necessarily better than the guy at the bottom.

• It’s not a prediction of usage — As noted during the preliminary posts, there are players that have played multiple positions and could be easily placed in more than one column. Naturally, I’m exploiting that for aesthetic purposes, but not to fantasy-baseball extent (e.g. he played one game at the position there).

• It’s not fair — There are players here that I wouldn’t list otherwise were it not for lack of position depth or dexterity. We’ve already seen that there’s a bias towards established players, though I’ve made a couple of changes that may very well be overcorrections to offset that.

I did indeed scrap the M*A*S*H category in favor of breaking apart the DSL bats and arms (which sounds more painful than what I mean) to keep the design intact. I created the category to acknowledge that the DSL is purely a scouting-by-box-score exercise. Truth be told, this is also true of the GCL and NYPL, too, but I’ve resisted the very tempting idea (from a workload perspective) of dropping coverage of one or more of the short-season leagues because I want to be as extensive as possible with this site.

Without further ado…