This week MLB and MLBPA restarted their negotiations, but it seems rather obvious that it will require games to be lost for the owners to end their lockout. Please note that syntax: It’s important. There is no strike.
This, however, is a site for prospects and prospect-following. I only reference the MLB lockout because it is not beyond the realm of possibility that they’ll threaten to sign replacement players as they did in 1995.
Odds are, the replacement players would not be “our guys” but the 4A types like Jake Noll or Daniel Palka, but the absence of those guys could cause a ripple effect such that we could see an awful lot of guys signed to plug holes and/or marginal guys “promoted” to Low-A with hopes that the lockout will end by the time the FCL starts up.
TOP 100 SEASON
Baseball America and Keith Law have weighed in with their Top 100 Prospects List. Cade Cavalli and Brady “He’s A Brick” House are on both lists – No. 27 (BA) and No. 48 (Law) for Cavalli; No. 59 (BA) and No. 46 (Law) for House. Interesting tidbit: According to Law, Ruiz has exhausted his prospect eligibility:
Days on the roster in September now count against the rookie threshold, whereas days on the active roster in any September prior to 2020 do not count, a change MLB made to the rookie eligibility rules in 2020. Thus new Washington catcher Keibert Ruiz, who has 46 days on active rosters in the last two years, no longer qualifies.
I’m torn whether or not to remove Ruiz from our 2022 Watchlist, even though my first line from his capsule is this: “To be honest, it’s hard for me to get that excited about Keibert Ruiz because he feels like he’s already graduated.”
A few years ago, we ran into this with the immortal Wilmer Difo, who hit the service-time limit in late August 2016 but was under the limit for PAs. Baseball America, for those wondering, does not care about consider service time, which conveniently enables them to keep borderline players on their multitude of lists for longer.
I’m leaning towards keeping him with an asterisk since he’s part of a category that will probably (hopefully) not happen again. But I can be swayed on this if you’d like to take a swag in the comments.
We now return you to your winter malaise (hence the pic)…