MLB Pipeline Releases its Top 30 for Washington

As per usual, MLB decided to wait until Spring Training was in full swing before, say, releasing this in January or February when more people might care or pay attention. Sorry, I don’t buy the chimera that this is in preparation for next week’s “Breakout Series,” which, if it were that important, wouldn’t be held over three days in conjunction with the regular ST.

I mean, how hard is to understand that if you’re going to do a prospects showcase, then maybe you should put the focus on the minor-leaguers so that they’re only ones that get written/talked/tweeted about for one news cycle? You could do what BA’s been doing for years and remind the gambl…er, fantasy-baseball folks that this is how you can get help picking your “deep league” teams.

But if there’s anyone or anything more tone-deaf than the Nats’ P.R., it’s MLB’s marketing/handling of MiLB so I probably am Abe Simpson here…

Back to the the MLB Pipeline Top 30, it’s once again in lockstep with the BA Top 30 with some, um, minor differences:

• OF Elijah Green at #6 instead of BA’s #9
• OF Daylen Lile at #7 vs. instead of BA’s #11
• RHP Travis Sykora at #11 vs. BA’s #14
• LHP DJ Herz at #13 vs. BA’s #15
• RHP Jackson Rutledge at #15 vs. BA’s #6
• Inclusions of Dustin Saenz and Israel Pineda
• Exclusions of Armando Cruz and Andrew Alvarez

The accompanying writeup confusingly dates the rebuild to the Juan Soto trade in 2022 vs. the flurry of trades made in July 2021 but otherwise checks the boxes as reliably as a ChatGPT bot.

With perhaps the exception of the overvaluation of Green, most of these differences come down to the listmaker’s subjectivity. As Mr. Boss argued in his post yesterday, there might be a better case to be made for Andry Lara and/or Roismar Quintana being overlooked.

As we’ve long noted here, there’s no need to remove your shoes when counting the true-blue chippers in the Washington system, which is probably just as well, given the number of slings the organization goes through each season.