Will A Pitching Prospect Ever Rank No. 1 Again On The Top 100?

The Baseball America Top 100 Prospects list has been around for 34 seasons. The Top 100 has been around long enough that prospects from the first Top 100 lists are now Hall of Famers.

At the top of the list, we’ve had outfielders (14), shortstops (6), catchers (4) and third basemen (3). But what has disappeared from the top spot are pitchers.

It has now been 17 seasons since a pitcher ranked No. 1 on the Top 100 Prospects list. This year, the top four prospects on the Top 100 are all position players.

Not only has no pitcher ranked No. 1 since Daisuke Matsuzaka of the Red Sox claimed the top spot in 2007, the only pitcher who has ranked in the top three in the past 10 years is Shohei Ohtani. And he’s a special case, because he also happened to be an outfielder/DH who had 35-home run potential as a two-way player.

It wasn’t always this way. In the first three years of the Top 100, a pitcher topped the list in all three years. Those three—Steve Avery (1990), Todd Van Poppel (1991) and Brien Taylor (1992)—are also a useful reminder of why just three pitchers (Matsuzaka, Rick Ankiel and Josh Beckett) have ranked No. 1 in the 31 seasons since.

There are more things that can go wrong with a pitcher. A young pitching prospect carries a much higher risk of significant injury than a position player. The chances of a pitcher’s career being derailed or interrupted by a significant injury is much higher than that of a position player.

In the six drafts from 2015 to 2020, there have been seven prep pitchers picked in the first round who have yet to throw 100 total pro innings because of injury. They are Nick Bitsko (2020), Brennan Malone (2019), Mason Denaburg (2018), Ethan Hankins (2018), Brady Aiken (2015), Ashe Russell (2015) and Mike Nikorak (2015).  Just this past week, we learned that Matt Allan, a 2019 third-round pick, had surgery on his elbow for a third time.

There is no analog for position players missing so much time.

For all of those reasons, we at Baseball America and baseball as an industry have become much more wary about ranking or valuing pitching prospects on the same level with the top position prospects. 

Baseball Prospectus’ 2003 study that declared that “there’s no such thing as a pitching prospect” may have been a massive over-simplification, but TINSTAPP was grounded in a kernel of truth. Pitching prospects are consistently more volatile than hitting prospects for a variety of reasons.

The steady reduction in innings even the best pitchers throw adds to the argument against ranking them No. 1. As late as 2010, the top starting pitchers in the majors would throw around 240 to 250 innings. In 2022, just eight pitchers topped 200 innings. In terms of batters faced, the leaders used to top 1,000 in a season. Only one pitcher has topped 900 batters faced since 2017.

There has been no similar reduction in the workload for position players, so the top position players are logging a larger share of playing time in comparison to pitchers.

Since no pitcher has ranked No. 1 in the most recent half of Top 100 Prospects history, it’s fair to wonder if there will ever again be a pitcher who ranks No. 1 on the Top 100.

Never say never. It’s possible that a year from now someone like Phillies righthander Andrew Painter may be viewed as clearly the best prospect in baseball, far enough beyond the best position prospect that he ranks No. 1, even accounting for the risks pitchers entail.

Or if Roki Sasaki dominates the Japanese major leagues for much of the rest of the 2020s, it’s possible to see him heading to the U.S. as a big league-ready ace whose immediate impact may slot him at No. 1.

But it is clear that it’s much harder for a pitcher to rank No. 1 than it was when Baseball America first rolled out the Top 100 Prospects in 1990, and that’s likely to be true for years to come.