2023 FYPD Rankings: Top 100 For First-Year Player Drafts

Dynasty leagues typically conduct their first-year player drafts in January, February or March, with managers in those leagues hard at work each offseason reviewing the most recent MLB draft class and incoming international signees.

This is Baseball America’s fourth crack at ranking the top 100 first-year prospects for dynasty leagues—you can see how we did in 2020, 2021 and 2022. Our focus this year is on 2022 draft picks plus the international free agents who signed on Jan. 15 this year. We also ranked the two latest Japanese imports from Nippon Professional Baseball.

These rankings were developed by Carlos Collazo, Geoff Pontes and Ben Badler, giving BA readers the best possible mix of expertise on the draft, professional and international talent pools.

As always, we focus more on upside and positional talent versus pitching. This is a primary reason why players who rank highly on draft or organizational top prospects rankings may rank lower here. It’s a matter of applying the proper context through the lens of fantasy baseball, where power, speed and a player’s hit tool are the most valuable attributes a position prospect can have. Conversely, pitching is all about power. The value of strikeouts is paramount in dynasty baseball, and there is a heavy bias toward pitchers with swing-and-miss arsenals.

Key

— H stands for batting/pitching hand, where an asterisk (*) denotes lefthanded, blank signifies righthanded and a pound sign (#) means switch-hitter.

— BA Grades appear in the 2023 Prospect Handbook and estimate players’ projected major league value on the 20-80 scouting scale. Each BA Grade comes with an assessment for Risk. In this exercise all players are assessed as either medium (M), high (H), very high (V) or extreme (X) risk.