Gunnar Henderson Moves To No. 1 in Our New Top 100

With our update of the Top 100 Prospects list—now with 2022 draft picks included—we have a new No. 1 prospect in baseball.

Orioles shortstop Gunnar Henderson ascends to the top spot.

We release our offseason Top 100 Prospects list in January every year. That’s the Top 100 that we record as our “official” Top 100 that we will refer to for years to come.

But as our readers know, to better provide all the information we gather, we now update our Top 100 Prospects list monthly during the MiLB season. We are continually gathering feedback on prospects, and the monthly updates allow us to better reflect what we learn as we learn it. This is why a prospect like Jackson Chourio can go from far off of the Top 100 Prospects list in January to one of the top prospects in all of baseball at this point.

But in between those monthly updates, we also account for graduations by removing players as they reach 130 MLB at-bats, 50 MLB innings or 30 MLB appearances. When we do that, we move everyone else up while adding a prospect at No. 100 to replace the graduated player. In between those monthly re-ranks, we are not re-evaluating the rankings, but we will account for graduations.

We moved Blue Jays catcher Gabriel Moreno to No. 1 on July 27. He moved up to No.1 because our then-No. 1 prospect Riley Greene graduated by topping 130 at-bats. Now that we are doing our full assessment of the Top 100 for a re-rank,  the consensus was that Gunnar Henderson is the best choice as the No. 1 prospect in baseball.

Our more recent previous re-rank was on July 11. Now, we are doing our final re-rank of the Top 100 Prospects list of the 2022 season. When we head into the offseason, we will have many hours of additional reporting and discussions to hash out our 2023 No. 1 prospect. It will assuredly be a tough decision.