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Weirdest trade of the year award goes to the Nationals, who attached Trea Turner to Max Scherzer’s remaining contract and moved about 130 million dollars off the payroll over the next seven years for the pre-free-agency life cycles of Dodgers’ prospects RHP Josiah Gray and C Keibert Ruiz. It’s an intriguing build, provided they get anything from Stephen Strasburg, Carter Kieboom, Victor Robles, Patrick Corbin and Luis Garcia. The team doesn’t look particularly close at first blush, but if they can find a few clever free agent moves, I can see the bones of a contender if I squint hard enough. 

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One odd outcome of this tank-focused era in baseball: you really stick out if you try to win and then don’t. Have you seen Squid Game yet? The would-be contenders who try but fail are essentially those people who moved after the giant doll said red light, only this happens daily for several months until merciful October embraces us all in pumpkin spice, candy corn and yard work. 

In New York, we find an organization that could have Jarred Kelenic, Pete Crow-Armstrong and Kumar Rocker. Instead, Steve Cohen and company have Edwin Diaz, Robinson Cano, and a chunk of payroll that wouldn’t exist if they’d just waited for their ship to come in. I get it; I like to push all in, too. I just never quite understand the binary that suddenly crops up midseason for some teams. Or when a new boss comes in and wags their Brodie V around just to say they’ve done something. Or when a new owner plays hardball with a first-round pick he was lucky to land. The game shouldn’t be about winning now or winning later and always waking the line going back and forth on that, or always robbing from the one hoping for the other. Whatever, sorry for the rant, let’s check the spects.

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The Marlins had high hopes this year coming off a crazy playoff chase fueled partially by Covid-based rule changes and the emergence of RHP Sixto Sanchez. 2022 was a different story—a coming-back-to-earth for the cellar dwelling fish—but that’s in the past after today, and the future remains bright in South Beach.

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I was putting the finishing touches on my top 10 prospects piece for the Miami Marlins when a curious news blurb came across my feed. The Pittsburgh Pirates would be calling up RHP Roansy Contreras to start Wednesday’s game. “Blimey!” I shouted like a scurvy landlubber walking the plank. “We’ve been hornswaggled!” 

I was confused, in other words, and have been circling the briney deep in my mind ever since, sailing around the pros and cons like an old seadog scanning for land.

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Atlanta is finishing a painful but impressive season, bottoming out at one point after losing Mike Soroka and Ronald Acuña Jr. for the year on top of missing Ian Anderson–not to mention the Marcel Ozuna saga. 

They could’ve done the cool kid thing and stopped trying. Instead, they traded for a whole new outfield of misfit toys–Jorge Soler, Joc Pederson, and Adam Duval–that selling teams no longer wanted on the payroll, sacrificing next to nothing from their farm in the process and putting together another potentially division-winning club, their fourth in a row if they can hold off the Phillies, who are just one game back as I type this on Saturday night. 

If Atlanta can power through, they’ll have benefited from being in baseball’s wonkiest division, but a win is a win, and who knows, perhaps this team that figures to win about 85 games will outperform much better regular season squads in the postseason, and even if they fall short, their minor league system looks better to me than it has since Acuña graduated. 

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I’m often referencing the echo chamber in this space, and sometimes I’ll throw in a specific citation even though I’m not here to drag other prospect people in specific as much as I’m here to help readers find value in general. A big part of finding value is knowing who’s free and who’s a helium-filled fever dream. When a deep lens into the echo chamber crossed my Twitter feed this week courtesy of High Upside Fantasy, it seemed like something I should share here. 

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Curious events in Cincinnati lead the way this week, as it probably hasn’t since Jerry Springer was running that town. Director of Pitching Initiatives / Pitching Coordinator Kyle Boddy has stepped away from the club this week, citing creative differences with the front office while heaping praise on major league pitching coach Derek Johnson. 

Click here for the full press release

The timing is odd, given the Reds success on the farm this season and proximity to a post-season on the big league side, but I suppose there’s never an ideal time for a break-up. Cut to early-20’s me navigating the transition from summer love to school-year fade to long-term relationship fizzle to finding some fickle reason to finally call it quits. I used to really hate endings. Now I’m old as hell and appreciate any kind of pause in the monotony.

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Washington OF Victor Robles is a priority target for me this off-season because I still think he’ll someday become the .280, 20 HR, 30 SB type he appeared to be before totally forgetting how to hit. The price is definitely Bob right now. I won’t go bidding into the wind of that dreamscape on the trade market if he’s rostered by a devout Robles believer, but chances are, the Robles-heavy investor is more than ready to diversify the portfolio. 

So why should we buy?

Just hope and hype of winters past?

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The tinkering is finished for tonight.

At this point in my highway hypnosis of staring at a spreadsheet for two weeks, I’m just hoping to park the car safely.

I’d love to discuss the work with you all, so drop a thought in the comments if that appeals to you.

The only real guide I’d offer to reading these rankings is the top group is fluid. The big two of Julio Rodriguez and Bobby Witt Jr. have built their own little neighborhood. Both should have played in the majors this year. Julio is flat out embarrassing AA pitchers. I maintain my stance that Jerry Dipoto chose foolishly when he decided to push Jarred Kelenic and slam the breaks on Rodriguez, a choice he apparently made sometime back in February and never once revisited throughout the season.

After the top two, there’s not much distance between CJ Abrams at #3 and Adley Rutschman at #8, a group that’s built in part by the injuries to Abrams and Carroll and the tanking of Baltimore, Chicago and Detroit. Can make a pretty strong case that all the healthy players in the elite eight earned a shot at major league pitching this year, but that’s baseball these days. Let’s get romantic about the rest of the list!

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Pittsburgh 3B Juan Jerez is all over my Twitter feed these days, which probably says as much about my Twitter feed as it does Juan Jerez, but that’s beside the point. Juan Jerez can hit, is the point. He’s slashing .307/.400/.521 with 6 HR and 10 SB as a 19-year-old in the Complex League. Would love to see him get a crack at Low A, even for a week or so, but Pittsburgh is getting stacked up on the lower levels, so he’ll probably have to wait it out. In his last ten games, Jerez is hitting .425 with 4 HR and 4 SB. Swing mechanics work bottom to top, maximizing the thunder in his 6-foot frame. This next bit comes from the department of redundancy department if you’re here every week: Pittsburgh knows what it’s doing on the development front. A lot of their hitters look like poetry in the batter’s box. They settle like still water then strike from their core through to their hands. 

Here’s a Jerez bomb with a nice effort and assist from the left fielder. 

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I’m working through my final Top 100 update of the regular season, aiming to post it next Sunday, and it’s been a lot of fun so far. After grinding through a much quieter and quicker 2020 season, it’s amazing to me how much an actual season of baseball can change our perspective on prospect world. Earlier this year, we didn’t know if we’d have the Dominican Summer Leagues at all, and the lower level complex leagues were little more than a fuzzy possibility in the eyes of prospect diehards. With the development ladder of baseball reshaped but functional again from the ground up, the full picture of our game is coming into focus. Let’s start with a couple DSL standouts on the cusp of ascending the bottom rung. 

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