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1. Nationals OF Dylan Crews | 22 | AAA

His last ten games have been arguably his best of the season: .300/.383/.600 with three home runs, two steals and a 10.6 percent strikeout rate. Small sample goes without saying but I’ll say it anyway and then say the Nats have had Crews on the escalator all season and will reportedly make room for him sooner than later. That’s what has him in the top spot, for what it’s Werth: the likelihood of a call-up turned out to be more valuable than usual in the construction of this list. Lots of uncertainty in the stash game this time of year.

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Dodgers RHP Edgardo Henriquez (21, AAA) missed last season due to Tommy John surgery but has recovered his easy-plus pitch mix and cruised through four levels already this season, recording 70 strikeouts in 41.1 innings along the way. Now he’s just one step away from joining an L.A. bullpen that could use an infusion of youth.  

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Astros 3B Zach Dezenzo (24) debuted last night after graduating Triple-A in just 11 games. He slashed .391/.472/.739 with four home runs and three stolen bases in those 11 games, so kudos to the ‘Stros for waving him onward to the majors. Dezenzo’s a large dude at 6’4” 220 lbs and brings easy power from the right side. Heads up in the Crawford boxes. 

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Here’s a link to the Top 50 Prospects For Dynasty Fantasy Baseball: May 2024 Update. Here’s a general layout of what’s been happening since then.  Graduated:  Paul Skenes, Wyatt Langford, Christian Scott, Pete Crow-Armstrong, Noelvi Marte, Heston Kjerstad, Jonny Deluca.  Moving Down:  Jonny Farmelo, Ricky Tiedemann, Orelvis Martinez, Cole Young.  Moving Up:  Sebastian Walcott, Roman […]

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If I were running an MLB organization these past few weeks, I’d have been on the phone with Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s agent in a fairly constant way, discussing long term contracts while I backchannel with the Blue Jays about his price tag on the trade market. It’s probably good that I’m not in that position. In dynasty leagues, I have a tendency to pay what it costs to make the move and figure out the rest in the aftermath. Major league teams do not agree with that approach, considering the lack of prospect firepower that changed organizations on deadline day. Baseball America ran a piece that said zero top 100 prospects were traded this time around. While we might be able to pick at the specifics a bit, the premise feels fair enough: this year brought us a strange few days of trades without many Named Guys making headlines. 

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1. Guardians 2B Travis Bazzana | 21  With Bazzana, the Guardians get their most polished draft prospect in a long time, but he’s not a floor play by any means. At six foot even out of Australia, Bazzana has gotten stronger throughout his career in college ball and added significant impact to his plus-contact profile, […]

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This week marks the beginning of a bottleneck on the minor league baseball calendar. 

The Arizona and Florida Complex Leagues will finish their regular seasons on Thursday before a brief playoffs. After the postseason, some of these players will head to a practice facility after a 50-game season. Some will get promoted to Low-A to continue their development via in-game repetitions. You can probably guess which outcome most players would prefer. It’d be a long off-season if you weren’t going to play an actual game again for about seven months. 

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I found out a few hours before the Futures Game that the Skills Showcase Challenge won’t air live after the seventh inning. Instead, it will be available on tape delay the next morning (today) at 10 a.m. EST. Perhaps that’s for the best in the sense that this event is new, and the league has no idea how it’s really going to play out, and certainly has no idea how to broadcast it before it happens. I figured it was pretty intuitive: show the hitter, show the hit, show the hitter, show the hit, and so on, but maybe it’s not that simple, and maybe it’s on tape delay for other reasons than trust in competence. I’m sure they want to have some kind of post-game show and include an interview or two. Whatever the reason, the showcase is probably on right now if you’re reading this as part of a Sunday morning routine. 

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Reds OF Rece Hinds has splurted out of the big league gate like catsup that’s been sitting upside down on a warm summer’s day or a chocolate bar in the hands of a toddler on that same summer day. They’re having a picnic, maybe, and listening to the Cincinnati Reds game because this is the 1970’s in middle America we’re talking about now through the power of sentences. In that era, a guy like Rece Hinds might hang around on the strength of 30 home run thump with the sort of off-the-bus skills that played well in those days, but which I mean he looks good getting off the bus, or sitting on the plane, or taking batting practice on the field. It’s hard to predict how free swingers will react to advanced scouting, but everything we’ve seen so far suggests pitchers will figure out they don’t have to throw strikes against Hinds, and that’ll put the squeeze back in the bottle real quick, as the kids say. Hinds struck out 38.4 percent of the time in 77 Triple-A games this year in part because he can’t catch up to the high cheese, and he can’t lay off the sauce down and out. Ingest at your own risk. 

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The 2024 Futures Game rosters were made public on Tuesday, so I’d like to highlight some key takeaways that might be relevant to people with mid-week transaction set-ups. 

For dynasty purposes, the Futures Game has always been an escalator for prospect fantasy values. Most people don’t watch minor league baseball on the regular, so their first time seeing some of these prospects with their own eyes happens during this seven-inning exhibition game. 

My takeaway today is that values are going to change more than ever this season due to the new Futures Skills Showcase that will follow the game itself. 

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