2019 First Year Player Draft Prospects, 2019 Fantasy Baseball

Happy holidays! For your present this year, I’m pushing out the Top 50 First Year Player Prospects. I chose those words precisely because rankings to me are like childbirth. Painful. Everybody wants to see. And then your in-laws complain about the name you picked out. Wonderful! For reals though, these specs are the most unsurest of an unsure bunch, so tiers are chunked in tens. I won’t put up much of a fuss within tiers, but if you want to talk about a player being in the wrong tier altogether, I think that’s a discussion worth having. I’ve already gone over my Top 10 First Year Player Prospects, and in that intro I talked a little about where my head’s at when I do these. (Insert “up my ass” joke here). Enjoy!

Swaggerty kicks off the next tier with a nice combination of power and speed from center field. India follows with a low risk/reward profile that should move quickly through the minors. Then we have a run of high schoolers with distant ETAs. From that group, Edwards and Adams have 80-grade speed. Wheels don’t age well, but those two could potentially impact the steals category on arrival. Luciano is the first international teenager I’m taking this year.

This tier is the most interesting to me. Martinez and Nunez are great international specs to target in the late second/early third rounds. They both have a ton of offensive upside from the left side of the dirt. Then we have a pair of first basemen with plus power in Lavigne and Casas. Kyler Murray is a gigantic crapshoot, but he’s obviously a freak athlete. I probably won’t touch him myself (in drafts that is) but on pure tools he’s still in that top 25.

There are a bunch of pitchers in this tier – which is funny because if I was actually drafting, this is where I’d take my first arm. I like Rodriguez’s fastball/slider combo for the strikeout potential. Turang and Schnell are both going to be projects, but the payoff could be above-average pop and speed up the middle.

The most interesting name in this tier is Clemens. Yes, he’s related. Sometimes prospects play above their raw tools thanks to plus makeup or grit. Clemens appears to be one of those. We’ll have to wait until some other year for Sharts to get drafted (thanks to Matt for pointing out he opted for college). I’m forming a prayer nonagon that he makes it to the pros just so I can hear this – “Owen Sharts on the mound.”