2024 Bluebird Banter Top 40 Prospects Index

Better late than never, the Bluebird Banter Top 40 prospect list returns over the next couple weeks leading into Opening Day. As in the past few years, the 2024 list is a collaboration of myself and Tom M.

The list was compiled, as previously, by grades in addition to the probability distributions formally introduced last year. Lists are fun, but it’s often the case that ordinal rankings obscure as much as they inform. Especially toward, the backend, the difference between a few spots on a prospect list is negligible and more in the eye of the beholder. The idea is to focus on and provide more context on how we see the prospects not only relatively, but with more emphasis on risks and projected realistic outlooks for major league value. After all, that’s what really matters in the end.

For more detail on the grading scale, see this primer from Fangraphs

To be frank, this is currently a pretty thin system and for the first time in years it was a struggle to fill out the backend of the list. The one notable strength —a number of near term contributors over age-25 at the upper levels—doesn’t even come into play for the main list. While making for a banner list of Older Prospects, it exacerbates the vacuum at the backend. All of which to say, there is not much separation in the back half of the list and placement is as much intuition and preference than objective differences.

2024 also completes a pendulum swing with very modest turnover after years of churn that only moderated last year. The recently departed Otto Lopez (#8) was the only graduation from the 2023 list, with Davis Schneider and Bowden Francis the only others to exhaust rookie eligibility from the Just Missed and Top 5 Older lists respectively.

Likewise, there was a markedly reduced outflow of prospects to other organizations, with only Sem Robberse (11) departing via trade. Though fellow birds-of a-now-different-red-feather Adam Kloffenstein and Matt Svanson were just beyond last year and would have easily placed on a midseason update.

Instead, as alluded to above, the most significant attrition from the 2023 list was of players who retain rookie eligibility but aged off the BBB criteria. There were a half dozen in total, headlined by Yosver Zulueta (7), Spencer Horwitz (13) and Tanner Morris (24) with another trio at the backend of whom only Brandon Eisert (38) would factor in. Most would expect to see these names on a prospect list, and we considered revising the criteria especially in light of the lost 2020 season, but demurred and instead will indicate where they’d slot in.

Of the other 32, with a mild spoiler alert, 22 are holdovers on the 2024 list though of course with significant moves in both directions. The turnover was highly segmented, with the top of the top more static than usual and the top 19 returning in some capacity, moderate turnover in the middle, and much more wholesale turnover on the back end.

This page/stream will serve as a landing page for all the content in this series. In addition to links for all the posts, the entire list will be below in one place as it is unveiled.

See also:

• The 2023 Bluebird Banter Top 40 Prospects List Index
• The 2022 Bluebird Banter Top 40 Prospects List Index
• The 2020 Bluebird Banter Top 40 Prospects List Index
• The 2019 Bluebird Banter Top 40 Prospects List Index
• The 2018 Bluebird Banter Top 40 Prospects List Index

Eligibility criteria for BBB Top 40:

• Players must retain rookie status (less than 130 MLB at-bats / 50 innings or 45 active days)
• 2024 must be the player’s age-25 or younger season, that is, players born after June 30, 1998. That’s not to say players older than that don’t have value or won’t make the majors, which is why we make a separate list for them as part of the series. Rather, they are closer to finished/developed products and beyond the point where further growth is an expectation and something to be projected which is a fundamental component of prospect lists/analysis.

2024 Top 40 List (grade):

9. Damiano Palmegiani (40)
10. Enmanuel Bonilla (40)
11. Connor Cooke (40)
12. Hagen Danner (40)
13. Adam Macko (40)
14. Kendry Rojas (40)
15. Dahian Santos (40)
16. Cade Doughty (40)
17. Chad Dallas (40)
18. Landen Maroudis (40)
19. Jace Bohrofen (40)
20. Juaron Watts-Brown (40)
21. T.J. Brock (35+/40)
22. Alex De Jesus (35+/40)
23. Gabriel Martinez (35+/40)
24. Hayden Juenger (35+/40)
25. CJ Van Eyk (35+)
26. Fernando Perez (35+)
27. Yondrei Rojas (35+)
28. Pat Gallagher (35)
29. Adrian Pinto (35)
30. Dasan Brown (35)
31. Tucker Toman (35)
32. Trenton Wallace (35)
33. Rafael Sanchez (35)
34. Connor O’Halloran (35)
35. Ryan Jennings (35)
36. Lazaro Estrada (35)
37. David Guzman (35)
38. Sam Shaw (35)
39. Nolan Perry (35)
40. Edward Duran (35)