Five Cincinnati Reds prospects land on John Sickels’ Top 100 list

Minor League Ball’s John Sickels has a new home at The Athletic - all the cool kids are doing it! - and he’s back at his prospect evaluation game in full force. On the eve of Cincinnati Reds pitchers and catchers reporting for work at the team’s spring training facility in Goodyear, AZ, Sickels also has his updated Top 100 overall prospect list ready for your perusal, and a handful of Reds farmhands have cracked the list.

The group of Reds is predictably led by Nick Senzel, who checks in at #7 overall, roughly in-line with where he’s been placed by most all prospect evaluators.

Somewhat surprisingly, Taylor Trammell shows up only at #32 overall, perhaps due to his second half slump after the brilliant first half of his 2018 season, one that was highlighted by winning the Futures Game MVP at the MLB All Star Weekend Bonanza Shindig Hair Care & Tire Repair. Perhaps I’m also just so irrationally excited about Trammell’s potential that here I am, pooh-poohing a ranking of #32 overall.

Both Hunter Greene (#39) and Jonathan India (#49) crack the Top 50, with both ranked relatively similar to where they’ve been in other rankings. Greene, of course, might well have the biggest chance to rise meteorically up this list of any pitching prospect in the game, as his elbow issues have largely seen folks pump the brakes on him year over year, but if the dominant displays he posted immediately prior to being shut down mid-2018 show up early and often in 2019, he’ll be poised to return to being ranked among the absolute top pitching prospects out there.

Finally, Tony Santillan checks in at #81 overall, with Sickels urging folks not to ‘overlook him,’ something that I do feel many have done in recent years. It could well be that the additions of Sonny Gray, Tanner Roark, and Alex Wood to the big league roster have caused us to temper our furor over who will emerge as the next great Reds pitcher from the farm, but at #81, Santillan enters the 2019 season in almost exactly the same spot that Tyler Mahle did just last year, and we should all recall well how excited we were for Mahle’s eventual big league debut. (And how excited we should still be about Mahle’s future in the rotation, to be honest.)

In all, it’s a solid showing for the Reds farm. It’s also damn refreshing to see Sickels have a home for his work again, as he’s long provided excellent analysis on the futures of MLB franchises. If ever you needed another reason to pick up a subscription to The Athletic, well, now you’ve got one - it’s worth mentioning that the full version of his list includes breakdowns of each prospect, too, and is much more than merely rankings.