Who is your #20 prospect in the Orioles system for 2020? (poll)

What gets you excited about a prospect, or at least leaves you intrigued about their potential? It’s different for everyone, but I think one thing that helps, especially for the sort of lower-ranked guys we’ve been going through in our polls for a little while, is familiarity.

The players you’ve followed loosely through the minors for two or three years are more interesting than last year’s fourth round draft pick and the seventh-best player acquired in a fire sale. Time will tell whether the familiar ones or the newer ones turn out to have a positive impact on the next good Orioles team - or if any of these guys will end up mattering at all.

In the last poll, the time finally came for outfielder Kyle Stowers to make it onto our list. With Fangraphs being the most aggressive on his potential, my choice to follow those rankings for when to add prospects to the polls has meant that Stowers has been available as a choice since the poll for #8. Only at #19 has he been the choice of Camden Chat readers, and that by a mere three-vote margin over infielder Rylan Bannon.

Our last poll features Bannon and the other five holdovers from last time: Infielders Cadyn Grenier and Darell Hernaiz, the ambiguously positioned Ramon Urias, pitcher Kyle Bradish, and outfielder Zach Watson. Joining the poll here at the end is last year’s fourth round pick, shortstop Joseph Ortiz.

What makes one guy a better prospect than others? Is it a high ceiling? A respectable floor? A track record of performance at higher minor league levels? It’s for you to decide what matters the most. None of us are professional prospect watchers, and that’s OK. We can all still read some lists and look at stats and decide who seems exciting and who doesn’t.

You might find it helpful to consult some of the scouting reports on these players. I like MLB Pipeline and Fangraphs because they’re thorough, they update over the course of a season, and they’re free. These have both updated their team rankings for the 2020 season. If you’re a subscriber to The Athletic, you can also see Keith Law’s top 20 Orioles prospects. ESPN+ subscribers can check out McDaniel’s rankings of the O’s system as well.

The player who gets the most votes in this poll will come in at the #20 slot in our top 20 prospects list, whether or not they receive a majority of votes cast. This is the end of the list. If your favorite less-heralded prospect didn’t make the cut, I hope that he plays well enough whenever there’s baseball again to move higher up the list.

Top prospects so far

1. Adley Rutschman
2. Austin Hays
3. Grayson Rodriguez
4. DL Hall
5. Ryan Mountcastle
6. Yusniel Diaz
7. Gunnar Henderson
8. Dean Kremer
9. Michael Baumann
10. Keegan Akin
11. Zac Lowther
12. Adam Hall
13. Zach Pop
14. Bruce Zimmermann
15. Hunter Harvey
16. Alexander Wells
17. Ryan McKenna
18. Drew Rom
19. Kyle Stowers

Today’s choices for #20

Cadyn Grenier
Acquired: 2018 draft (1st round/comp. balance, 37th overall)
2020 age: 23
2019 highest level: High-A Frederick

Between Delmarva and Frederick last season, Cadyn Grenier came to the plate 456 times and struck out 138 times. That is a strikeout in 30.3% of his plate appearances. Among qualified batters at the MLB level in 2019, just two players had a higher K%. It is very, very hard to become a successful player when are already striking out that much in A-ball. Most of the ones who achieve some kind of success hit a lot of dingers. Grenier had eight homers last season.

Whatever the Duquette group hoped the O’s might get out of Grenier hasn’t materialized yet. It would be unfair to act like there was no reason to believe in Grenier. His defensive skills at Oregon State were praised, with Grenier’s glove ability and arm pushing his better-hitting teammate Nick Madrigal, the #4 pick in that same draft, to second base.

That matters. If you can get a guy who can definitely play shortstop and just get him to hit a little bit, that’s a success. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened with Grenier yet in the pro ranks; he’s batted .236/.339/.369 in two pro seasons. It’s a hard climb to MLB if that’s already how you hit against A-ball pitchers. Things aren’t getting any easier.

FG’s Longenhagen mentions in his capsule on Grenier that he was “always a swing change candidate in pro ball,” so maybe the new development people will be better able to help him in his second full pro season. Grenier, according to Longenhagen, is not the only prospect being instructed on a “Donaldsonesque” swing, and if it clicks, he could be an MLB shortstop. Until it clicks, Grenier is not one of the names in the system that excites me.

Rylan Bannon
Acquired: July 2018 (Manny Machado trade with Dodgers)
2020 age: 24 (turns 24 on Apr. 22)
2019 highest level: Triple-A Norfolk

Bannon is the fourth of the players from the Machado trade to make an appearance on this poll. He has the same story of Dean Kremer and Zach Pop: He was performing at the time of the trade at a level that seemed to exceed his prospect hype. When the O’s acquired Bannon, he was batting .296/.402/.559 over 89 games with High-A Rancho Cucamonga, with 20 home runs.

It’s a batting line that gets the attention, as it seems to have gotten Duquette and company’s attention. However, that league, the California League, is a notorious hitter-friendly league and Bannon was about the same age as the competition. A 22-year-old, as he was then, wrecking High-A is interesting, but it doesn’t indicate a sky-high ceiling like a phenom hitting that level at age 19 might.

The MLB Pipeline capsule, which rates Bannon as the #18 prospect in the O’s system, says this about him:

A compact but strong hitter, Bannon controls the strike zone very well, as evidenced by big on-base numbers throughout his professional career. ... Defensively, Bannon possesses good first step quickness and a strong but sometimes erratic arm. ... All told, he profiles a valuable utility player at the Major League level, who should be able to provide some thump off the bench against left-handed pitching.

How Bannon looks against Triple-A competition over the season this year might determine whether he can be more than just a bench player. As it is, his ceiling sounds a bit like a Hanser Alberto-type of player in that he’s a guy who can play second base and third base and developed the calling card in 2019 of hitting against lefties. Bannon has walked more in the minors than Alberto has done in MLB to date, and he also strikes out more often than Alberto, but not a concerning level of strikeouts.

Bannon got a little taste of MLB spring training this year as a non-roster invite, though he was already reassigned to minor league camp before coronavirus concerns shut everything down. As a 2017 college draftee, Bannon will have to be added to the 40-man roster in order to be protected from the next Rule 5 draft.

Darell Hernaiz
Acquired: 2019 draft (5th round, 138th overall)
2020 age: 18 (turns 19 on August 3)
2019 highest level: Gulf Coast League Orioles

The MLB draft lacks the short-term gratification of other sports. This is doubly true when it involves the selection of players out of high school. Hernaiz, like higher-ranked 2019 draftee Gunnar Henderson, was still 17 years old on draft day last year. That’s probably what made both of them of interest to the new O’s draft brain trust. A younger player may be more raw in his skills but may have a higher upside to reach down the road.

Fangraphs ranking sees some potential in Hernaiz, labeling him “one of the more interesting young players in this system.” Part of that is by default; there aren’t many young players in the system since the Duquette-era O’s mostly weren’t signing the kinds of 16-year-old Dominican players who would otherwise be interesting young players in a system.

According to FG, Hernaiz already has “the ability to drop the bat head and lift pitches toward the bottom of the zone. He can rotate and create leverage, and might just stay at shortstop.” Since he’s so young, he might not appear until Aberdeen’s short season. It may well be that every minor league is a short season league in 2020 due to the coronavirus.

Kyle Bradish
Acquired: December 2019 (Dylan Bundy trade with Angels)
2020 age: 23
2019 highest level: High-A Inland Empire

It has not been any secret for nearly two years now that the Orioles are tanking. Still, the level this offseason of actively making the present-day team worse - rather than just opting to not improve it - was new since Mike Elias took over and it was tough to stomach even if you were steeled for the rebuild. The fact that Bradish, the highest-rated player the O’s acquired for Bundy or Jonathan Villar, only pops up on the FG list at #24, is not exciting.

Bradish was the Angels fourth round pick in the 2018 draft. One thing they probably liked about him a lot is that he struck out 140 batters in 101 innings for New Mexico State. That continued into the pro ranks in 2019, where Bradish struck out 120 batters in another 101 innings for Inland Empire. If a pitcher can strike a lot of guys out, that’s a plus.

What’s not a plus is Bradish’s walk rate. When a guy already has a 4.9 BB/9 in the Western Athletic Conference, there are problems to overcome. They were not immediately solved as a pro: Bradish had a 4.7 BB/9 last year. That’s probably what got FG’s Longenhagen to proclaim him “straight out of middle relief central casting.”

Ramon Urias
Acquired: Feb. 2020 waiver claim
2020 age: 26 (turns 26 June 3)
2019 highest level: Triple-A Memphis

As a general rule, guys who arrive via waiver claim at the age of 25 don’t have much in the way of prospect stock. If any idiot could look and see that guy’s good enough, or even that he will be good enough eventually, he doesn’t end up on waivers, and he’s not still in the minors when he’s about to turn 26.

Urias is absent from mention in lists other than the Fangraphs one, where he is described as “the player in the system about whom the scouts and data most disagree.” It’s not the scouts who like him, as Longenhagen notes he’s seen as “an unathletic infielder, arguably positionless, without the power to make up for his defensive issues.” It’s not a phrase that will make anyone start saving up for 2024 World Series tickets.

The plus side, such as it is, is that over about a full season’s worth of games at the Triple-A level, Urias has batted .262/.347/.426. It doesn’t cost the Orioles much to give him a look at Norfolk, where if he does well and someone falters at the MLB level, Urias might earn his own MLB chance, whenever baseball ends up being played again. Or he could just be one more infielder to cycle on and off the Orioles 40-man roster before any fan gets a chance to see him in Baltimore.

Zach Watson
Acquired: 2019 draft (3rd round, 79th overall)
2020 age: 23 (turns 23 June 25)
2019 highest level: Low-A Delmarva

The Orioles had picks #71 and #79 in the 2019 draft and used both of them on college center fielders from big-name programs. Stowers was a Stanford product, where Watson came from LSU. Both of these are far enough back in the draft that we probably shouldn’t expect big things, though they’re high enough that if the picks do work out, that won’t be surprising either.

Consider that the Orioles selected Austin Hays, a player you’re probably excited to see whenever 2020 baseball is played, at #91 in the 2016 draft. If you find one of the guys everyone else missed, you can pick a good player here.

One big difference with Hays is that Hays immediately showed up and knocked around pro pitching, batting .336/.386/.514 in 38 games at Aberdeen after being drafted. Watson’s batting line between Aberdeen and Delmarva was .224/.295/.431. It’s the same as I wrote about Stowers above: I’d rather see a good small sample than a bad one. Whenever baseball returns, we’ll see if Watson can start writing a new narrative.

Joseph Ortiz
Acquired: 2019 draft (4th round, 108th overall)
2020 age: 21
2019 highest level: Short-season Aberdeen

One thing that has been an ongoing theme of this list is that fans have tended to choose a more familiar name than a newer name who’s got some attention of professional prospect writers. That’s how Stowers went from being #10 on the Fangraphs list to barely making it in at #19 on our list.

Ortiz, like fellow 2019 picks Stowers and Watson, just hasn’t had a lot of time to be known to Orioles fans, and his immediate minor league results weren’t enough to draw attention to him. He played in 56 games for Aberdeen last season and batted .241/.345/.267. Any time the OBP is more than 100 points higher than the batting average, that’s interesting, but it’s less interesting when that comes along with “three extra-base hits in 195 at-bats.”

That kind of thing is probably why Ortiz is absent entirely from the Pipeline top 30 Orioles and only at #26 on the Fangraphs list. Even FG sums him up by saying, “Realistically, he’s a bench infielder.” It wouldn’t be an exciting outcome if he was a higher draft pick - like, say Grenier was - but that’d still be a success if Ortiz reaches that point. It’s just hard to get too interested when this is all he’s done so far.

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The last several polls have been narrow victories. There aren’t as many strong favorites this far down the rankings. Are you going to vote to get Bannon on the list at last, or do you have your eye on a different prospect to close out the list? Let us know in the comments below.