Seven Blue Jays to be on BA Top 100 list

Baseball America will release its 29th annual Top 100 prospects list on Wednesday, and Bluebird Banter has learned from a well-placed source on deep background (okay, an email from BA) that it will feature seven Blue Jays prospects. Given that those 100 are spread across 30 teams, the Blue Jays will be punching well above their weight with double the average representation.

We don’t know who exactly those seven will be, though BA’s Blue Jays Top 10 list from the end of October is suggestive (the overall and teams lists are done by different people, so they don’t necessarily line up perfectly. That list was headlined by the usual suspects, essentially the consensus top three in the system: Vlad Jr., Bo Bichette, and Danny Jansen.

Those three were followed by teenager phenom RHP Eric Pardinho (who just turned 18 a few weeks ago), 2018 first rounder SS/3B Jordan Groshans, fireballing righty Nate Pearson and his 100+ MPH velocity, 2018’s big riser in SS Kevin Smith, and then RHP Sean Reid-Foley. That’s the top eight, so at least one those will necessarily be left off the Top 100, and that’s assuming no one else jumps up from below (infielders Cavan Biggio and Miguel Hiraldo rounded out the top 10.

With that in mind, let’s have some fun with predictions. In the comments, give us the seven names that will make the list, the order in which they will appear, and the estimated spot of each prospect. It’s not a formal contest, since I don’t want to get Tom in trouble with his good friends in the legal department, but we’ll score everyone’s projections by taking the absolute difference in predicted spots for each prospect, taking the square root, and adding them up. So for example, if Nate Pearson were 75th, predictions of 50 and 100 would both be 25 off, the square root of which is 5 which would be the score for that projection (lower is better). Players who don’t make the list will be assumed to rank 125 for the purposes of scoring.