Last Updated on July 15, 2025 11:30 am by Paul Williamson | Published: July 15, 2025

The All-Star break now upon us, the attention of many a manager will turn to the myriad of festivities, whether it’s the Home Run Derby or the All-Star Game itself. But for the prospect hounds like you and I, the feature attraction was Saturday’s Futures Game, featuring some of the best and brightest prospects from around the league.

Of our ten names this week, only two – Owen Caissie and Carter Jensen – took part in this year’s showcase, with Caissie doubling and walking twice, while Jensen struck out in his lone plate appearance. Though Caissie had an impressive outing overall, MVP honors were instead awarded to the Dodgers’ Josue De Paula for his three-run home run off of White Sox starter Noah Schultz, but it nonetheless added an extra exclamation point to cap off a sizzling first half of the season for the Cubs outfielder, as he regained a lot of the shine he had previously held in prospect circles.

Though the rest of the names below weren’t among the lucky group to receive an invite this season, they’re absolutely showing the skills necessary to be included – and perhaps even star in – next year’s event.

The usual preamble;

This article will come out every two weeks, highlighting the ten most noteworthy performances for MiLB players during that window. The players discussed will come from a mix of levels (Triple-A, Single-A, etc.) and because of that, I will attempt to contextualize their statistics for both the quality of competition, as well as the player’s own age, to the best of my abilities. In other words, a 25-year old slugger going on a home run binge isn’t going to get my attention if they’re facing off against a 20-year-old pitcher on a daily basis. On the other hand, an 18-year-old holding their own against more advanced pitching is going to skyrocket them towards the top of the rankings very quickly.

Since we could go as deep into the minors as the Complex and Dominican Summer Leagues, this is intended as more of a companion article for deep dynasty leagues, as opposed to those that shallow enough to essentially just focus on players listed on Top 100 lists. This is more for the sickos who want to be able to brag about having the next Jesus Made or Jung Hoo Lee on their roster more than five years before they make their MLB debut.

That said, there’s a chance some of our mining leads to some true diamonds in the rough emerging – just look to what Kristian Campbell did last year for example. So with that in mind, I will have a specific section of each article that focuses on how the upper echelon of prospects is performing, in addition to geeking out over the future wave of breakout stars. And as we go through the season, I’ll denote each player written about as one of three categories;

Golden 🥇 (the best of the best)

Gems 💎 (exciting up-and-comers)

Unrefined ⚒ (has tools of interest)

As the weeks go by, I’ll track each player and how many times they appear in the article under each category in a chart at the bottom. Hopefully by year’s end we’ll then have rough ranking of the most interesting players from each tier as a guideline that you can then use for your own dynasty purposes!

Statistics are up to date as of July 14th.

Esteban Mejia – SP – BAL 💎

Last 14 Days: 4.1 IP – 0.00 ERA/2.73 FIP/0.69 WHIP – 5:1 K:BB – 0 HR (CPX)

Season: 36.2 IP – 2.21 ERA/2.78 FIP/1.25 WHIP – 46:19 K:BB – 0 HR (CPX)

I wanted to start this week off with Meija specifically because he’s illustrative of a line of thinking that’s been rattling around in my head for a while and I’ve been looking for a way to get it from my brain into an article. Turns out Mejia was just who I was looking for.

See, for as much time as I do invest researching prospects on my own time, I am doing so as a hobby – because I enjoy it and find it an interesting endeavor. Over the years, I feel I’ve been able to have a slightly better success rate than your normal fantasy manager due to this, but it by no means makes me a scout – 99.9% of the time, my opinions come from a combination of the statistics plus parsing the looks that actual scouts are able to get of these players. After all, not only do I have a full-time job that has nothing to do with baseball, I live in the wrong country to reliably see 29 of the 30 teams play live.

Though I thank you for choosing yours truly, what that means is, despite my best efforts, I’m sometimes only a mouthpiece for the information of others. This is one such case, as my interest in Mejia comes from a particularly praiseworthy writeup over at Baseball America. I’ve read many such writeups over the years but the descriptions used by the author (Josh Norris) took me panel by panel through the Vince McMahon meme, progressively getting more and more excited. Let’s dive through it together.

After describing the slow grind of scouting no-name players on backfields to little fanfare, the author writes;

Sorting the prospects from the suspects can be a slog, but every so often someone comes to the fore with talent that places him more than a few cuts above the rest. These are the prospects who make you forget about the heat, the humidity and the jagged quality of play and demand your full attention.

Esteban Mejia is one such player.

Color me intrigued, naturally. Throw on a deep baritone and you can almost picture the words above as the voiceover opening of a movie trailer, can’t you? But let’s find out more about what Mejia has to offer.

The Orioles righthander is 18 years old and armed with the body, athleticism and pitch package that allow evaluators to dream big. He produces outings that burrow in your brain and stay there for weeks. Seeing ceilings this high requires binoculars … He stands 6-foot-3 and checks in at about 175 pounds, leaving him plenty of room to add strength in the coming years. The thought alone should drench hitters in a cold sweat, given the pyrotechnics already produced by Mejia’s whip-quick right arm.

In the words of one Ace Ventura… Alrighty then! Those certainly are impossible to ignore comparisons.

Already hitting 102mph with his fastball while regularly sitting in the upper 90s, Mejia has all the tools necessary to become a legitimate ace in the league. The only problem? He’s yet to advance to full-season ball. This is a player a long, and I mean long, way from the majors who will need to prove his ability over a much longer time period… but this seems to be the Eury Perez toolkit if everything breaks right. The sky is seemingly the limit!

Edward Florentino – OF – PIT 💎

Last 14 Days: .333/.463/.714 – 4HR/9SB – .522 wOBA – .381 ISO – 212 wRC+ (A)

Season: .325/.429/.613 – 10HR/18SB – .478 wOBA – .288 ISO – 181 wRC+ (CPX/A)

Unlike Mejia, Florentino actually has the boxscore numbers to backup his soon-to-be meteoric rise up the prospect rankings.

Boasting an outstanding powerstroke for an 18-year-old, Florentino’s 60-grade raw power is buoyed by his ability to make some of his best contact on batted balls in the air, leading to an extremely fantasy-friendly home run profile. Being able to do that consistently is how the best hitters in the league find success but it’s not as easy to do as it sounds – just look to someone like Vlad Jr. as an example of a hitter whose hardest hits tend to come on launch angles that lead to groundballs instead of home runs. It’s still early, but having that skillset at this age is a fantastic sign of Florentino following in the footsteps of organization-mate Konnor Griffin as Pirates prospects who quickly went from outside Top 100 lists to firmly in the upper half.

Currently listed at 6’4″ and 200lbs, the chances of Florentino keeping up his stolen base is unlikely – he’s already projected to eventually end up at first base – but the bat is looking like it will be more than capable of carrying him to potential stardom on its own.

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Jeff Clowers

• "The Dynasty Diamond": July 15th
• Working The Waiver Wire: July 11th
• Working The Waiver Wire: July 4th