Last Updated on July 1, 2025 4:11 pm by Paul Williamson | Published: July 1, 2025

Happy birthday to the greatest country in the world! No, not you guys.

From comedians such as Mike Meyers, to athletes like Wayne Gretzky, and our musical pride and joy Drake Avril Lavigne, us Canadians have been quietly infiltrating our Southern neighbours (that’s right, with a U) from the inside out without you Americans ever cluing in. Heck, I bet you didn’t know that one of the biggest risers in dynasty baseball this season – Jonah Tong –  is from Ontario!

The rest of this article has nothing at all to do with Canada, but I’m required to patriotically highlight our own at least once every couple years otherwise I risk losing my passport.

That job now done, let’s get on to the prospects!

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 June 30th.

Colson Montgomery – SS – CHW 💎

Last 14 Days: .317/.356/.780 – 4HR/0SB – .466 wOBA – .463 ISO – 173 wRC+ (AAA)

Season: .217/.294/.425 – 11HR/4SB – .321 wOBA – .208 ISO – 80 wRC+ (CPX/AAA)

I’ve said it once and I’ll probably say it a million more times; prospect progression is (say it with me, class) not linear!

Though he wasn’t selected until the back half of the first round in the 2021 draft, Montgomery carried reasonably high expectations even as a high school hitter, receiving a $3-million dollar bonus on the strength of his power and on-base skills. After a cup of coffee in the complex leagues as a 19-year old in 2021, Montgomery came out the following year and slashed a combined .274/.381/.429 across three levels (A/A+/AA), which officially put him on the map as a prospect.

Though he struggled in his first taste of Double-A, to the tune of a .484 OPS over 14 games, his second go-around showed significant growth, as he managed a much-improved line of .244/.400/.427 with a 129 wRC+ in 37 games played at just 21 years of age. That performance started to push him up the rankings, mostly towards the range of 25-50, as his stock began to flourish but just as quickly as it initially rose, a .700 OPS at Triple-A  in 2024 caused his value to start slipping away before the remainder crumbled away in the blink of an eye with his performance to open the 2025 season.

Through his first 23 games of the year, Montgomery managed a paltry .149 average with just a .479 OPS while striking out 41.7% of the time. Even though he was still younger than most of his competition at Triple-A, it’s impossible to just look past an output so putrid while simply claiming he’ll just work through things, so the White Sox took a drastic step – they demoted him.

Not back to Double-A, nor even to High-A. No, Montgomery was sent all the way down to the Complex leagues in order to clear his head while reworking his swing mechanics in an attempt to get him back on track.

Though he only got into five games in his time at the level, hitting just .176/.263/.176, the time away did seem to help him find his focus as he’s gained new life upon his return to Triple-A. In what is now a 30-game sample size, Montgomery has flourished once more with a slash line of .278/.354/.600 and eight home runs – and most importantly, a strikeout rate that has now been trimmed down significantly to a rate of 27.7 percent.

Because we don’t have access to the non-public Statcast data in the minors, it’s rare that I get the opportunity to include some proper batted ball data but because Montgomery has spent the past two seasons at Triple-A, where systems are used at all stadiums, we actually have some data points to use as evidence of a rebound;

Remember, those 2025 statistics still include the start of the season in which Montgomery fell flat on his face since we aren’t able to separate out what he did pre- and post-sojourn to the complex leagues, making it an even more impressive turnaround than it may seem on the surface.

There’s still work to be done, but Montgomery is starting to slowly earn back our trust in his ability to be a fantasy contributor.

Kevin Alcantara – OF – CHC 💎

Last 14 Days: .412/.487/.735 – 2HR/0SB – .526 wOBA – .324 ISO – 213 wRC+ (AAA)

Season: .264/.346/.448 – 9HR/9SB – .356 wOBA – .184 ISO – 104 wRC+ (AAA)

Big-bodied power-speed threats who are young for their level are usually feted as the up and coming stars of tomorrow but despite matching home run and stolen base totals of 14 each to go with a 121 wRC+ split between Double-A and Triple-A as a 21-year-old last year, Alcantara has not received quite the same level of praise as some of his prospect peers.

It could be that his long levers (he measures at 6’6″ tall) point towards the potential for elevated strikeout totals, but we’ve seen other similarly talented and plus-sized players such as Aaron Judge (the prospect) or Oneil Cruz eventually find their swing’s comfort zone after an adjustment so while we’re basing some of our guesswork off of association, it doesn’t seem farfetched to think Alcantara could follow in their footsteps, even if to slightly less success. To his doubters’ credit, Alcantara is currently running a strikeout rate north of 30% but he’s also crushing the ball when he does make contact, upping his hard-hit rate from last season an additional 1.4% to sit just a couple decimal points shy of 50% while also increasing his MaxEV by a matching 1.4mph.

When you do that kind of damage when swinging the bat, it helps to make sure that you’re lifting the ball rather than pounding ground balls into the dirt and Alcantara seems to have taken that lesson to heart, having bumped up his flyball rate compared to last year’s figures at Triple-A;

Between the batting and body profiles, it seems clear that Alcantara is going to be a streaky hitter once he eventually gets an extended run at the MLB level but when he finds himself in a hot stretch, he’ll look like an All-Star caliber hitter. The only question will be, how often do we see that version?

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Jeff Clowers

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