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There is no One True Golden List.

There isn’t a Top 100 prospect ranking kept in a vault somewhere that will be revealed on Opening Day with all of the right answers. We won’t truly know how a Top 100 holds up until 10, 15, even 20 years from now. Until then, we can only study up, watch tape, talk to sources, elicit feedback and incorporate all of that into what you see on the MLB Pipeline Prospect Watch page.

In other words, be human.

Jim Callis, Jonathan Mayo and I are indeed humans, not AI machines thankfully, and we collaborate on the Top 100 that becomes an instant debate point the second we release it to the public. Truth be told, we have our own debates as we hammer out the list, and those debates only strengthen the list itself. We have a defense for why we ranked guys as we did because we’ve already defended it among ourselves.

With that in mind, I wanted to use this week’s MLB Pipeline newsletter to take you behind the curtain a little bit and share which prospects spurred the most debate as part of this year’s Top 100 process.

Charlie Condon, OF/3B, Rockies (No. 29)
Last year’s Golden Spikes Award winner was the most dominant force in college baseball, leading Division I in average (.433), homers (37) and OPS (1.565), and since he played for Georgia in the SEC, those numbers didn’t exactly come against weak competition. There were some defensive questions (which remain) about Condon’s profile, but in all, he was considered one of the best hitting prospects in the Draft before he went third overall to the Rockies. Then he struck out in 31.2 percent of his at-bats over 25 games for High-A Spokane and hit just .180/.248/.270 in 109 plate appearances.

External feedback indicated worry that this wasn’t small-sample craziness and that Condon looked poor enough to see his stock slip quickly in pro ball. It also seems like a hand injury may have been partly to blame, and that the former Bulldog may have pressed to make up the results. In the end, we allowed Condon some grace considering he looked much better in a larger sample size, but he still dropped a few spots from early drafts of the Top 100. If the hand was a reason for the struggle, he could easily leap again with more pro success in the spring. But if his issues are deeper than that, we’re prepared to move him down again as warning signs grow louder.

Ethan Salas, C, Padres (No. 33)
Signed for $5.6 million in January 2023, Salas shot up to No. 8 overall in our 2024 preseason rankings after looking like a well-rounded catcher on the fast track to San Diego. That progress stalled during his age-18 season in which he slashed just .206/.288/.311 in 111 games for High-A Fort Wayne. The young backstop’s defensive evaluations remain as good as ever, but catching prospects can be fickle given how much they have to take on -- both physically and mentally -- at a young age. (See: Diego Cartaya.) Salas showed some signs of a turnaround late in the Midwest League after stance adjustments, and he mostly held his own in the Arizona Fall League. But the up-and-down nature of his career has many scouts shrugging as they try to figure out his profile. There was some thought to push Salas even deeper because of those concerns, but given his age and potential ceiling, we settled on keeping him in the Top 35 but behind other catchers with more exciting feedback in Dalton Rushing and Kyle Teel.

Kumar Rocker, RHP, Rangers (No. 44)
You might remember Rocker as one of the most dominant college pitchers of the last decade for his time at Vanderbilt. You might also remember the right shoulder and Tommy John surgeries that followed and that entering his age-25 season, he’s only thrown 64 2/3 innings in pro ball in the Minors. All of that was part of the consideration here. As was that Rocker’s “death ball” slider just might be the best breaking pitch among prospects and that he was sitting 96-97 mph with his four-seamer. It’s a complicated mix for the player that ended up being the oldest on the Top 100. Rocker’s MLB-ready pitch mix would push him into the Top 25 alone, but his checkered injury history moved him down closer to the middle. If not for that, he likely wouldn’t have been on the list as a longtime graduate in the first place.

Xavier Isaac, 1B, Rays (No. 51)
What do you do with a left-handed slugger who produced some of the Minors’ most consistently great exit velocities in his age-20 season? Typically, you rank them fairly high up. What do you do with a player with a 40.6 percent K rate at Double-A and an overall swing-and-miss rate of 49.3 percent? That might be someone you move off the list entirely. For Isaac, his time with Montgomery presented his first real struggle in the Minors, and he was still almost four years younger than average for the Southern League. A more dominant turn in the Arizona Fall League would have pushed him into the Top 40, but even though we still believe he can be valuable as a high-power, low-contact type, we tended to jump other prospects over Isaac when they entered the same range.

Jesus Made, SS/3B, Brewers (No. 56)
A personal favorite prospect of mine, Made laid waste to the Dominican Summer League in his first taste of the Minors and had the underlying data to amp up the excitement level tenfold. (More on that in the scouting report linked above.) In short, he was a selective hitter capable of making loud contact when he got his pitch -- a terrific formula. But there were those three pesky letters: DSL. As good as the data is, the DSL isn’t a place known for pitchers with incredible command, and Made will be tested more as he comes stateside, likely to Single-A Carolina early in 2025. The 17-year-old has the ceiling of players ranked much higher, but even this represents a fairly unprecedented move for such a young player with so little pro experience.

Jacob Misiorowski, RHP, Brewers (No. 100)
In my writeup on Monday, I noted that Misiorowski has the best grades for his fastball (80) and curveball (70) among this year’s Top 100 crop, and I’ll add that his low-90s cutter-like slider is no slouch either. But the 6-foot-7 hurler’s control issues haven’t much improved since he was drafted in 2022, and the Brewers gave him a long look as a Triple-A reliever to end last year. Milwaukee has said this offseason it plans to keep Misiorowski in a starting role entering the new year, but most evaluators see him as a future closer. We tend not to place pure relievers on the Top 100 when there are so many other starting prospects out there. Misiorowski almost got squeezed out as a result. But he snuck back on because the starting door isn’t fully closed yet, and even if/when it does, his fallback might be as a right-handed Josh Hader -- a closer who the market decided was worth $95 million just last offseason.