Baseball America released their top 10 Astros prospects list today. Spoiler 1. Jacob Melton 2. Xavier Neyens 3. Anderson Brito 4. Ethan Frey 5. Brice Matthews 6. A.J. Blubaugh 7. Kevin Alvarez 8. Ethan Pecko 9. Walker Janek 10. Bryce Mayer
Interesting. They’ve been high on Melton for 2 years. That’s pretty high for Frey. Ullola outside the top 10 is an outlier.
I do not find any great meaning for players in the Top 10 lists, that have not made it to AA yet. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Luis Rodriguez is also a great young pitcher, traded from the White Sox from the Corey Julks trade. Eduardo Yunior Perez, 6'4, 19 years old Power Hitter in the DSL League. Plate discipline in taking walks is the next development for him.
This article mentions Matthews being expected to play a role with Houston this season: https://www.mlb.com/astros/news/astros-top-prospect-brice-matthews-in-2026-plans I was thinking about how quickly Brice Matthews and Cam Smith have been moved thru the system. Smith has a similar profile to Carson Benge, who is a current MLB Top 30 prospect. If both Matthews and Smith had been promoted more slowly, dominating AA last season before moving up and dominating AAA with maybe just a small sample in the majors, Smith would be a Top 30 prospect and Matthews would be in the 60-90 range. I wonder then what the opinions/rankings would be of Houston’s farm system.
Houstons farm includes hundreds of prospects. Mathews is only one of them. Neither him nor Cam Smith changes my overall perception of that system. Neither of them is likely to be in the Astros farm system for very long if at all next season.
