Revisiting and re-ranking baseball's top 10 prospect lists 10 years later

A decade after being considered future stars, many of the players have not panned out, some have and one was overlooked entirely.

Although baseball's draft does not inspire anywhere near the same level of engagement as do the NFL and NBA versions, the interest level in discovering the Next Big Thing remains just as high in the national pastime as anywhere else. In recent years, prospect lists have become especially popular, and now—with former top prospects having just reached the majors in recent days, the upcoming Super Two cutoff promising more to come, the start of the NCAA baseball tournament and the MLB draft itself just days away—this constitutes something of the high season for thinking about baseball's future stars.

With that in mind, we decided to take a look back just 10 years to see who the game's consensus best prospects were as measured by the top 100 lists of Baseball America and Baseball Prospectus, the leaders in the field then and now. We then re-ranked the top 10 based on how the careers of the players on those top 100 lists have turned out with some tie-breaking consideration given to what might happen in the years ahead.

Before proceeding, a quick note: While BA ranked newly signed Red Sox pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka No. 1 overall before the '07 season, BP did not include him at all in its top 100 because the Japanese righty was arriving in the U.S. as more of a fully formed star than a traditional prospect; we have therefore decided to keep Matsuzaka off of our list as well.