Rangers Top Pitching Prospect’s Bold Projection Puts Him Among MLB’s Best

The Texas Rangers have expected a lot of pitching prospect capital in the last several months to improve the team. That leaves opportunity for others.

Caden Scarborough is one of those pitchers the Rangers hopes to see step up in 2026. He’s already made tremendous strides in one year. At the start of the 2025 season, MLB Pipeline ranked him at the bottom of the organization’s Top 30 prospects. Earlier this month, those same rankings had him at No. 2 behind Sebastian Walcott.

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Among right-handed pitchers, he’s not among the Top 10 in baseball. But, if MLB Pipeline’s bold prediction for 2026 comes to pass, Texas won’t have to wait long.

Caden Scarborough’s Bold 2026 Prediction

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Scarborough is just 20 years old and has risen relatively fast through the ranks since he was a sixth-round pick of the Rangers in 2023 out of Harmony, Fla.

He’s only pitched two pro seasons. He has an under .500 record as a starter. But sites like MLB Pipeline don’t just judge players on numbers. They judge them on talent. And if things work right in 2026, the site believes Scarborough will occupy some rare air:

“He'll continue his ascension in 2026, ranking among the Minor League leaders in strikeouts and K/BB ratio and blossoming into the third-best righty pitching prospect in the game, behind only Seth Hernandez (Pirates) and Ryan Sloan (Mariners),” wrote the Pipeline analysts.

That’s good news for the Rangers, who traded three Top 15 pitching prospects —Kohl Drake, Mitch Bratt and David Hagaman — in July to the Arizona Diamondbacks to acquire Merrill Kelly. Texas also included pitcher Alejandro Rosario to the Washington Nationals as part of the five-player haul to acquire left-hander MacKenzie Gore in January.

In 2025 with Class-A Hickory and High-A Hub City, his overall record was 2-5 but everything flipped. He trimmed the ERA to 2.45 in 22 games (21 starts), with 114 strikeouts and 21 walks in 88 innings. Batters hit just .181 against him. He also had a 0.88 WHIP. That was after he only got six games in for 2024, thanks to a strained lat.

In that small sample in the Arizona Complex League and Class-A Down East, he went 2-1 with a 6.97 ERA, with 13 strikeouts and nine walks in 10.1 innings.

He isn’t the only pitching prospect the Rangers are counting on. There is also David Davalillo, who had an incredible 2025 and was named the franchise’s winner of the Nolan Ryan pitcher of the year award. But, right now, Scarborough is ahead of him — in both prospect rankings and bold predictions.