Here come the 2024 Top Prospects!

It’s that time of year, when we simultaneously count up our SSS Top Prospects, from 100 to 1, while gauging our readership’s picks for the top two or three dozen prospects in the system.

As always, I will be proctoring the Top Prospect Vote. Each round will feature 10 players to choose from. Some basic stats and prior SSS prospect rankings will be provided to help you choose. This year, we’re starting our vote/countdown earlier (last year, around Christmas?), so depending on how close the voting is, we may even take a week between Prospect Votes. As always, however, when a vote is a runaway, it will be called early to move on to the next spot.

This year’s Top 100 composition will again boast a variety of bylines, including me, Brett, Joe Resis, Melissa Sage-Bollenbach, Kristina Airdo and Luke Smailes. The remnants of WSM’s tireless biography work years back will live on in some writeups as well.

In the past, we’ve imagined these two lists meeting in the middle, i.e. running the Top Prospect Vote until No. 50, right around the time we’ve counted all the way up from 100 to the midway point. In the past couple of years, voting has petered out well before No. 50. We’ll take the vote as far as makes sense, but once we’re down to just a couple of dozen voters still interested, we may be losing some overall value in the exercise.

Anyway, it should be fun, once again. There seem to be some scoffers out there, even among our own readers, who think that a clown farm system like the White Sox’s doesn’t merit any sort of “top [x] prospects” offseason feature. But as Brett has always maintained, these might be the only features ever done on some of these players — let’s give them some shine. We have a lot of new entries this year, as some familiar names have matriculated to the majors, left the system, of fallen out of Top Prospect consideration.

Besides, guys don’t just roll out of bed as Top 10 blue chips. Highly-ranked Cristian Mena was first featured in this series at No. 82 (2020) and No. 94 (2021), Adam Hackenberg was at No. 66 back in 2021, and Anderson Comás fell completely out of the Top 100 as an outfielder and is now reborn here as a reliever. (And in the past, guys like Carlos Pérez ranked low as No. 81 just a few years ago.) These profiles can be seen as sneak previews of the guys you’ll be paying a lot more attention to in days to come.

2018 SSS Top Prospect Vote
2019 South Side Sox Prospect Vote
2020 South Side Sox Top Prospect Vote
2021 White Sox Top Prospect Vote
2021 White Sox Top 100 Prospects
2022 White Sox Top Prospect Vote
2022 White Sox Top 100 Prospects
2023 White Sox Top Prospect Vote
2023 White Sox Top 100 Prospects

(our first Top 100 prospect countdown was over at South Side Hit Pen)