Colorado Rockies prospect rankings, pre-season 2019: Top 30 summary

After revealing the Purple Row community’s Colorado Rockies top prospect list over the last few weeks, it’s time to show the whole list at once with some voting stats. I’ll also have some thoughts on the state of the system to share tomorrow to conclude the series.

Without further ado, here is the full pre-season 2019 Top 30 PuRPs list, including some voting stats:

It was an easy top prospect ranking for Brendan Rodgers in this edition of the PuRPs poll with a near monopoly on the top spot of PuRPs ballots, receiving 31 of 32 first place votes. This is his fifth top PuRP honors in a row. The top 10 players all cleared 650 points and were named on all 32 ballots, among 13 prospects to receive that honor.

As a reminder, 30 points were granted for a first place vote, 29 for second, etc. Until a player was named on 11 ballots, his vote totals were modified on a sliding scale to avoid an individual ballot having too much say over the community forecast. In this edition of the list this rule was only applied to one player in the top 30. For more info on voting numbers for players that didn’t quite make the top 30, please check out the intro post to this edition of the PuRPs list as well as the write-ups of the honorable mention PuRPs. No ties were broken in the top 30, though spots 30 and 31 were decided by a single point.

There was a pretty good consensus about the top 23 prospects, forming a clear tier of players that the electorate felt were potential MLB impact players by virtue of the fact that they were named on at least 26 of the ballots.

Some more notes:

• In all, 13 players were on every ballot, 60 players received at least one vote for this PuRPs list (up from 57 last time), 50 got mentioned on multiple ballots (same as mid-season 2018), 32 were named on at least 11 ballots (and therefore were unmodified), and all PuRPs were named on at least half of the ballots, showing that most of the list was more or less agreed upon by the community, if not necessarily the order. Here is a link to the polling thread.
• In this edition of the PuRPs list there were six new names compared to the mid-season 2018 list. The new PuRPs are Justin Lawrence (15), Josh Fuentes (16), Reid Humphreys (18), Ryan Feltner (19), Rico Garcia (20), and Bret Boswell (28). None of these prospects had previously been a PuRP on a prior list.

Breaking the list down by position, there are 14 pitchers (9 of them are nominally starters with a couple being a question mark, ten are righties, four are southpaws, and four are in the top 10), four outfielders, six corner infielders, five middle infielders, and one catcher.

It looks like there are five PuRPs who finished the season in MLB or Triple-A (including three of the top five), so it won’t be long before we start seeing some of these guys producing as regulars for the Rockies, which will open up room for some new faces on future PuRP lists.