Colorado Rockies prospect rankings, mid-season 2021: Top 30 summary

After revealing the Purple Row community’s Colorado Rockies top prospect list over the last week, 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 as a whole on Monday to conclude the series.

Without further ado, here is the full mid-season 2021 Top 30 PuRPs list, including some voting stats:

After finishing a close second in the previous poll, 2020 first rounder Zac Veen ran away with votes this time around, garnering 21 of 23 first place votes. 2018 first-round pick Ryan Rolison was a strong second, while 2021 first-rounder Benny Montgomery and 2019 first-rounder Michael Toglia rounded out an all-first-round top four.

In all, 13 players were listed on all 23 ballots and another seven were included on 22 ballots, including the top 18. There was a pretty good consensus about the top 23 prospects, forming a clear tier of players that the electorate felt were worthy by virtue of the fact that they were named on at least 19 of the 23 ballots. Polling was conducted in August 2021 after the trade deadline, so all major transactions had been finalized.

As a reminder, 30 points were granted for a first place vote, 29 for second, etc. Until a player was named on five 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 wasn’t applied to any 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. Several ties were broken this time around, both in the top 30 (Sam Weatherly was on more ballots than Adael Amador) and the ‘others receiving votes’ section.

Some more notes:

• 59 players received at least one vote for this PuRPs list (up from 51 last time), 46 got mentioned on multiple ballots (up from 38), and 32 were named on at least eight ballots (and therefore were unmodified). All PuRPs were named on at least 11 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 nine new names compared to the preseason 2021 list. The new PuRPs are Benny Montgomery (3), Elehuris Montero (4), Jaden Hill (9), Joe Rock (16), Willie MacIver (22). Hunter Goodman (24), McCade Brown (26), Noah Davis (28), and Warming Bernabel (29). Seven of these new PuRPs weren’t in the system the last time polling was conducted, coming either by the draft or trade.

Breaking the list down by position, there are 12 pitchers (all of which are nominally starters with a few potentially on their way to a relief role; eight are righties, four are southpaws, and three are in the top 10), five outfielders, five corner infielders, three middle infielders, two who could play either a corner or middle infield position, and three catchers.

Though the upper minors have largely been bereft of highly-ranked prospects this year, 2022 should see seven to 10 of these PuRPs play in Triple-A or the big leagues. There’s going to be a large reckoning on the 40-man roster this offseason given the lost development time in 2020, which I’ll talk more about in my state of the system post. The bottom line is that I expect to see quite a bit of churn on the list in the next year through organizational changes or MLB service time.