PHILADELPHIA — A lot of scouting directors will roll their eyes when you talk about Top 100 prospects. There’s a good reason for that. Back when Baseball America first popularized the genre, an organization could mostly take pride whenever one of its minor league hopefuls earned national accolades. It was a carrot for scouts, a stick for career-minded executives, a headline for ticket sellers.
Now?
It’s still all of those things. But it can also be a curse. In our transaction-mad and comprehensively aggregated world, the annual Top 100 lists have become a shorthand for scouting success. At some point, “Top 100″ came to mean both “relevant” and “can’t miss.” The only prospects who mattered were the ones on that list. And the ones who were on that list were ones whom fans could pencil into their lineups and rotations for the next decade.
