Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Cleveland Guardians. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the fifth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.
A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.
All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here.
Other Prospects of Note
Grouped by type and listed in order of preference within each category.
Defense-Aided Profiles
Kody Huff, C
Alex Mooney, INF
Dayan Frias, INF
All three of these guys can kind of play a premium position and do at least one other thing well. Huff, a Phoenix native who went to Stanford, is an average defender who is hitting the ball harder than he ever has before, but his strikeouts are excessive. He could be a fine third catcher on a 40-man. Mooney is a plus athlete with a powerful top hand and bend-y lower body. He’s rough around the edges on defense but could have a relevant power-hitting peak down the line because of how athletic his swing is. Frias has plateaued as a defender. He once looked like a future plus third base glove, but instead he’s merely average. He still has good lefty bat speed, switch-hitting utility, and defensive versatility.
Daniel Espino
Daniel Espino, RHP
We’re now at a point where Espino, who was once maybe the best pitching prospect in the sport, needs to show that he’s healthy before it’s reasonable to project a realistic big league future for him. He was once touching 102 mph and bending in huge secondary stuff, but he hasn’t pitched in several years due to multiple severe injuries.
Soft-Tossing Depth Starters
Ryan Webb, LHP
Rodney Boone, LHP
Aaron Davenport, RHP
Webb is a slider-heavy 26-year-old lefty out of Georgia who entered 2025 coming off two consecutive years of strong statistical performance in the mid- and upper-minors. He has a cricket bowler’s arm action and pitches heavily off a low-80s slider. Once part of a great college rotation at UC Santa Barbara, Boone’s sneaky fastball, above-average changeup and plus command have allowed the 25-year-old to pitch well up through Double-A. Davenport has been super durable (he’s thrown 100 or more innings each of the last four seasons) and is pitching well in Double-A off the back of his invisible 89 mph fastball. None of his secondaries are plus.
Power Sleepers
Jorge Burgos, 1B/OF
Jonathan Martinez, INF
Luis Merejo, 1B/RF
Burgos has plus lefty bat speed, and his swing is geared to get to all of his power. He hit 18 bombs last year but struck out nearly 30% of the time, which is too much for a poor 1B/OF defender. Martinez is another of the many interesting Guardians infielders in their complex group; he has plus bat speed but below-average feel for contact. Merejo is an 18-year-old righty slugger who is struggling to make contact in full season ball so far in 2025, but he has plus-plus bat speed and has a 50% hard-hit rate as of list publication.
Bat-to-Ball Types
Christian Knapczyk, 2B
Yeiferth Castillo, LF
Maick Collado, 1B
Bennett Thompson, C
Knapczyk is a hitterish second base-only defender without the power to play there every day. He’s performed well in A-ball, which is to be expected as he’s a 23-year-old who comes out of the ACC. Castillo is a stocky, 18-year-old Venezuelan outfielder whose listed height and weight (5-foot-8, 155 pounds) constitute a comical underestimation of his size. He has a great rookie ball contact track record, but he’s a maxed out 1B/LF type of athlete who needs to keep his strikeout rate in the single digits to keep climbing the list. Collado is a switch-hitting first baseman with good feel for contact but not enough power for a first base-only bat. Thompson was a Day Three pick out of Oregon in 2024 ($150,000) who has had offensive success at Low-A so far in 2025. He has a punchy swing and good strength for his size. I’m skeptical of his swing’s long-term viability, but he’s done enough so far to be on the radar.
Extra Relievers
Magnus Ellerts, RHP
Bradley Hanner, RHP
Tyler Thornton, RHP
Jake Miller, RHP
Ellerts is a 6-foot-5 righty with a 92-95 mph fastball that plays up thanks to his nearly seven feet of extension. He’ll flash a good slider but hangs too many of them. He has middle-inning relief ceiling if he can polish his control. Normally low-slot pitchers have longer, swooping arm actions, but Hanner is a low-release guy with an ultra-short, shot-putter’s stroke. It imparts weird angle on his 92 mph fastball and late lateral action on his hard slider, but Hanner’s control probably needs to improve for him to play a big league role. Thornton is an open-striding righty with a flat-angled, 94-96 mph fastball and 30-grade command. He’s recently back from the IL and pitching in Akron. Miller only throws 89 on average, but he has really deceptive arm speed and a right-freezing slider. The 24-year-old is off to a fair start at Akron.
System Overview
This is an above-average farm system thanks to the half dozen Top 100 prospects spearheading the list, and because the 45 FV tier is particularly deep in this org. Many of the high-profile players above are off to slow starts or are injured, which has stopped the guys who arguably have the talent to be 55- or 60-grade prospects from ascending into that tier a little more than a month and a half into the season. Injuries are rampant here. I count 13 players on the main section of the list who are either hurt right now, or are rehabbing from injury. It creates some volatility in the assessment of this system as a whole to have looks at that many players impacted by their health.
Has the bloom come off the pitching development rose a little bit here? While there are several recent late-round draftees who have improved enough to make the cut for this ranking, there is no obvious, Tanner Bibee-ish mid-rotation type who has added huge velo and is rocketing through this org right now. There are lots of former non-prospects who are suddenly 35+ or 40 FVs, but less in the way of the truly impact pitching we’re used to seeing in this system. Last year’s Guardians draft class, which brought three high-profile high school pitchers into the fold (Braylon Doughty, Joey Oakie, Chase Mobley), looks like a deliberate attempt to change that, but two of those three guys have been slow out of the gate.
Instead, the core of this system right now rests with the position players, often contact-oriented prospects who get a little bit stronger and start to swing more aggressively once they turn pro. Cleveland’s approach to amateur scouting is unique. Like a lot of teams, they rely heavily on data and modeling, especially when it comes to large conference college players. They famously rarely send scouts to Division-I college games until late in the season so the scouts can spend more time turning over rocks in places where the data is less available, like high schools and junior colleges. That’s how you end up with Matt Wilkinson and Cooper Ingle in the same draft class. Cleveland also has a track record of targeting the youngest players in a given draft class, as well as college players whose sophomore season and Cape Cod performance were better than their junior season output (an indication of regression model use).
They’ve behaved similarly internationally, as Guardians scouts were on the early side of tracking amateurs’ swing decisions and contact rates in that market. In the past, they’ve gravitated to short-levered, compact athletes on the international side. While this is still true to a degree, there have been more bigger-framed, high-variance athletes rolling through the lower levels of the system during the last couple of years, 6-foot-2 prospects rather than 5-foot-9 fellas. Trading off hit tool risk for power potential is something a small market org like this should be doing at least a little bit, and it feels like Cleveland has made that adjustment.
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