Cade Horton – Picture by Todd Johnson

And just like that, Baseball America dropped its top 30 Cubs summer prospect list. Most of the names are pretty familiar, but there is a lot of movement throughout the list with a few notable names being nonexistent.

The summer is always a strange time to do a prospect list because when the season is about half over, you just have rookie league starting, and then you have the draft taking place the next month. So you have a convergence of three events and so a summer list is always going to fluctuate quite a bit and tend to lean more towards more established players at full season affiliates, such as the case with bassball America’s list. It tends to rely more on performance and productivity.

At the top, you find PCA followed by Cade Horton, Ben Brown and then Matt Mervis. Mervis should fall off the list here in the next two weeks as he will lose his prospect status when he reaches 135 ABs . Jackson Ferris is the biggest riser all the way up to number five while Miguel Amaya comes in at six. And then we have some guys who arguably could make a case for being in the top five in Jordan Wicks and Owen, Caissie. Then we have two guys that fell quite a bit in Brennen Davis and Kevin Alcântara rounding out the top 10.

When you get to number 11 and go all the way through 30, you could juggle a lot of those guys around. You will find the usual suspects of DJ Herz, Moises Ballesteros, Cristian Hernandez, Kevin Made, James Triantos and more in that spectrum.

The first thing you notice is, there is no Jake Slaughter. The guy who has arguably dominated the system the last year is nowhere to be seen.

Because it is a subscription article, we can’t give you all the specific rankings and details about the post, but there were a few surprises. Hayden McGeary did make the list as did Pedro Ramirez. Jefferson Rojas is also in the 20s and Darius Hill gets bumped up all the way to low 20s. We allso find BJ Murray and Luke Little in there as well Pablo Aliendo who is in the low teens. Aliendo is the biggest mover after Jackson Farris.

Several guys did fall, including Alexander Canario, but Baseball America is still holding onto Chase Strumpf and Kohl Franklin while also including Cam Sanders on the list.

The biggest omissions that I see are Luis Vazquez, Michael Arias, Yonathan Perlaza, Felix Stevens, and Adan Sanchez. There’s also no Derniche a Valdez but Baseball America tends to be more conservative in its rankings. I still can’t get over the omission of Slaughter at all. I didn’t think I would ever type that sentence, but he’s been a RBI and HR machine the last year.

Their winter list should be a lot different. The key word there being should.