Cade Horton – Picture by Todd Johnson

Kiley McDaniel of ESPN released his list of top 50 prospects today and it contained to Cubs. Pete Crow Armstrong was ranked number 15 while Cade Horton was ranked the number 22 Prospect. 

To read how McDaniel talked about Horton, he was pretty effusive in his praise of the young right hand or skills. He wrote:

Horton is arguably the biggest riser of players in this top 50 from this past spring. He was a somewhat surprising seventh overall pick last summer because of his short track record post-Tommy John surgery at Oklahoma, but there were clear indicators of upside. I sent around a list with him ranked in the 30s, and almost everyone who saw it said he needed to be higher. Horton has a plus fastball, slider and curveball — with strikeout rates to match — and he has surprised people with how well he’s pitched this season. He could take the mantle of top pitching prospect in baseball if Skenes graduates before he does.

That’s getting close to the norm for most lists the past few weeks. We’ve seen PCA slip a little to the low to mid teens as the new draft picks come into the rankings. And then we’ve seen Horton shoot up in the rankings all the way into the top 30.
Cubs fans haven’t seen anything this good prospect wise since about 2016!

While McDaniel’s list stopped at 50, he did put down more names but did not rank them. He did organize them into levels, and he had two Cubs in that group of 30 additional names. They were Ben Brown, who is currently at Triple-A Iowa, and Owen Caissie, who is currently at Double-A Tennessee. Had McDaniel gone to 100, who knows if we would’ve seen Matt Shaw and Kevin Alcântara in the next 20 or maybe even Jordan Wicks or Alexander Canario.

Over the next 10 weeks, the minor league baseball season will wrap up, minor league playoffs will take place and then instructs will be going on shortly followed by the Arizona Fall League at the beginning of October. The AFL runs through them the first week of November. It’ll be interesting to see if more Cubs start to pop on the list after that.

North Side Bound will be redoing our list that we did in late June in probably late November/early December, after the AFL is completed. 

This is getting to be pretty exciting!