12 Former Top MLB Prospects Struggling to Break Through in the Majors
At long last, Jo Adell is playing reasonably well.
The Los Angeles Angels' No. 10 overall pick in Major League Baseball's 2017 draft quickly became one of the top prospects in all of baseball, entering both 2020 and 2021 as a consensus top 10 prospect between Baseball America, Baseball Prospectus and MLB.com. But in his first four seasons in the majors, he was nowhere near the star we were promised, posting an OPS of .625 and a bWAR of -1.4.
At 25 years old, though, the outfielder is finally making his mark. Bit of a rough start to May, but he ended April with an OPS of .979, emerging as one of the lone bright spots for a club otherwise going nowhere fast.
So, who's next in a sport littered with top picks/prospects who have yet to even remotely live up to the hype?
Every player on this list was either a top 10 overall draft pick in the 2014-18 timeframe, or a top 15 prospect in the 2017-21 timeframe, per Baseball America preseason rankings. In either case, it's been long enough that he should have amounted to something by now, but not so long that we've necessarily given up hope.
By the way, not a huge data set here. A bunch of guys were top 15 prospects for several of those years, and as you might expect, there's a good deal of overlap between top 10 draft picks and top 15 prospects. There were only 95 unique players to choose from—one of which was Oakland's 2018 No. 9 pick Kyler Murray.
Even from that list of 95, though, trimming down to just 12 was a challenge. Easily could've included at least a dozen other busts. However, these are the ones who just might finally breakthrough in 2024.
UTIL Nick Gordon
1 of 10
Drafted: No. 5 overall in 2014
Baseball America Prospect Rankings: No. 61 in 2015, No. 53 in 2016, No. 60 in 2017, No. 93 in 2018
Career MLB Stats (2021-Present): .244/.286/.393, 20 HR, 96 RBI, 17 SB, 0.6 bWAR
In his junior year of high school, Nick Gordon—son of three-time All-Star pitcher Tom "Flash" Gordon—was named the Gatorade Florida Baseball Player of the Year. The shortstop/pitcher hit .505 and had a 0.78 ERA. He was even better at the dish the following year, batting .512 with six home runs en route to being selected fifth overall by the Minnesota Twins.
However, he never came close to terrorizing minor league pitchers like he did high school pitchers, which is why he never quite made it into the top 50 of the prospect rankings, even as a top-five pick.
It wasn't until Gordon's sixth season in the minors (2019) that he finally posted an OPS north of .750. But even that came in a 70-game season riddled with injuries, and was followed by a full year lost to COVID.
For a hot minute in the second half of the 2022 campaign, it looked like Gordon was finally ready to start living up to the hype from nearly a decade prior. From July 27 through the end of the year, he hit .290, drove in 37 runs and blossomed into a player who needed to be started on a nearly everyday basis.
But after a slow start to 2023 in which he was batting .176 through 34 games, Gordon fouled a ball off his leg and suffered a fractured tibia. He missed the rest of the season before getting traded to Miami in February, where he is once again floundering around the Mendoza Line.
The good news is he should get plenty of opportunity to salvage his career over the next few months. The Marlins are terrible and they recently traded Luis Arraez away for a bunch of prospects, opening the door for Gordon to play more. (He was already getting plenty of action in left field, but now there are reps to be had at second base, too.)
Everyone marveled at Arraez's four-hit performance in his Padres debut, but Gordon had a four-hit game one day after that, and has homered twice since Arraez's departure. Maybe the breakthrough is finally happening.
SS Marco Luciano
2 of 10
Drafted: N/A (Signed as an international free agent in July 2018)
Baseball America Prospect Rankings: No. 19 in 2020, No. 12 in 2021, No. 17 in 2022, No. 37 in 2023, No. 56 in 2024
Career MLB Stats (2023): 14 G, .231/.333/.308, 1 SB, 0.1 bWAR
On the one hand, Marco Luciano is the youngest player on this list, and by a considerable margin. Everyone else here is already at least 25, but he doesn't turn 23 until September. So while 2024 feels somewhat like a last chance for some of these guys to at least begin to amount to something, Luciano is still a couple years away from entering a "now or never" type of season from an age perspective.
All the same, we've been waiting quite some time for the phenom who got a $2.6 million signing bonus as a 16-year-old nearly six years ago.
The initial returns were great. In 38 games of rookie league ball in 2019, Luciano posted a 1.055 OPS and entered what should have been his age-18 season as one of the highest rated prospects in all of baseball.
However, the minor league season getting cancelled in 2020 probably stunted his development a bit, because it has been a slow climb through the minors since then. (Subsequently missing a large chunk of the 2022 season with a back injury didn't help, either.)
Luciano had two brief stints in the majors last season, but didn't do enough to inherit Brandon Crawford's job as San Francisco's primary shortstop, beaten out by Nick Ahmed in spring training.
He has been hitting well at Triple-A Sacramento, though, and Ahmed has sputtered his way to a sub-.300 slugging percentage. Wouldn't be a surprise if Luciano gets another shot very soon.
LHP Brendan McKay
3 of 10
Drafted: No. 4 overall in 2017
Baseball America Prospect Rankings: No. 39 in 2018, No. 47 in 2019, No. 14 in 2020
Career MLB Stats (2019): 49.0 IP, 5.14 ERA, 1.41 WHIP, 10.3 K/9, -0.1 bWAR
Before there was Shohei Ohtani, there was Brendan McKay.
Well, not actually. McKay was born about 18 months after Ohtani. But when the Rays drafted him fourth overall in 2017—the summer before Ohtani made his MLB debut—they intended for him to be a two-way player. In his third and final season at Louisville, he hit .341/.457/.659 with 18 home runs. And across his three seasons in college, he logged 315.1 innings pitched with a 2.23 ERA, 1.05 WHIP and 11.2 K/9.
It was a short-lived dream, though, as McKay couldn't hit minor league pitching with much regularity. But his pitching future was bright, blazing through the minors and making his MLB debut less than two years after getting drafted—a debut in which he went six scoreless innings, no less.
Then came the terrible luck.
McKay missed the start of 2020 after testing positive for COVID. While ramping up to make his season debut, he was shut down with a shoulder injury, later needing season-ending surgery. That limited him to just seven minor league starts in 2021, before undergoing surgery for thoracic outlet syndrome that November. He made just seven more minor league appearances the following season before Tommy John surgery in September 2022, which wiped out all of 2023 for him.
Dude can't catch a break.
But the 28-year-old is trying to return from all of those setbacks, and has pitched quite well thus far at Double-A Montgomery, allowing just two earned runs in 18 innings of work. He was promoted to Triple-A Durham last week and might make it back to the big leagues before the end of the season.
.png?w=256)
CF Mickey Moniak
4 of 10
Drafted: No. 1 overall in 2016
Baseball America Prospect Rankings: No. 17 in 2017
Career MLB Stats (2020-Present): 181 G, .232/.270/.401, 20 HR, 63 RBI, 0.2 bWAR
A little over six years after making Mickey Moniak the No. 1 overall pick in the 2016 MLB draft, the Philadelphia Phillies threw in the towel, trading him and Jadiel Sanchez for a couple months' worth of Noah Syndergaard.
Hard to blame them, though. In three brief stints with the Phils, Moniak appeared in 47 games with a .386 OPS, never even hitting particularly well in the minors, either.
Last year, it looked like he may have finally graduated from a colossal disappointment into a legitimately productive member of a franchise, batting .280 and hitting 14 home runs in 85 games played for the Angels.
Heck, 45 games into his season, Moniak had a highly encouraging (and aesthetically pleasing) 1.000 OPS.
He faded considerably over his final 40 games, though, batting .220 with a .587 OPS the rest of the way. And 30 games into the current campaign, he has been even worse at .190 and .534, respectively.
However, with Mike Trout out indefinitely and Aaron Hicks recently getting designated for assignment, the Halos are kind of all-in on Moniak as their primary centerfielder for the foreseeable future, giving the 26-year-old perhaps one final chance to prove he can be a regular for a contender. (Not that the Angels are a contender in 2024, but you get it.)
CF Cristian Pache
5 of 10
Drafted: N/A (Signed as an international free agent in July 2015)
Baseball America Prospect Rankings: No. 85 in 2019, No. 12 in 2020, No. 7 in 2021, No. 84 in 2022
Career MLB Stats (2020-Present): 173 G, .171/.236/.267, 6 HR, 4 SB, -0.6 bWAR
Less than eight months after sending Mickey Moniak to the Angels, the Phillies must have felt a gaping hole in the "centerfielder who has woefully failed to live up to the hype" department, because they traded for Cristian Pache in March 2023 when he had a career OPS of .439 in 115 MLB games played.
To his credit, Pache was more valuable than usual last year. He didn't play a ton, only logging 95 plate appearances, but he had a .736 OPS and was valuable as a late-innings defensive replacement.
Still, he was a far cry from the kid who racked up 59 doubles, 15 triples and 21 home runs between 2018 and 2019 in the process of becoming one of the most coveted prospects in the minors. And he has backslid early this season with a .465 OPS—albeit in just 23 plate appearances as the "only use in case of emergency" option at the end of Philadelphia's bench.
But what else is new? Save for a couple of months on the woebegone A's in 2022 and a couple of weeks in the prior year with Atlanta, Pache has never been given a chance to play every day and get into any sort of groove.
Would love to see him get traded to either the White Sox or Marlins and get some regular playing time for a change. However, it might be too little, too late to salvage this once promising career.
RHP Nate Pearson
6 of 10
Drafted: No. 28 overall in 2017
Baseball America Prospect Rankings: No. 91 in 2018, No. 70 in 2019, No. 7 in 2020, No. 14 in 2021, No. 62 in 2022
Career MLB Stats (2020-Present): 88.0 IP, 5.01 ERA, 1.44 WHIP, 9.4 K/9, -0.5 bWAR
In 2019, Nate Pearson emerged as a potential "next big thing" in Toronto's farm system. He made 25 starts with a 2.30 ERA, 0.89 WHIP and 10.5 K/9, catapulting into one of the top prospects in all of baseball.
Then the pandemic happened and he got rushed to the big leagues after an impressive showing in "spring training."
Pearson did have a great MLB debut, going five scoreless innings against Max Scherzer and the Washington Nationals.
Unfortunately, that was very much the high point of a career that otherwise has not gone according to plan.
He made just three more starts that summer before landing on the IL with an elbow injury, and he never really recovered, seemingly in a constant state of some sort of physical ailment since before he even made it to the majors.
Pearson has been used almost exclusively in a relief capacity over the past four years, and rarely in high-leverage roles. Yet, there's still hope he'll eventually blossom into a key part of the pitching staff. Just last season, he had a 1.74 ERA and 14.8 K/9 in 20 appearances at Triple-A Buffalo.
It just has not translated to the majors.
He had a strong opening month to the 2024 campaign, entering May with a 1.80 ERA and even tallying a save. Let's see if he can build on that.
RHP Sixto Sánchez
7 of 10
Drafted: N/A (Signed as an amateur free agent in February 2015)
Baseball America Prospect Rankings: No. 80 in 2017, No. 25 in 2018, No. 13 in 2019, No. 16 in 2020, No. 6 in 2021
Career MLB Stats (2020-Present): 57.0 IP, 4.74 ERA, 1.35 WHIP, 6.9 K/9, 0.9 bWAR
As a teenager, Sixto Sánchez looked like the next Pedro Martínez.
In his age-17 season (2016), Sánchez made 11 starts in rookie ball for the Phillies, posting an 0.50 ERA and 0.76 WHIP. And while he wasn't that dominant in subsequent seasons, it was readily apparent across multiple years that he had star potential, posting overall marks of 2.57 ERA and 1.02 WHIP in his six seasons in the minors.
When the Phillies traded for J.T. Realmuto in February 2019, Sánchez was easily the most noteworthy part of the return the Marlins received. He was great at Double-A Jacksonville that year and was solid in his seven starts for the Marlins in 2020, including a stretch of four consecutive quality starts.
Then came the shoulder injuries.
He was shut down after three good appearances in 2021 spring training and missed all of that season, all of the next season and almost all of 2023, logging one inning in late September for Double-A Pensacola.
We had pretty well given up on ever seeing him again, let alone seeing him shoving at a Pedro Martínez level.
He's back on the mound, though. And while the early results haven't been great (18 IP, 15 ER), the fact that he has made it more than seven weeks into the season without landing on the IL is kind of a big deal.
If he continues to stay healthy, perhaps some of his signature stuff will show up again.
UTIL Nick Senzel
8 of 10
Drafted: No. 2 overall in 2016
Baseball America Prospect Rankings: No. 9 in 2017, No. 7 in 2018, No. 10 in 2019
Career MLB Stats (2019-Present): 396 G, .238/.302/.374, 38 HR, 136 RBI, 32 SB, -1.5 bWAR
Compared to most of the players on this list, Nick Senzel has been somewhat successful. Certainly not from a wins above replacement perspective, but he's at least getting regular playing time in the majors, when healthy.
But for a No. 2 overall draft pick who opened three consecutive years as one of the top 10 prospects in all of baseball, Senzel's career has been a huge letdown.
The initial returns were respectable. After three straight seasons batting north of .300 in the minors, Senzel played 104 games as a rookie with a .742 OPS as Cincinnati's primary centerfielder in 2019.
However, he missed the final few weeks of the season with a torn labrum, missed most of the truncated 2020 season with an undisclosed injury/illness and missed most of 2021 with a knee injury.
He was finally mostly healthy in 2022-23, but not good enough to save his job. The Reds could have brought him back for both 2024 and 2025, but they simply non-tendered him after one of his better (relatively speaking) seasons in the majors, allowing him to sign with the Nationals as a free agent.
Then, hours before he could make his Nationals debut, Senzel suffered a fractured thumb while fielding grounders. It only kept him out about two weeks, though, and he has gotten out to a decent start in the nation's capital, at one point hitting five home runs in the span of 18 at-bats.
Senzel turns 29 next month, but maybe he could become a key piece of the Nationals for the foreseeable future. Goodness knows third base has been a struggle for this franchise since losing Anthony Rendon to free agency five years ago. (That includes Carter Kieboom, who was Baseball America's No. 15 prospect prior to 2020 and another strong candidate for this depressing list.)
RHP Forrest Whitley
9 of 10
Drafted: No. 17 overall pick in 2016
Baseball America Prospect Rankings: No. 10 in 2018, No. 5 in 2019, No. 25 in 2020, No. 80 in 2021
Career MLB Stats (2024): 0.2 IP, 1 H, 1 BB, 1 HBP
Heading into spring 2019, Forrest Whitley was basically for Houston what Paul Skenes was for Pittsburgh this spring—one of the most highly touted prospects in all of baseball and a viable candidate to open the year in the starting rotation.
To his credit, Whitley made the decision difficult for the Astros, going 15 innings in spring training with a 3.00 ERA, 1.07 WHIP and 10.2 K/9. But they opted to round out their rotation with veterans Collin McHugh and Brad Peacock instead, sending Whitley to Triple-A with fans hoping to see him soon.
But whereas Skenes obliterated the competition in Triple-A to the tune of a 0.99 ERA before making his MLB debut Saturday, Whitley got pummeled at Round Rock, posting a 12.21 ERA in eight appearances before getting shut down and reassigned to rookie ball when he returned nearly two months later.
After that, it was quite the uphill journey.
Whitley missed 2020 because minor league ball was wiped out. He missed 2021 after undergoing Tommy John surgery, which also limited him to 40 innings pitched in 2022. He subsequently lasted 30 innings in the minors in 2023 before a season-ending lat strain. Worse yet: Between those two years, he had a 6.17 ERA.
He finally arrived this spring, though, making his long-awaited MLB debut for Houston on April 16. However, he was sent back down to Triple-A the next day and landed back on the IL about a week later with elbow discomfort.
Will he make it back to the big leagues this season?
Ever?
A Trio of No. 6 Overall Picks
10 of 10
2014 No. 6 Draft Pick: Alex Jackson
2015 No. 6 Draft Pick: Tyler Jay
2017 No. 6 Draft Pick: Austin Beck
The No. 6 pick in the MLB draft has historically been one of the best, producing eight players worth at least 30 bWAR, including Derek Jeter, Gary Sheffield, Zack Greinke and Barry Bonds.
But for a while there in the mid-2010s, the No. 6 pick in the draft was all sorts of cursed.
From 2013-17, those picks were Colin Moran, Alex Jackson, Tyler Jay, A.J. Puk and Austin Beck, who have been worth a combined 0.0 bWAR in their careers.
Puk has at least been OK, although the Marlins surely regret their decision to let him try to convert from a closer to a starter this past offseason. And Moran managed to play in more than 500 MLB games, albeit at a replacement level.
There's a decent chance you've never even heard of the other three, though.
Jackson recently resurfaced with the Rays, making his season debut on May 3 after an impressive start at Triple-A Durham. Prior to that, though, he had played in just 66 MLB games across four seasons (2019-22), batting .141 and striking out in 89 of 185 plate appearances (48.1 percent). The most noteworthy thing about his career is that the Braves traded him for Adam Duvall in 2021, followed by Duvall playing a key role in that World Series.
Jay finally made his MLB debut last month, a week before celebrating his 30th birthday. He logged four innings of mop-up work for the Mets before getting sent back down to Triple-A Syracuse. Decent chance he'll be back again this season.
And Austin Beck has yet to play in the majors, though he is at least hitting in the minors for a change. After batting .252 across five seasons in Oakland's farm system and missing all of 2023 with a torn ACL, he signed with the Dodgers and hit .306 with an OPS north of 1.000 in his first 13 games at Double-A Tulsa. It's pretty unlikely he makes his way up to Los Angeles any time soon, given how loaded that roster is, but the 25-year-old outfielder could be an intriguing trade chip if he keeps it up.
.png?w=480)
