2025 There R Giants' Top 50: #11-15

Questions, questions.....

Photo Credit: Mick Anders | Richmond Flying Squirrels

So far, in this year’s Top 50, we’ve seen:

• Just Missed List

• 46-50 (Camacho, Foster, Flores, Hernandez, Reckley)

• 41-45 (Christian, Pomares, Ahuna, Perez, Sugastey)

• 36-40 (Howell, Murphy, Miles, Simon, Choate)

• 31-35 (Sanchez, Waites, Bresnahan, Rengel, Maldonado)

• 26-30 (Hipwell, Bello, Tejada, Diaz, Bericoto)

• 21-25 (Ortíz, Furman, Cayama, Harris, Ceballos

• 16-20 (Cox, Martin, Meckler, Bostick, Velasquez)

What to make of today’s group of players — the Men Who Would Be …. well, not Kings precisely, but at least solid members of this year’s Top 10. Everybody here today has an argument to make for inclusion in the group that we’ll be counting down one at a time beginning Friday. That’s particularly true this year, when I frankly had a lot of questions about my top 10 group — even going so far as to break a long-held principle of my list making (which we’ll get to later on). As I’ve probably indicated throughout this winter, things get pretty squishy, pretty quickly in this year’s rankings (EDITOR’S NOTE: it might be better expressed as “pretty compressed” talent, and compression would actually make the rankings dense and hard, not squishy at all, so that first metaphor is really just poor writing). There’s a lot of uncertainty in this year’s collection of talent.

But everybody in today’s final group of five has enough questions still persisting to drop them just out of the one-at-a-timers. In several of today’s questions, those questions are connected to pauses in their development — mostly due to physical issues — that have slowed them or side-tracked them in some way. This is the “take a pause” group, and it can be particularly hard to envision how things will look for players when they come out the other side of that pause.

They are all in different parts of their journey up the development mountain — some have barely gotten onto the trail, some are nearing the summit, and some on a rest break en route. But all of them come with just enough uncertainty to prevent them from being Top 10 dudes, consigning them instead to that oh so vague “11-20” bucket. That’s ok, though! Tyler Fitzgerald came out of this bucket. Landen Roupp did as well. While there may be questions here, questions can sometimes be answered in thrilling ways!

So it goes in the list making business. As Casey Kasem used to say, “we’re counting ‘em down and we won’t stop, till we reach the top.” Let’s take in our final group of five.