Other than in Triple A, which has another few days to go, the 2024 minor-league regular season is now in the books, so it’s time for my annual Prospect of the Year award, given to the prospect who showed the best performance in the minor leagues in 2024.
While the process of selecting the top prospects was ultimately subjective, I focused primarily on legitimate prospects who performed well relative to their age, level and experience in pro ball. In short, the younger a player was relative to the other players in his league — especially when compared solely to the players in his league with a chance to have some impact in the majors — the more impressed I was with a strong performance. What a player did in the majors, if he was called up, was irrelevant for this list’s purposes. I do consider age relative to level, so a player like
Spencer Horwitz, who hit .335/.456/.514 in Triple A but was 26 years old and repeating the level, doesn’t make the cut.
So, given those criteria, here is my overall Prospect of the Year for 2024, as well as several other players who had outstanding seasons and deserved notice.
(Note: Scouting grades are on a 20-80 scale)
The decision to give the award to Campbell wasn’t even close for me — nobody in the minors had a year to touch Campbell’s. He finished the season with a .330/.439/.558 line across three levels, starting the year with High-A Greenville and finishing it with Triple-A Worcester. That triple-slash line was good for a 179 wRC+*, which was by far the highest of anyone in the minors with at least 400 PA, well ahead of the No. 2 player at a wRC+ of 160. His OBP ranked third among all hitters, his slugging percentage sixth, and his batting average fourth.
This all came with just a 19.9 percent strikeout rate, and it was in his first full year in pro ball. And he did it while playing four skill positions — second, short, center, and third, with more than 200 innings at each of the first three spots.
Campbell was a redshirt freshman at Georgia Tech in 2022 and missed a few more weeks to start 2023 for the Wreck, hitting .376/.484/.549 in 45 games after he joined their lineup for good on March 10. That followed a strong summer the year before playing for Duluth in the wood-bat Northwoods League.
Red Sox area scout Kirk Fredericksson drafted Campbell and told me he believed not just in the skill set, but saw Campbell’s “good makeup and aptitude” to go with it — and when you have an athlete who has those things, you can really bet on their upside. This already looks like a home run of a pick for the Red Sox’s scouting staff, as Campbell tore up pitching — even good pitching — at every level, and now sits as one of the top 50 prospects in baseball.
*(I’ve said before that I don’t believe wRC+ has much predictive value for minor-league position players. I am only using it here as a measure of how good Campbell’s year was.)
Honorable mentions
Franklin Arias, SS, Boston Red Sox
It’s been a pretty good year for the Boston farm system, with
Roman Anthony joining Campbell in reaching Triple A and hitting well at two levels, 2023 first-rounder
Kyle Teel also reaching Triple A in his first full pro season, and the 18-year-old Arias tearing up the Florida Complex League with a .355/.471/.584 line before a promotion to Low A in August. He hit .257/.331/.378 at the higher level as one of just a handful of 18-year-olds to play there, and of course did so playing one of the most valuable positions on the field.
The Red Sox’s system has turned around very quickly in the past few years, with some fantastic drafts and a couple of early successes on the international scouting side, as well.