While the New York Yankees only saw a pair of players crack ESPN prospect guru Kiley McDaniel's latest Top 100 list (Jasson Dominguez, George Lombard Jr.), all is not lost for their current farm system.
McDaniel was kind enough to go several levels more thorough than most, mapping out the fates of many of the players who just missed his list. And by "just missed, we mean "an additional 100".
Yankee fans who absorbed McDaniel's baseline list were no doubt bummed out by the exclusion of Roderick Arias and Spencer Jones, which has become par for the course in recent weeks and on similar lists. Luckily, this particular list contextualized their absence, and had a good deal of high praise for Arias in particular.
The ranked Yankees in this particular overflow column (subscription required) include Jones at No. 130, Will Warren at No. 158, and Arias just off the top tier at No. 103. McDaniel went as far as to note Arias as one of three AL East infielders he considered naming the "most likely" unranked prospects to reach the Top 50 of his 2026 list. Unfortunately, Red Sox prospect Franklin Arias actually won the honor, but beggars can't be choosers here.
Would be nice if they could be, though. Begging stinks. Choosing rules!
We rank and hand out superlatives for the future stars who just missed Kiley McDaniel's top 100 prospect list.https://t.co/Co3GL6rZbr
— Buster Olney (@Buster_ESPN) January 30, 2025
Yankees prospects Roderick Arias, Spencer Jones receive some love among ESPN's Top 100 near-misses
The closest thing to negativity here came in McDaniel's note about Jones, who he considers an honorable mention in the category of "Prospect Most Likely to Lead MLB in Home Runs at Their Peak".
Of course, Jones has power for days, but remains entirely vexing; as McDaniel noted, he is currently "trying scouts' patience" as he seeks to eradicate (or, at least, minimize) the overwhelming swing-and-miss from his game.
At this point, the assessments of the Yankees' prospect future do not matter. They're in the (very recent) past. Now, it's time to take the feedback and prosper between the lines, making 2025's lowly rankings look just as retroactively inaccurate as 2024's preseason assertions that the Yankees had among the game's top-tier farms. Arias, in particular, seems poised to bloom.