Prospect expert makes conflicting, strange mistake about Yankees' top young pitcher

The New York Yankees' farm system has taken a notable top-to-bottom hit over the past 365 days. While Jasson Dominguez still remains as promising as ever, he didn't have the fulfilling year at the MLB level that many expected him to (Tommy John surgery will do that to a person). George Lombard Jr. is a consensus top-100 prospect, but the other names expected to be in that mix (Spencer Jones, Roderick Arias) have fallen back a bit.

Add in a fleet of pitching injuries, and there's still plenty to prove entering a pivotal 2025 season. One of those injured arms, Chase Hampton, was zooming towards the top 50 last spring before losing the majority of '24 to a few separate injuries. He started on the shelf with what MLB Pipeline called a "shoulder impingement" before it later was referred to as a "UCL sprain". Hampton returned mid-year, but was then laid up with a "lower body" issue after just seven short starts (18 2/3 innings pitched).

It was a lost season by any metric, but Hampton is, in his own words, "ready to rock" for 2025, sharing in an Athletic profile by Brendan Kuty on Jan. 30 that he's healthy and throwing live BP ahead of a pivotal campaign. “One word: Dominate,” he noted, of his own current mentality. “I think that describes my game when I’m good and I’m on."

Hampton certainly sounds prepared to prove the doubters wrong ... which is why Yankees fans were especially taken aback by expert Keith Law's top prospect list, also published in the very same outlet on Monday morning. According to Law's first edition of his Yankees top 20, he believed Hampton had undergone Tommy John surgery, and wouldn't be available until 2026.

He eventually corrected the piece, but still left in his ominous closer, "I wrote last year that 'he looks like a back-end starter if he can hold up.' I hope he still looks like one whenever he returns."

He's, uh, he's supposed to return immediately. Right?

Yankees' Chase Hampton healthy, despite erroneous reports of Tommy John surgery

The prospect world can be dark and hard to sift through. Minor-league teams often intentionally obscure information regarding their injured players (at the behest of their parent clubs, of course). Remember when Everson Pereira just disappeared in the middle of 2023? Without the recent Hampton interview, it wouldn't have been totally out of the ordinary for us to find out about a secret Tommy John retroactively.

Luckily, Law appears to have admitted his mistake, and we can all get back to worrying about 35 other things. Probably.