Blue Jays Top-30 Prospects: Honorable mentions, part one

Our 2016 Toronto Blue Jays Top-30 Prospects list is about
to begin counting down, but first, a look at some talented named that fell just short

The Blue Jays farm system was thinned by Toronto’s deadline fireworks show in 2015, so as we prepare to count down our top-30 list entering 2016, this group has a different feel from top to bottom. And with that, it will need to be treated a little differently.

We discussed earlier in the week how the Blue Jays prospect pool is entering a critical period of cumulative growth, one which should be enabled by a fairly stable MLB roster. This is also necessary, as the majority of Toronto’s prospect talent is still one or more years away from being MLB-ready. With this, you get a crowded picture after surpassing the top 12-15 prospects.

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In fact, you could rank prospects number 15 through 50 in a dozen different ways without anything becoming all that bizarre, and opinions certainly vary on many from that pool. So take the coming rankings as our one cumulative voice in the conversation of many others. January and February are great times for prospect rankings and discussion league wide.

That being said, while we’ll be sticking to tradition by limiting our list to a top-30, we did want to recognize some of the names on the cusp. These are not meant to be in any particular order, as this group becomes fairly clouded itself, nor are these Honorable Mentions meant to be all-encompassing. But it’s important to pull some extra chairs up to the table wherever we can.

For those of you who haven’t followed the Minor League system and prospects closely in the past, there’s no time like the present. There’s an added satisfaction to seeing a young prospect mature into a nightly fixture on your television set, and while the names we’ll be working through over the next two days haven’t quite cracked our top-30, this Blue Jays team is stocked full of impact players that spent their own prospect days on the outside looking in.

First up in the Honorable Mentions: the tallest prospect to just miss the cut…

Next: LHP Matt Smoral still searching for consistency