Our Sox Populi staff combines their prospect lists each offseason, coming up with the Top 100 players in the system. We’ll be summarizing and counting them up here, five at a time, leading up to the regular season.

50
DJ Gladney
Left Fielder
Birmingham Barons
Baseball Cube Rating 57.50
For a player who’s been in the system “forever,” (2019), it somehow seems DJ is a stilted prospect. Yet he was still significantly young for his level (Double-A) last season, and remains if nothing else a powerful bat. Add in the game-winning, walk-off single in the Southern League title-clinching win in 2024, and perhaps there is another gear for him yet to kick into.

49
Lucas Gordon
Left-Handed Starter
Winston-Salem Dash
Baseball Cube Rating 71.33
If Gordon was a fireballer coming out of the SEC, you better bet he’d be a Top 20 prospect-plus. But as a savvy southpaw, we’re told to diminish expectations for an inevitable crash into that prospect brick wall. We’re still waiting.

48
Ricardo Brizuela
Right-Handed Starter
Kannapolis Cannon Ballers
Baseball Cube Rating 65.17
An arm of intrigue, if only for the rare extra work asked of him after the 2024 ACL season, in the form of a promotion to Low-A. Stating the obvious, this is an obvious earmark of a pitcher organizational intrigue, who also has demonstrated the ability to shoulder a workload.

47
Trey McGough
Left-Handed Reliever
Charlotte Knights
Baseball Cube Rating 62.67
Given that the Eloy Jiménez trade to Baltimore last summer was a trade dump (inasmuch as any of The Big Baby’s salary could be dumped), getting McGough as a tidy little lottery ticket was a delicious sweetener. The southpaw completely dominated the minors, and mostly Triple-A, in 2024 (1.98 ERA, 1.016 WHIP) and surely has little left to prove there.

46
Ryan Galanie
First Baseman
Winston-Salem Dash
Baseball Cube Rating 65.13
The Xerox copy of Caden Connor but preceding the slightly-younger player by mere weeks in promotion, Galanie encountered some of the same issues as his teammate: Picking on pitchers much younger, and finding the game catching up hard on him once the playing field is leveled. Galanie was tremendous at Kannapolis in 2024, but he’ll need to dominate at Double-A this summer to flex possible South Side potential.

Lucas Gordon photo courtesy of Lucas Gordon/Instagram.

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