Keibert Ruiz tops Dodgers top prospects list at Baseball America

Baseball America unveiled their top 10 Dodgers prospects for 2021 on Tuesday, with catcher Keibert Ruiz topping the list.

Ruiz was ranked second by both Baseball Prospectus and FanGraphs behind pitcher Josiah Gray, who was second on the BA list. Baseball America praised Ruiz’s hitting tool, grading it at a 60 on the 20-80 scouting scale:

The Dodgers made adjustments in 2020 to get him more upright in his stance and keep his hands closer to his body, and the result was a more direct path that helped him stay inside the ball and produce consistently harder contact.

Second baseman Michael Busch, a first-round pick in 2019, was ranked third by BA and tabbed as the best hitter for average in the system, and has been in the top four in all three national Dodgers lists to date. BA is highest on the Dodgers’ other 2019 first-rounder, third baseman Kody Hoese, putting him fourth while noting, “Hoese looks like a future standout at his best but needs to be more consistent with his swing and throwing stroke.”

BA was also highest so far on pitcher Bobby Miller, the club’s first-round pick in 2020, ranking him fifth in the system. He’s one of six Dodgers to be ranked in the team’s top 10 prospects by all three lists to date.

One quirk of BA’s list is Edwin Ríos still qualifying for this list despite exhausting his rookie status. Ríos only has 123 major league at-bats, seven shy of the threshold, but also was on the active roster for over the required 45 days of pre-September time, even before accounting for the fact that MLB relaxed the rules in the truncated 2020 to also include September service time. Unsurprisingly, Ríos was picked by BA as having the best power in the Dodgers’ system.

Aside from Ríos, Ruiz is the only other player on the Baseball America top-10 list to have already played in the majors. The switch-hitting Ruiz caught two games for the Dodgers in 2020, including hitting a home run on August 16 in his first major league at-bat.

Because he’s no longer a rookie, I’m not including Ríos on our composite list, but here are the Dodgers who have shown up on at least one top-10 list so far this offseason.