With Roman Anthony officially graduating from prospect status on Thursday with his 46th day of active big league service time (one more than the maximum for future rookie eligibility), there's a new No. 1 atop MLB Pipeline's Top 100 Prospects list.
Pirates shortstop Konnor Griffin ascends to the top spot midway through his first professional season. He went ninth overall in the 2024 Draft, in which he had the highest ceiling of any player but also had several teams questioning whether his right-handed swing would work at the big league level.
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So far, so good. Griffin is slashing .324/.400/.511 with 13 homers and 42 steals in 79 games between Single-A and High-A. He ranks ninth in the Minors in hitting while striking out at a 21 percent clip. And his tools are just as exciting as his performance.
Griffin has electric bat speed and well-above-average foot speed, giving him 30-30 upside. He also has plus-plus arm strength -- his fastball was clocked as high as 96 mph when he pitched at Jackson Prep (Flowood, Miss.) -- and moves very well at shortstop for a 6-foot-4, 225-pounder. Amateur scouts projected him as a plus defender at short and a Gold Glover in center field.
Since MLB.com began ranking prospects in 2004, Griffin is the second-youngest player (19 years, three months) to grab the top spot, trailing only Wander Franco (18 years, five months in mid-2019). He's the first player to claim No. 1 in his debut season as a professional.
Griffin ranked No. 43 on our preseason Top 100 and his in-season jump to No. 1 is unprecedented. Alex Bregman made the previous biggest leap, moving from No. 22 in January 2016 to No. 1 that August. Mike Trout went from unranked on our preseason Top 50 in 2010 to No. 1 on our preseason list a year later, but there were no midseason rankings in between.
You may be wondering how Griffin went from ranking No. 11 on the Top 100 on Tuesday to No. 2 on Wednesday before climbing another spot with Anthony's graduation. As part of our pre-Trade Deadline Top 30 updates, we refreshed every organization's top 10 and made the decision that Griffin should move ahead of the Pirates' other elite prospect, right-hander Bubba Chandler.
That dictated that Griffin had to slide up to at least No. 5 on the Top 100 in order to have him in front of Chandler. We opted to place him at No. 2, setting up his rise to No. 1 on Thursday.