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This has been a very good season for rookies, with a clear runaway RoY winner in the American League (Kevin McGonigle) and a tighter race between some top prospects in the National League. J.J. Wetherholt remains the clear favorite, but Sal Stewart has put up some gaudy counting stats, with the Mets’ former top-10 prospect duo of Nolan McLean and Carson Benge lurking as well. All those names have gotten a fair bit of coverage given how good they’ve been, but it does feel like an awful lot of Top 101 prospects have graduated this season. Perhaps it isn’t actually that much more than normal—I haven’t gone back and charted this historically—but it does make for a useful late-season column idea. So let’s take a look at how the rest of our graduating class of 2026 Top 101 Prospects have fared in their first pass at big league action, starting with the Top 25.
1. Konnor Griffin, OF, Pittsburgh Pirates
After a rather tepid start to his major-league career, Griffin was heating up before he hit the injured list for a month with a forearm strain. He wasn’t even back a week from that before he got sidelined once again, this time with a finger injury. Griffin will likely return before the end of the season, but he has been sort of preserved in stasis mid-breakout, and we don’t know exactly what the lost time and pair of upper body injuries will mean for the balance of 2026. Still, he did more than enough in his 200-plus plate appearances to suggest the future remains bright. He has a potential plus-plus power/speed combo in the near-term, and the latter could end up elite by his mid-20s if not before. Conversely, he didn’t fully assuage the hit tool concerns—he ran a terrifying chase rate during those first 200+ plate appearances—and he has let the no. 2 prospect, Kevin McGonigle, open up a healthy early career WARP lead. But this is a long-term value list, and Griffin might start making up ground as soon as next season.
