Was wondering the same- 2 of the top 5 are gone. 2 are likely to be graduated possibly as early as April. The 3rd if things are slow.... Mayer.... another year but he could end up the no. 1 prospect if he can stay healthy after all the teams graduations.
After him it gets much younger quickly in the Sox system. Hopefully some pitching starts to move up
Sure. I am as a big a prospect humper as there is here, and have enjoyed watching the players rise the ranks, but if your team isn't the Dodgers and has a top of the line farm system for multiple years, then they probably aren't winning much at the MLB level because you need those prospects to graduate at some point. The hope is that all three make the leap this year, and that Grissom is good, and if all of that works out they won't have any top 100 guys, but they will have their LF (Campbell in my dream scenario), SS (Mayer), 2B (Grissom), 1B (Duh), RF (Abreu) and Util OF (Rafaela) for essentially free while they are winning and rebuilding the farm system at the same time.
With the way I have seen some baseball people raving about the Sox development system, I would be surprised to see any/all of Password, Bleis, Arias, Romero, Monegro or Paez beating on the door to the top 100 lists this time next year.
And while they don't have top end pitching, Fitts and Priester look like they could slot in the back end of the rotation this year, Guerrero, Weissert and Slaten are all super cheap and look like solid pen pieces, Criswell has a role somewhere, and Penrod and Dobbins may even see some time in the second half of this year. The Crochet signing, while it hurts the pipeline in the short term, allows everyone else to kind of slot into a spot where they probably belong (Houck 1B/2, Bello 2/3, Crawford/Fitts/Priester/Giolito filling in the rest).
I think this team is in a really good position to go on a long run of sustained success starting as soon as this year. I want them to add one more pitcher, and they need a long term solution at catcher (as much as I liked Teel, I am not convinced he was it, either, though).
Either way, though, I think the rest of this decade should be a lot more fun than the first four years (five is you count 2020 as this decade) have been.