Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Tampa Bay Rays. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the sixth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.
A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.
All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here.
Other Prospects of Note
Grouped by type and listed in order of preference within each category.
Rookie-Level Hitters
Andres Torres, C
Franklin Merisu, OF
Israfell Bautista, CF
Luis Almanzar, OF
After two years in the DSL, Torres is now in Florida as the primary catcher on Tampa Bay’s FCL roster. He’s a lefty batter who lets the baseball travel really deep in the hitting zone. He’s strong enough to hit lots of hard oppo grounders and line drives, and some of his data is exciting (this is an 80% contact rate catcher with a 47% hard-hit rate), but his swing needs an overhaul for it to be weaponized. He’s a good receiver and a poor thrower. Merisu, 18, has above-average power projection at a fairly explosive 6-foot-3, and he looks pretty good in center field, but it takes him so long to get his hands going that he’s often late to the contact point, so he’s whiffing a lot right now. Bautista, 19, is a rail thin 6-foot-2 converted infielder who can really run around in center field. He has a plus ceiling on defense but needs to get stronger to hit. Almanzar is a long-levered, 6-foot-2, lefty-hitting outfielder who is less in control of his swing than his teammates.
DSL Arms To Like for Their Stuff
Sebastian Pina, RHP
Angel Castillo, RHP
Gabriel Paez, LHP
Frank Chessman, RHP
Jhonny Aranguren, RHP
Pina, 17, is a smaller, athletic DSL righty who is sitting 93 and touching 95 with plus vertical break. Castillo, 24, is a newly-signed righty throwing gas at an effortless 94-97 mph. He has a reliever’s build at a stout 5-foot-10. Paez (sitting 95, up to 98) is a 6-foot-3 19-year-old lefty in his third DSL season. He struggled to throw strikes in the other two. Chessman and Aranguren have both been up to 96.
DSL Arms To Like for Their Delivery
Justin Suero, RHP
Angel Perez, RHP
Isaac Vegas, RHP
Denichel Javier, RHP
Suero, 17, is a 6-foot-3 righty with a 90-93 mph fastball and a clean arm stroke, but a very upright blocking leg. Perez, 17, is a really athletic 5-foot-11 righty with a gorgeous arm action, an 89-mph fastball, and plus breaking ball spin. Vegas, 20, is a 5-foot-11 righty who cruises so far down the mound that he generates over six-and-a-half feet of extension. He has upper-80s fastball velo and a Bugs Bunny changeup. Javier, 18, is a 6-foot righty with a very whippy arm and a lower slot. He’s sitting 93 with huge tail and has a nasty gyro slider. He has more of a relief look than the others in this cluster, but also the nastiest present stuff.
Depth Starters
Chase Solesky, RHP
Brian Van Belle, RHP
Chris Clark, RHP
Aidan Haugh, RHP
Once a White Sock and a National, the Rays brought in Solesky on a minor league deal during the offseason, and the kitchen sink righty pitched well enough in Durham to move into the Bulls rotation and make his big league debut in May. Solesky’s stuff is only okay, but he commands his entire repertoire (except for his changeup) at a plus or better level. The 28-year-old is the best spot start option in the org at the moment because he’s a lock to take the ball and throw strikes. Van Belle is a 29-year-old spot starter with a good changeup who blew out at the end of 2025 and is on the full-season injured list. Clark, 24, was the Angels’ 2023 fifth-rounder out of Harvard. He’s a lower-slotted righty who has been in and out of the rotation at Montgomery so far this year, sitting 92 with uphill angle and tail, and a roughly average slider and changeup. Haugh is a 6-foot-6 righty out of North Carolina who is having strike-throwing success in Charleston. His secondary pitches are roughly average, but his fastball is getting hit a bit too much for comfort.
Relievers With a Good Secondary Pitch
Evan Reifert, RHP
Bryce Shaffer, LHP
Austin Vernon, RHP
Jack Kartsonas, RHP
Dylan Lesko, RHP
Jackson Lancaster, LHP
Andrew Lindsey, RHP
Hayden Snelsire, RHP
K.C. Hunt, RHP
Reifert has a plus-plus slider, but his fastball has been vulnerable to contact, and he has historically been very walk prone. You might remember Shaffer as the cross-bodied, low-slot lefty from the good Coastal Carolina teams of 2023 and 2024. The Rays signed him as an undrafted free agent and moved him from the third base side of the rubber to the first, and now his delivery is even wackier. Andy Pettitte’s pickoff move was more direct to the plate than Shaffer’s delivery. He’s thriving in A-ball. Vernon, 27, was shut down in March, came back in May, pitched for two weeks, and was shut down again. At his best, the 6-foot-8 righty has looked like a wild middle reliever with a plus slider. Kartsonas was a generic fastball/slider guy at West Virginia just a year ago, but after signing with the Rays as an undrafted free agent, he’s now a high-octane (up to 97) fastball/splitter starter who began the season at Montgomery before he was sent back to Bowling Green, where he is thriving in the rotation. He’s 25 and has worse control than his walk numbers indicate.
Lesko was once a great high school pitching prospect and first-round pick by the Padres whose career was derailed by a TJ and an inability to throw strikes coming out of surgery. He has an incredible changeup, but continues to struggle finding the plate with such severity that he’s still stuck in A-ball. Lancaster, 27, was a nomadic (JUCO, Missouri, Louisiana Tech) two-way college player who was signed as an undrafted free agent in 2023. He had A-ball success as a fastball/slider relief southpaw, but both his control and strikeouts have dipped as he’s climbed. Acquired from the Marlins via trade, Lindsey is a lower-slot Double-A reliever who hasn’t had his peak velo (he was in the upper 90s at Tennessee) for a couple of years, though his slider/cutter is playing like a plus pitch. He’s 26. Out of Division III Randolph-Macon comes Hayden Snelsire, a 17th-rounder who is thriving in the Montgomery bullpen thanks to a good slider. Hunt came from Milwaukee in a marginal trade for Jake Woodford. His fastballs sits about 90 and gets pummeled, but he has an effective cutter in the 83-87 mph range. Previously a starter, he is walking a batter per inning in a relief role at Durham.
Hard Throwers
Logan Workman, RHP
Trace Phillips, RHP
Jack Hartman, RHP
Cesar De Jesus, LHP
Andy Rodriguez, RHP
Workman has been a durable upper-level starter for a couple of years, but this season he’s shifted into a bullpen role at Durham. His uphill fastball is a viable big league pitch, but his secondaries are a little short. Phillips was a two-way player at Middle Tennessee who missed most of his draft-eligible sophomore season due to multiple injuries. A wrist issue limited his at-bats even when he was healthy enough to work as a pitcher, and then a separate, unknown issue shut him down on the mound. He was up to 97 and generating plus miss with both his slider and changeup in a handful of starts prior to injury. He signed with the Rays as an undrafted free agent and is only now back pitching in games on the complex, where his fastball has been in the 93-95 mph range.
Hartman was acquired from Pittsburgh for Ji Man Choi, and for a minute, he looked like a viable low-leverage reliever when he was sitting 96-98 a couple Fall Leagues ago. His velo has slipped since then and is more in the 93-95 mph range now, though he has added a curveball this year that has been effective in limited innings, as he too has been injured for much of the year. De Jesus is a 22-year-old lefty up to 98, but without the control to make it effective. Rodriguez provides a great lesson in fastball shape because he sits 95-97, but is only generating a 13% miss rate (the big league average is 22%) at Bowling Green.
System Overview
As usual, the Rays system is as deep and talented as any in baseball. They’ve been crushing the draft, as several of the team’s high school picks from the last couple of years have improved to the point where they feasibly have an everyday player outcome. Some of those guys have a chance to be pretty special players, the kind the Rays can only acquire if they draft them. As analytically inclined as one might assume the Rays to be, they sure do like toolsy, risky players in the draft, and they aren’t afraid to give one individual international prospect a huge, pool-consuming bonus in any given year. This kind of talent acquisition behavior isn’t consistent with the other stereotypically “smart” teams.
Because of how transactional the Rays tend to be, their pro scouting department has a bigger impact on their talent pool than perhaps any other club, and it’s one of the keys to their sustained success. The machinery isn’t just reliant upon them getting good players. The timing of when the Rays trade their big leaguers, and the sheer number of prospects they get back per trade, helps their cup stay full. Take Shane Baz. Baz was one of three prospects acquired for Chris Archer (Austin Meadows and Tyler Glasnow were the others), and then he netted the Rays four players and a pick a few years later. This is how a small market team can stay good, by occasionally running into a Junior Caminero type player who can steer the rudder of the franchise toward the top of the AL East standings.
The Rays’ player dev feels like a mixed bag. An inordinate number of their players are hurt right now, and several of their upper-level pitchers have regressed as strike-throwers. The process used to compile this list involves me evaluating the upper-level pitchers one after another, and several of them have struggled to sustain the stuff that got them onto prospect lists in the first place. But when I progressed to the lower levels, I was suddenly confronted with last year’s draft class, which is chock full of guys who the Rays have already made changes to. Those changes often include a bigger stride down the mound than the player had before.
Another quirk of the Rays system is that most everyone throws a fastball, a slider/cutter, and that’s kind of it. Several of the best pitchers in the system bully the heart of the zone with a fastball that has some kind of additive trait, and then will throw a short, hard slider or cutter off of that. The ones who have a third pitch tend to throw it way less than their two primary offerings. Again, the shops that reasonable people would consider to be on the cutting edge of player dev tend to want to help pitchers develop as many pitches as they can, but not the Rays. If the Rays take a buyer’s posture at the 2026 deadline, it will be interesting to see if the pitchers they move get tweaked by their new orgs.