Yankees' Aaron Judge serves as key reminder in MLB prospect list rankings season

It's that time of year when every baseball website is putting out their top-100 prospects list.

It's a good chance for fans to argue about their given team's young players while waiting for baseball season to actually arrive.

And well, just remember that they don't always get it right.

It's always a bit of a hit-and-miss exercise to rank players who, for the most part, have not even stepped on a major league field yet. The rankings are based on physical tools, what scouts might know about intangibles, and projection.

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Sometimes, they miss the mark by a bit.

Take Aaron Judge, for example.

Judge is one of the best right-handed hitters of all time, but he was never a top-10 prospect in the sport. On most lists, he barely ever broke into the top-50.

In part, it's because he's different, a 6-foot-7 behemoth with worries about the swing and miss in his game.

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It certainly all worked out OK for Judge.

Turns out, he reached the maximum version of himself, and maybe beyond what anyone could've imagined. You can't really project a hitter to turn into one of the best ever, but that's exactly what Judge did.

That's not to say every under-ranked prospect will turn into Aaron Judge. But it's just a nice little reminder that it's not a perfect science, and sometimes, what we don't expect will actually be what happens.

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