Detroit Tigers: Five Prospects Who Could Break Into Top-100 Rankings

It’s Prospects Week here at Motor City Bengals, where we’re giving you everything you need to know about the state of the Detroit Tigers farm system.

If you haven’t already, you can check out our list of the Top 20 Detroit Tigers prospects, and a few more players who just missed the cut.

We also have you covered when it comes to areas of depth in the farm system, players with interesting tools, and even coverage of the 2021 MLB draft.

The Detroit Tigers currently have a highly ranked farm system, but it’s top-heavy, and we are likely to see a handful of players graduate out of prospect status this season. That’s good! The goal of all farm systems is to turn prospects into major leaguers, not to rank highly on MLB Pipeline.

But we also know rebuilding teams like the Detroit Tigers are striving to create the sort of self-sustaining drafting and development systems we see from the Los Angeles Dodgers and Tampa Bay Rays. Top prospects graduate, and new ones bubble up to take their place.

So that’s the focus of our article today. Here are the five Detroit Tigers players who could find their way onto Top-100 rankings lists next year if they have great seasons.

Detroit Tigers Potential Top-100 Prospect – Franklin Perez

This doesn’t seem all that likely after Franklin Perez’s underwhelming outing this week. His mechanics looked odd, his release point wandered, and his fastball sat in the 86-88 MPH range. It wasn’t want anyone wanted to see, but it was also somewhat understandable: Franklin Perez has barely pitched for three years. On the positive side, his curveball still had good shape and his changeup showed nice fade. If he can somehow recover his low-90s velocity and show progress in the minors this year, he could regain his top-100 prospect status from 2017 and 2018, when he looked like a good bet to become a mid-rotation starter