The Athletic's Minor League awards: Konnor Griffin is our prospect of the year

Other than Triple A, which has another few days to go, the 2025 minor-league regular season is now in the books, so its time for my annual Prospect of the Year award, given to the prospect who showed the best performance in the minor leagues in 2025.

While the process of selecting the top prospects was ultimately subjective, I focused primarily on prospects who legitimately project to be major-league regulars and who performed well relative to their age, level and experience in pro ball.

In short, the younger a player was relative to the other players in his league especially when compared to those with a chance to have some impact in the majors the more impressed I was with a strong performance.

What a player did in the majors, if he was called up, was irrelevant for this lists purposes.

Advertisement I do consider age relative to level as well as experience, so a player like Luis Campusano, who hit .338/.445/.606 in Triple A as a 26-year-old with major-league experience, doesnt make the cut.

Also, a players absence from this article isnt a knock on his prospect status; Jesus Made isnt here but remains one of the best prospects in the game, and his performance was still excellent for an 18-year-old with limited experience.

So, given those criteria, here is my selection for Prospect of the Year for 2025, as well as several other players who had outstanding seasons and deserved notice.

Prospect of the Year Griffin did the thing that only the best prospects seem to do: He got better as he moved up the ladder, in his case reaching Double A just a few months after he turned 19.

He played at three separate levels this season which was his pro debut and didnt post an average below .325, an OBP below .396 or a slugging percentage below .510 at any stop.

He stole 65 bases in 78 attempts, for an 83 percent success rate.

Griffin showed a very advanced approach for any teenager this season, but it was even more impressive given that he went to a small private high school in Jackson, Miss., where he didnt play against the same caliber of competition that high school players in Southern California or much of Florida face.

And he even played better defense at shortstop this season than I think anyone expected.

It was an incredible year start to finish, but especially to finish, as he set himself up to reach the majors in 2026 before hes even old enough to drink.

That performance makes him our Prospect of the Year.

Kevin McGonigle, SS/2B, Detroit Tigers The Tigers second pick in the 2023 draft, McGonigle had a great debut in 2024 but played only about half a season due to injury.

He got a late start again in 2025, but when he returned, he was one of the best hitters anywhere in the minors, with a .372/.462/.648 line in High A, followed by a .254/.369/.550 line in Double A (with a bizarre .230 BABIP that will certainly go up with more playing time).

McGonigle walked more than he struck out at every level this year and showed way more power than I expected, both in production (31 doubles, two triples, 19 homers in just 88 games) and batted-ball quality.

Advertisement Alfredo Duno, C, Cincinnati Reds Duno played just 32 games in Low A last year at age 18 before an injury ended his season.

His return trip to the level this year produced one of the best lines of any catcher in organized baseball: .287/.430/.518, 18 homers and 95 walks against just 91 strikeouts.

His OBP was higher than Griffins at the same level, and Duno led all players in the Florida State League with at least 300 plate appearances, and he also led the league in homers and walks.

Im still skeptical about whether Dunos frame will allow him to stick behind the plate, but the bat is real.

Rainiel Rodriguez, C, St.

Louis Cardinals Rodriguez hit .276/.399/.555 overall this year as an 18-year-old, destroying the Florida Complex League for 20 games before moving up to High A for 60 games, where he hit 13 homers and continued to show patience and selectivity.

He has excellent bat speed already, and the power numbers are backed up by strong data, including a peak already at 111 mph.

His defense is a work in progress he can throw but doesnt move well and will have to maintain his conditioning.

For the purposes of this list, however, he had the best performance of any 18-year-old in the minors this year.

(In that very narrow category, nods go to Pittsburghs Edward Florentino and the Los Angeles Dodgers Ching-Hsien Ko.) JJ Wetherholt, SS, St.

Louis Cardinals The Cardinals 2024 first-round pick started his first full pro season in Double A, where he hit .300/.425/.466 with more walks than strikeouts, then moved up to Triple A for the last 42 games of the season and hit even better, with a .317/.427/.573 line through Monday.

Wetherholt has 16 homers and has even stolen 21 bags in 24 attempts, which is notable given how much of his junior spring was ruined by a recurring hamstring injury that now seems behind him.

I cant imagine he has more than 50 minor-league games between him and a big-league call-up at this point.

Nate George, OF, Baltimore Orioles I could be a little biased, as I saw George twice, and both times he impressed me with his hair-on-fire style of play, along with plus speed and a very good approach for someone with his background.

The Orioles drafted George in the 16th round in 2024 out of a rural Illinois high school; hed barely played in any summer or fall events the prior year, so there was limited data on him and few scouting looks other than his senior year.

George started in the FCL, hitting .383/.451/.556 there in 23 games, then went to Low A, where he proved himself against better pitching with a .337/.410/.491 line in 43 games.

He finished up with a few weeks in High-A Aberdeen ( RIP ) and kept going with a .291/.380/.392 line there, with his 21 percent strikeout rate his highest at any level.

He ended the year with nine triples and stole 50 bases in 75 attempts, all of which underscores that his programming is if run, then run hard.

Well see where his power ends up, but few prospects of any age had a better season than he did.

Advertisement Pitcher of the year Tong led the minor leagues in strikeouts this year with 179 in just 113 2/3 innings.

To put that in context, 135 pitchers threw more innings in the minors than Tong did this year, but he struck out more than any of them.

He allowed just two homers in those 113 2/3 innings, one of the best rates in the minors; although, if youre wondering how predictive that is, he allowed three in his first 11 2/3 innings in the majors.

Tong finds success with an unusual delivery that makes his fastball hard for hitters to square up, and he pairs it with a changeup that generated a whiff rate just over 50 percent in the minors this season.

He leads a trio of Mets starter prospects, along with Brandon Sproat and Nolan McLean, none of whom were first-rounders and all of whom improved markedly once they got into the Mets player development system.

Payton Tolle, LHP, Boston Red Sox Its funny; early in the season, it seemed like Red Sox fans were all excited about a breakout lefty in their system, but it was another guy Brandon Clarke, their fifth-round pick from 2024 who came out of the gate hot (24 strikeouts, two walks in his first 14 innings) but then stumbled with a combination of bad control and blisters, walking almost a batter an inning in High A.

Well see if he can improve on that when healthy, but it turns out a different lefty from Bostons 2024 draft class was the real breakout prospect: Tolle, the second-rounder.

Tolle saw his velocity creep up as the season went along, reaching the majors in his first full pro season and hitting 99.2 mph there, after topping out around 96 mph in his junior year at TCU.

Tolle struck out 36.5 percent of the batters he faced in his 91 2/3 innings in the minors this year and walked just 6.3 percent, with his strikeout-to-walk ratio ranking fourth among all minor-league pitchers with at least 90 innings.

I was a little skeptical of the breakout earlier in the year because it seemed to be more a function of deception he gets way, way out over his front side in his delivery, and he comes back a little across his body but I buy it more now; I was just fashionably late to the Payton party.

Draft debut of the year The No.

20 pick this July out of the University of Tennessee, Fischer played in 19 games for Low-A Wisconsin and hit .311/.402/.446 with a 25.3 percent strikeout rate.

Very few draftees played more games than that anyway, and Fischer was one of the few who hit well across the board when he did play.

This selection could have been No.

1 pick Eli Willits, as he got off to a huge start for Low-A Fredericksburg, but apparently someone told him to try to pull the ball in the air more and he had three hits in his last 30 plate appearances.

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