2023 MLB Draft picks: Sleepers, stars and up-and-comers - ESPN

I've already ranked the draft prospects for this year's draft based on how good I think they will be, so this article points to players who I'm higher on than many other outlets/scouts/teams — and lets me explain why. In other cases, it's focusing on players I've seen often and have a good feeling that they'll find success, or who have really convinced the scouts I trust most. Here are the players I'm most excited about in this year's draft.

To get you into the swing of things, let's call out my fifth-ranked player, Max Clark. I think the casual draft fan assumes the fifth-best player won't have five-WAR upside, but that's why this draft is considered the best in at least a decade, led by the elite top five. Clark has a lot of parallels to NL Rookie of the Year candidate Corbin Carroll of the Arizona Diamondbacks.

It's important to note the actual chances of comps like this becoming real. Using some empirical outcomes of different tiers of top prospects and adapting them to Clark, let's call it a 35% chance he's at the level of perennial All-Star (3.5+ annual WAR, roughly), 35% he's a solid to good everyday player (2 to 3.5 WAR), and a 30% chance he's a sometimes-regular, good backup, or worse. That might not sound like good odds for a top-of-the-draft success, but that kind of player gets a bonus of $6-8 million in the draft and is immediately worth something like $50 million in trade value the day he signs, using some of the math I use to value farm systems.

I've developed a track record for picking my guy in each draft — it usually comes wherever the biggest gap between what I think vs. others, combined with conviction about my projection. They've unintentionally ended up being the same kind of player —