2021 Draft Noise: Early College Risers & Other Notes

Over the past 10 months, have you happened to hear Casey Stern mutter the iconic phrase, "prospects are cool, parades are cooler," and thought, shit, prospects are waaaaaay cooler than parades now! Don't get me wrong, I loved a good, old-fashioned homecoming float as a kid as much as anybody. But the Coronavirus pandemic has done quite a number on the attractiveness of modern parades. In today's world, I think "prospects are cool, but watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade alone while shoveling a full tin of baked corn into your mouth that you made for yourself is cooler," is a bit more fitting, wouldn't you say? Well, here at Razzball with The Itch and myself, prospects are always cool. They're cool even when they're not, say, in July when everyone else is getting psyched for the start of the 2020 MLB season and 2020 fantasy football drafts, and I'm busy writing a Way-Too-Early College Top 25 for the 2021 MLB Draft segment, inadvertently detailing how one-dimensional my life is. Or, if you read that particular post, how frequently I crap myself on airplanes.

In my Way-Too-Early College Top 25, I took an early shot at laying out the top 25 prospects for the 2021 MLB Draft in a year that had very little spring action and a summer filled with cancelled developmental leagues. Now, as college players returned to campus over the past several months, effectively receiving some varying level of fall training, practice and game action, we have a lot more data and scouting to lean on. But, before I begin rehashing my top college prospects list and start to build it into my annual (it's year two, can I say that?) complete college top 100, let's discuss some early risers that I may have either previously overlooked or under-ranked. Since I'm such a Carmen Sandiego fanatic, I'll also go rogue and add some other notes of things I'm hearing, or seeing, that I don't really agree with, or that I simply think are worth mentioning. That, my dear friends, begins at the very top of the 2021 Draft (guess who?), then follows with the likes of Ethan Wilson and Jaden Hill.