This Vote represents the last in our series this year, as we are into Spring Training and also now bumping right up against the Top 100 countdown. Our voters play an important role in almost half of that list, but it doesn’t make much sense to be voting on players who are already showing up in the Top 100 profiles.
And in fact, this year’s Vote went longer than any other we’ve run under “normal” circumstances. (In 2020, we ran the Vote to 50 rounds given there was no baseball being played/minors season cancelled outright, and in 2018 we ran the Vote well into the regular season as a first-time effort.)
It was a fitting, even poetic, end to the polling, as Reudis Diaz finally advanced, on his 33rd ballot. That is doubtlessly an all-time record span on the ballot for our Prospect Vote.
Diaz in fact won this round with authority, outpacing fellow long-balloter Aldrin Batista by 18 votes. Making an enormous jump of five spots on the ballot and 23 total votes, Diaz routed the rest, with 28 of 71 (39%) votes:
This was Diaz’s first time in our voting. Perhaps next year he won’t have to linger so long on the ballot.
Past No. 37s in the SSS Top Prospect Vote
2025 Voting lasted 31 rounds
2024 Voting lasted 34 rounds
2023 Voting lasted 24 rounds
2022 Voting lasted 17 rounds
2021 Voting lasted 35 rounds
2020 Lenyn Sosa (26%)
2019 Voting lasted 36 rounds
2018 Laz Rivera (27%)
Diaz also become the fourth right-handed reliever to advance, as well as the third RHRP in the last six results:
Here’s the overall breakdown of our readership winners: one catcher, three second basemen, two third basemen, four shortstops, one left fielder, three center fielders, four right fielders, seven right-handed starting pitchers, nine left-handed starting pitcher, four right-handed relievers and one left-handed relievers. There were no first basemen voted forward this year.
Overall, that’s 21 of 37 winning prospects being pitchers, and 16 of 37 winners being starting pitchers.
Past South Side Sox Prospect votes