As the 2026 Minor League Baseball season begins, many Yankees fans will be focusing on names such as perceived MLB roster snubs Spencer Jones and Jasson Domínguez or blue-chip pitching prospects Carlos Lagrange and Elmer Rodríguez.
However, a different crop of players, often on the outskirts of prospect rankings, will enter the season hoping to find themselves in the same sentences as the four above by October.
When this exercise was done almost a year ago, the three players mentioned included Lagrange, Griffin Herring and Edgleen Perez. Going into the 2025 season, Perez ranked the highest amongst the three on MLB.com’s preseason system ranking, coming in at 13. Lagrange came in at 19, while Herring was all the way down at 28.
Fast forward to today, Lagrange is a consensus top 100 prospect while Herring and Perez were key pieces in the trades that brought Ryan McMahon and David Bednar to New York at the 2025 deadline.
After successfully finding three names in 2025, here is a trio of players who could find themselves rocketing up prospect rankings by the end of 2026.
Henry Lalane
Lalane and Lagrange came into 2025 on similar footing: a pair of highly touted international signees who had signed less than a year apart and had both suffered injuries in recent seasons. In fact, Lalane was ranked higher than Lagrange by MLB.com, coming in at 11.
The difference from there? The latter tossed 120 minor league innings. The former was limited to just 19.1. In fact, Lalane has just 143 career innings since signing in 2021.
The Bronx native, who signed out of the Dominican Republic after moving there when he was young, has long been lauded for his strikeout potential and ability to touch the upper 90s. However, the velocity has taken a hit due to shoulder issues which had to be surgically fixed.
Lalane still has the ability to strike out the side in any given inning, evidenced by his 11 strikeouts per nine innings in Low-A in 2025. On the other hand, the soon to be 22-year-old can also be prone to walking the house, walking over seven batters per nine.
If the left-hander can recapture his early career velocity and bring the walks back down to even close to where he had it in the Florida Coast League in 2023 (1.7/9), he could make a similar jump to Lagrange in 2026.
Thatcher Hurd
A third-round pick out of LSU in 2024, Hurd has yet to throw a professional pitch. The 23-year-old’s last outing came with the Cotuit Kettleers of the Cape Cod Baseball League in his draft year before undergoing Tommy John surgery prior to 2025.
Hurd has always possessed first round stuff but often not the production to go with it. After working to a 1.06 ERA in his first year of college at UCLA before transferring to LSU, Hurd struggled in two years for the Tigers while bouncing in and out of the weekend rotation. The right-hander finished his time in Baton Rouge with a 6.04 ERA, though he was the winning pitcher in the 2023 NCAA National Championship Game.
Hurd should make his debut at some point in 2026 and could reach High-A if the buildup and return go as planned. Based on what he showed in college, Baseball Savant credits Hurd with a plus fastball and slider and an average curve. What Savant is low on is his control, handing him a 40-grade which may keep him from becoming a starter. Still, the Yankees love taking pitchers with poor college results and below average control and turning them into viable upper-level prospects (see Ben Hess). A lot will depend on the speed of his return, but don’t count out Hurd making it as a starter just yet.
Harrison Cohen
Rounding out the trio of arms, Cohen is easily the most experienced and likely would be even if the other two hadn’t been plagued by the injury bug. One of the last true prospects in the organization to be born before the turn of the century, the 26-year-old Cohen will turn 27 this season; not exactly the prototypical age of a notable farmhand.
Even making his way to a list like this would have been a tall task after going undrafted in 2022. However, the right-hander has earned that respect through his consistently dominant minor league performance.
Cohen worked to sub-two full season ERAs across multiple levels in both 2024 and 2025, striking out over a batter an inning in both campaigns. The New York native ran into some walk trouble in 2025, as his 5.3 BB/9 was over two higher than in 2024. Cohen’s pitch mix is also questionable, as MLB.com considers only his slider to be above average.
Pitching in both the World Baseball Classic for Team Israel and Major League spring training, Cohen will likely get his first cracks at the big leagues this season. The bullpen arm will likely never feature at the back end of a contending bullpen or come in to get big postseason outs. There’s a reason he went both unprotected and unselected in this past off-season’s Rule 5 draft. Still, there’s something to be said for being a reliable middle-inning reliever on a league-minimum contract.