Josiah Hartshorn keeps piling up the kind of numbers that force you to stop and look twice.
The 19-year-old, taken by the Cubs in the sixth round out of high school just one year ago, has gone from intriguing pick to Chicago’s No. 1 prospect in a hurry. Across two levels this season, he’s hitting .285/.403/.520 with a 139 wRC+, and the source material says he’ll start 2027 at Double-A with his MLB debut not long after.
The latest marker on his climb came with his 21st homer, which also gave him his 100th RBI. That makes Hartshorn the first teenage Cubs prospect to reach 100 RBIs since at least 2005.
It’s another line in a very exclusive club. A few days earlier, Hartshorn became the first teenage prospect in the organization to reach 20 home runs this century. Before him, the last Cubs player that young to get there was Corey Patterson in 1999.
His 100th RBI also put him in rarer company across the minors this season. MLB Pipeline noted that the blast made him the fifth most among Minor Leaguers this year.
For the Cubs system, the last farmhand to drive in 100 runs in a single season was Matt Mervis in 2022, when he finished with 119 RBIs. Mervis hit .309/.379/.605 with a 153 wRC+ that year while moving from High-A to Triple-A and slugged 36 homers, just one shy of Iowa teammate Alexander Canario’s 37. But he was five years older than Hartshorn is now when that season happened, and he never matched that level after reaching the majors in 2023.
The more natural big-picture comparisons are Kris Bryant and Javier Báez. Báez posted 111 RBIs as a 20-year-old in 2013, while Bryant had 110 RBIs as a 22-year-old in 2014.
Both followed those seasons by landing consensus top-five prospect status. Hartshorn doesn’t carry the same draft pedigree - Bryant and Báez were top-10 overall picks, while Hartshorn was the advanced high school bat who fell to the sixth round - but the production is starting to speak loudly on its own.
He may not rocket that high in a crowded prospect field when offseason rankings come out, but a top-20 placement is described as very much in play. More than that, Hartshorn is making a case that he belongs in the conversation with some of the best Cubs prospects in recent memory.
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The biggest question now is whether this is tied to the shoulder and back issues that have lingered in his recent past, or whether it is something new altogether. Either way, the timing is frustrating, with only a short stretch left in the minor league calendar and no clear indication yet whether Conrad will be back before the season ends on Sept. 11. [Read more 🡒]