Welcome to the Rotowire Prospect Podcast. I'm your host James Anderson. And today's guest is Arm Layton of just baseball. And this is my first time chatting with Arm, so I'm really excited to have him on. He's been a great Twitter follow. If you're, if you're on Twitter twitter you're looking for prospect content definitely recommend

following arm latin arm how you doing uh thanks so much for joining me i'm doing great man

thanks for having me on it's uh likewise enjoy following your stuff and i'm glad we're able to uh

link up here and talk some prospects yeah and it's uh it's, it's a, it's a perfect time to have you on.

You just released a really, really, uh,

in-depth top 100 prospect rankings on just baseball.com.

Uh, but first I just want to kind of get, um, you know, sort of how how long have you kind of

been following minor leaguers? How long have you been really kind of interested in the evaluation

side of minor league baseball? Yeah, it's a great question. And it honestly started with when I was

playing in high school.

Funny enough, where I played in South Florida.

And, you know, I was the scrappy switch hitting utility guy that was just happy to be on a team that had some really good players.

And a couple of the guys on my team were going through the draft process, Griffin Conon, I being one. And then another friend of mine, Zach Cohn, who ended up playing in the Pirates organization, Griffin's still with the Marlins. And then one other teammate our catcher, Mike Rothenberg, played at Duke and now is in the Tigers org. And so I'm watching all these guys go through the processing, the scouts come, like reading then reports on them versus what I see day in and day out, some of the things that were right,

some of the things that were wrong. these guys go through the processing, the scouts come, like reading then reports on them versus

what I see day in and day out, some of the things that were right, some of the things that were

wrong, watching these guys with video, talking to my teammates about what they're going through.

I was just so captivated by it. I'm like, how do they know everything about my friends that,

you know, that I'm with every day to be able to invest millions into them.

And that whole process was really fascinating to me. Then fast forward, you know, once my

playing days were done and I wanted to stay in baseball, I wanted to cover it. So I went to Syracuse,

did the whole journalism thing, and I originally wanted

to do play-by-play. So went out to the Cape Cod League. That was my first play-by-play gig. And then I was

...