Ryan Wideman turned a week in Visalia into one of the loudest stretches of the minor league season and did it in a way that looked almost too strange to count. The third-round pick out of Western Kentucky last year helped lead a sweep in a six-game series, then hit one of the wildest home runs of the year when a well-struck one-hopper got past shortstop Kayson Cunningham and then got by the center fielder before the umpires ruled the ball was not stuck and called it a home run.
Wideman was not finished. He later bounced a ball off the batter’s eye in center for a more conventional home run and raised his OPS by almost 250 points this week. That was enough to place him among the 20 hottest prospects in Baseball America’s Hot Sheet for April 27, 2026, which tracked minor league performance through April 26 and is meant to capture the week’s best rises rather than reshuffle any longer-term prospect list.
His surge came in a class that also featured Hartman, who turned High-A Rome into a launch pad with three home runs in the opening game at Greensboro and two more home runs over the course of the week. The 2024 20th-round pick is off to a hot start in 2026, and the underlying numbers matched the box score. Hartman showed a significant increase in both exit velocity data and launch angles, the kind of change teams notice because it can point to more than a short burst of luck.
Serwinowski’s week was shaped more by command than by power, though the power is still there. Acquired when the Dodgers interjected themselves into the Rays-Reds trade last summer and turned catcher Hunter Fedduccia into Serwinowski, he has always had a big arm. On Wednesday, after rough first three starts this year, he carried a perfect game into the fifth inning and struck out the side in the third as he finally found the strike zone. That outing stood out because it showed the raw stuff can still play when the fastball lands where it should.
The Hot Sheet also included Payne, drafted in the first round in 2024 out of the Texas prep ranks, who produced solid numbers in his first full season in 2025 with the Carolina Mudcats before putting together a louder week. He hit four home runs this past week and showed speed, power and improved plate discipline, a combination that makes his early-season line look less like a hot streak and more like a step forward. In another corner of the upper minors, Davalillo kept climbing after a long road back. Released by the Mets after the 2021 season and later signed as a minor league free agent with the Rangers, he struck out 10 batters this past week, tossed six scoreless frames to earn the win against Tulsa and generated a season-high 18 swinging strikes. He is now pitching in the upper minors and only a few steps away from the major leagues.
Baseball America’s Hot Sheet is not a re-ranking of its Top 100 Prospects. It is a weekly read on who has been hottest, and this week’s list made room for a little bit of everything: a slugger who found a new gear, a pitcher who finally threw strikes, and a veteran arm whose next stop could be the majors. The one thing they all had in common was urgency, because a week like this can change the way a team sees a player long before the calendar changes again.
