Rating the Farm Systems

by prhood on Dec 29, 2006 2:54 PM EST

I'm going to be particiapting in a draft whereby we select an AL team and the players it "owns". Apart from the MLB players this encompasses the minor league systems of each team. Obviously this is a relevant factor in deciding which team to select. I thought I would do a quick and dirty evaluation of each AL team based on John's player ratings. I assigned 6 pts for a A, 5 for a A- down to 1 pt for a C+. I excluded the C calibre players altogether. I then divided the total by 20 (the number of players John listed)which gives greater weight to a deep system versus one that has a few good prospects but no depth. My rating system generated the following result: 1. TB 2.7 2. BOS 2.2 3. MIN 2.1 4. CLE 2.1 5. NYY 2.0 6. KC 2.0 7. LAA 1.9 8. BAL 1.5 9. OAK 1.4 10. DET 1.4 11. TOR 1.3 12. SEA 1.2 13. CHW 1.1 14. Tex - Not rated - no data Obviously TB is in a class by itself. The #2 through #7 sports are pretty equal while the systrems for the remaining teams are relatively spooty.

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I started

doing this, using a GPA style grading system. A = 4.0, A- = 3.67, B+ = 3.33, etc. If you can wait until John is done, I will make the spreadsheet available to anyone who wants it.

ps. you can't always divide by 20, as John sometimes throws in one or two extra names (I made that mistake already).

"Dying is no big deal. The least of us will manage that. Living is the trick." - Red Smith

by finman on Dec 29, 2006 3:06 PM EST reply actions

That's a n improvement in terms of assiging grades

TAM    B
BOS    B-
CLE    B-
MIN    B-
LAA    B-
NYY    C+
KC    C+
OAK    C+
TOR    C
DET    C
BAL    C-
CHW    C-
SEA    D

The relative ranking is more or less unchanged but SEA appears to have a ntably weak system. I only included the top 20 propsects in each system.

by prhood on Dec 29, 2006 3:48 PM EST up reply actions

Damn that

didn't show the way I wanted it to.

1. TB 2.7
2. BOS 2.2
3. MIN 2.1
4. CLE 2.1
5. NYY 2.0
6. KC 2.0
7. LAA 1.9
8. BAL 1.5
9. OAK 1.4
10. DET 1.4
11. TOR 1.3
12. SEA 1.2
13. CHW 1.1
14. Tex - Not rated - no data

I used the 20 to get a feeling for the relative number of good prospects in the system - this is essentuially the same as assigning a value of 0 to any player C or lower.

by prhood on Dec 29, 2006 3:35 PM EST reply actions

Weights are Wrong

Two years ago I counted all of John's letter grades and put them in a spreadsheet along with BA's farm system rankings. The formula that best predicted the latter from the former was (12 * number of A) + (9 * number of A-) + (3 * number of B+) + (total of B, B-, C+, and C).

So you can see that in the real world, a huge premium is placed on having A and A- players, as it should be. You can also see that there was no correlation between John ranking a player B or C and BA's assessment of a system, which is not suprising, since by the time we get that low opinions differ a lot.

Until John publishes his book, we don't know how many C+ prospects each system has (let alone how many C), since half a dozen systems (TB, Col, Ari, Bos, Atl, LAA) filled out the top 20 without getting to C.

For the time being, you could go with a 12-8-4-2-1 weighting for A, A-, B+, B, B- and use number of C+ as a tiebreaker.

That gives you

TB 52
KC 36
Col 35
NYA 32
Ari 31
Cle 31
LAN 30
Min 29
Bos 28
LAA 27
Htn 27
Cin 27
Mil 26
NYN 26
Atl 22
Fla 21
SF 20
Det 20
ChN 19
Tor 19
Bal 18
Sea 15
StL 13
Was 12
Oak 12
Phi 11
ChA 10

by Eric Van on Dec 29, 2006 4:14 PM EST reply actions

re: rankings

i agree with your theory that A and A- prospects should be emphasized, but how exactly do you know thats the "best" formula?...in other words, why multiply A prospects by 9? why not 8 or 7 or any other number a significant amount greater than a B prospect?

by nyybaseball99 on Dec 29, 2006 6:27 PM EST up reply actions

ok i see

i misread the post

by nyybaseball99 on Dec 29, 2006 6:29 PM EST up reply actions

re: rankings

im not sure what the point of converting john;s individual rankings to a farm system ranking from BA...why is a formula needed when we'll have the BA list anyway?

it kinda defeats the purpose of some of this stuff as well, these rankings are supposed to be subjective, the way people construct these rankings is through how much they value potential, production, injury history, and some other factors...so why is a formula needed to turn on into the other?

idk if john ranks the systems but if he doesnt a formula should be used to construct one, not to construct one to look as similar as possible to BA's rankings

by nyybaseball99 on Dec 29, 2006 6:37 PM EST up reply actions

Eric!

I'm glad Eric wrote this reply. I was going to write something to this effect, based purely on intuition.

Here are some reasons you might want to know what the historical "translation" from John's grades to BA system rankings are:

Find the systems that "don't add up". If you plug the numbers in like Eric did here (thanks, EV), and then BA ranks one of those teams significantly different than it shows up here, that's a "gap" between how John sees their system and how BA sees them - very useful to dig into those systems and determine which players are likely interpreted differently.
Reverse-engineering the BA top-30 lists into equivalent Sickels' letter grades, based on the BA system rankings (and their top-10/top-30 lists). This could bring into focus where individual players are rated significantly differently. If John has 3 A- players, 3 B+ players, and a 4 B players in an organization, and BA shows that organization as being 23rd-best, a #2 ranking by John vs. a #2 ranking by BA aren't going to mean that the player is viewed anywhere near the same by both systems.

by BobbyMac on Dec 29, 2006 10:51 PM EST up reply actions

And Furthermore ....

BobbyMac got a lot of it.

My ultimate desire was to know how much more valuable an A or A- prospect was than a B+ or B, as regarded by experts like BA or John. Ideally, I would have had letter grades from BA for each prospect, plus their farm system rankings. Or both from John. What I actually had on hand to use was the system rankings from BA but the letter grades from John. So I did that analysis, which answers the question I was asking, but does so with some noise added to the data set -- the noise being the different opinions of John and BA.

I'll probably repeat the analysis this year (and I should probably do it for last year, too, as well as with all three years combined).

BTW, if you add Matsuzaka as an A prospect for the Sox, they become the #2 system in MLB (although I can see a subjective case for them still being behind KC). If BA ranks them below #3, it will clearly be a case of their counting D-Mat as a prospect in their top 100 and in the Sox top 10, but not counting (or discounting) him when ranking the farm systems. Since he actually isn't a product of the farm system, that makes sense, of course.

by Eric Van on Dec 30, 2006 12:51 AM EST up reply actions

Sanchez etc

When doing the yankees, you can't ignore Humberto Sanchez, Kevin Whealan. But I wonder if there could be a system that would differentiate the btw deep systems and systems with a few stars.

by wir963 on Dec 29, 2006 4:52 PM EST reply actions