Ranking the Farm Systems

https://www.minorleagueball.com/2012/1/1/2674804/2012-mlb-farm-system-ranking-based-on-sickels-grading-system

I’ve got a similar spreadsheet, but since there are many types of farm systems (top heavy - Washington, Arizona; deep but lacking elite talent - Toronto, San Diego, Boston) the weights really matter. Tinkering around, a number of different systems can end up on top.

for putting together all this work.

is that, I think a lot of Cubs fans thought we would rank, as a system, in the lower third, or at least the back end of the teens, due to the lack of upper level talent. I mean, I think most Cubs fans thought the system was more talented than general fans believed, but not top half talented.

But BA had the Cubs at 14th pre-Reds/Padres trades, and Callis suggested we’d slide up a few notches.

against the Royals. They may not have the best depth since graduating so many players but i think they arguable have the best top talent.

who’s an A-

It’d probably be better to assign dollar values a la Victor Wang instead of using arbitrary point totals.

Victor Wang already did this research based off Sickels’ prospect rankings.

http://www.beyondtheboxscore.com/2009/7/20/950254/which-is-better-compensation

Probably be a bit more accurate if you used values based off those numbers.

Well done!

Billy Beane will trade Parker before he makes it to the bigs.
Can’t have the A’s winning can we Billy?

is that John was inconsistent in the number of prospects reviewed, going down through 25 for some teams but only through 20 for others. Suppose you could explain that, John? Was it your intention to go as deep as necessary to break ties? Or was there (as there appears to be) a change in how deep the reviews went as your articles progressed? Not sure without looking in detail, but it seemed to me like most of the lists where you only mentioned 20 guys were the ones at the beginning of the process.

And your final rankings pretty much perfectly jibe with my unresearched, unquantitative rankings. At the end of prospect season, I reckon people will have the Dbacks higher and the Twins lower, but the rest will be pretty comparable to what you have here.

I’m not sure I’d call my Twins a top 10 system though… Probably more 10-15.

There are 288 players at B- or above. I’d say that is a fair cutoff for meaningful depth; if we include all the C+ players, the list balloons to 580 prospects.

To put it bluntly, any methodology that says the Cubs’ system is roughly 90% as valuable as the Royals, D’Backs, and Cardinals probably needs overhauling.

Top 24 prospects: StL 1, Cubs 0
Top 76 prospects: StL 5, Cubs 2
Top 146 prospects: StL 11, Cubs 3
Top 288 prospects: StL 13, Cubs 7

And yet the Northsiders have 88% as much minor league talent? Doesn’t figure.

shouldn’t be a C+ guy in the first place—-if he’s seen to have a decent chance to reach something approaching his potential. Either you’re in the top 300, or you ain’t. And if you ain’t, then you are indeed mostly irrelevent right now.

Take Orlando Arcia, f’rinstance. (Not even a C+ actually, but a straight C.) I’d give him a B-, or maybe even a borderline B. Yes, it was the DSL, but as Ben Badler’s March 2009 article for BA ably pointed out, even DSL numbers have meaning…particularly if the player is quite young, and has positive scouting reports married to the nice numbers.

And the Cubs, with the addition of Rizzo, have three (Jackson, Baez).

Sorry about the lack of clarity in the previous post, Ryno. The numbers were all taken from John’s grades (24 A and A-, 76 B+ or better, etc.).

Speaking for m’self, I look forward to your system rankings with baited breath. As for Badler’s article, I’m so computer illiterate I don’t know if this will even work.

Here’s hoping.

A quick Google search, “Ben Badler DSL March 2009” will net a satisfactory result, though.

If you are going to count C grade guys at all, you should probably count a consistent total number of guys per team. Pretty much any team goes 30+ deep in “C” grade prospects.

The problem I have right now is, the Nationals for example traded 4 guys, so you are now only counting 16 total players in their system. But the only reason any C guys got included at all was to bring a team’s total to 20. If the list were made after the trade, the Nationals would have had 4 more C guys included.

I see a similar problem with the C+ grades. Teams who had more than 20 guys listed to include all the C+ are still getting over-rated. In this ranking for example, if a prospect improved from B to B+, it seems that would only increase the overall score by 0.3 points. But if a player improves from C to C+, that will improve the grade by a lot more. In reality though, anyone would rather have the B player improve to a B+.

The way to solve this might be to include a consistent number of prospects per team (say 25). Just assume that everyone has enough C guys to get to that number.

And in a later post, John stated at least 5 in the others category were C+’s also. Other deep systems would almost assuredly have more than 25 in C+ players as well.
Grading systems after the Handbook is released would be a bit more accurate.

Your count is off. I’ve only looked at the B prospects(so I don’t know if your count of the C prospects is accurate or not), but you have them listed as having 2 straight B prospects. They actually only have 1 straight B prospect. But they also have 2 B+ prospects and 2 B- prospects.