When you look behind the curtain and see how the process is done, you learn a lot more. John Sickels allows for this to happen when creating his lists of the Top 20 prospects for each major league organization. The beginning of the process is the organization discussion where he poses questions to the readers about players in particular and asks for personal sleeper picks.

He then makes his first cuts to give himself around 35-40 prospects per team to look at and vet further. This is the preliminary prospect list. Once the preliminary list is compiled, the next step is to dish out the grades. He then comes up with a prospect grade distribution of the players and gives the readers a chance to guess at which players receive which grades.

The final step in the process is to rank each of the top prospects in the organization one through twenty, sometimes more depending on how stacked the system is. The grades and ranks are revealed along with a handful of other names to keep an eye on for one reason or another. Below is an index of each team along with links to each stage of the process.

For now, this is a work in progress with more teams to be added.

National League East

American League Central