We’re basically at the end of “Prospect Season” now … and the last of the major pundits (mlbpipeline.com) has published its org rankings.\u00a0 We talked about the Nats system top X in a previous post, now here’s a more macro view on how our system looks in general.<\/p>\n
Short answer: “Not Good, Bob!”<\/p>\n
(TV reference, anyone?)<\/p>\n
Anyway.\u00a0 Here’s links to the major pundits and their system rankings:<\/p>\n
I havn’t seen anything from Fangraphs (i’m not sure they do entire system rankings), Baseball Prospectus now has their entire site behind a paywall, ESPN is in a transition year after Law left, and\u00a0John Sickels<\/strong> at the Athletic\u00a0 (who has done rank ings in the past) seems to have re-focused his attentions for now, so we’re down to these four major pundits.<\/p>\n I’ve seen a couple other rankings (one from Bleacher Report, another from Myworldofbaseball.com) that are mostly driven by the rankings of the top prospects in each system, which is a somewhat limited way to view an entire system comprised of hundreds of prospects.\u00a0 If a system has (say) three top 100 players that are sure fire MLBers then absolutely nothing else in the time line … how strong is that “system” in general?\u00a0 I’d rather have a ton of percolating talent than having a top heavy system.\u00a0 \u00a0This generally describes why there’s sometimes wild differences in the way systems are ranked, especially in the Law rankings (b\/c he’s heavy on ceiling and is the anti-famous<\/p>\n Nats observations: Both MLB and Law have the Nats at #29.\u00a0 MLB says that “trades and free agent signings” have led the system to be depleted.\u00a0 Law says the team “worked the heck out of the system” in trades to acquire players.\u00a0 Neither mention the poor drafting at the top levels over the past seasons (as I laid out in a previous post).\u00a0 MILB and BA are a bit more friendly, perhaps because they still think rather highly of some of our more “famous” prospects (Romero, Mendoza, Antuna<\/strong> etc).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Overall system ranking observatiosn:<\/p>\n Its ok to be at the Bottom of these rankings if you’ve used your system to get to a WS title.\u00a0 Washington, Houston, Boston are definitely in this category.\u00a0 Cincinnati has really shredded their depth lately to stock up and make a run, so their low ranking is understandable.\u00a0 Colorado’s location here is a bit more of an indictment of their approach lately.<\/p>\n Its incredible that the two wealthiest teams (Yankees and Dodgers) continue to not only win 100+ games but maintain among the strongest farm systems.\u00a0 How does this happen?\u00a0 They both should have the least amount of assets to leverage in the draft and the IFA market (by virtue of having the smallest bonus pools for being among the best teams), yet they both continue to churn out prospect after prospect.\u00a0 They’re both clearing doing something right.<\/p>\n Lastly its notable that a couple of the serial “tankers” of late (Baltimore, Miami, and Seattle in particular) have made huge strides in their system rankings over the past couple of years.\u00a0 They’re on the Houston and Chicago Cubs plan of bottoming out to build back up.\u00a0 We’ll\u00a0 have to wait and see how it goes in the next few\u00a0 years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We’re basically at the end of “Prospect Season” now … and the last of the major pundits (mlbpipeline.com) has published its org rankings.\u00a0 We talked about the Nats system top X in a previous post, now here’s a more macro view on how our system looks in general. Short answer: “Not Good, Bob!” (TV reference, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,4324],"tags":[440,590,475,110,4327,4325,4326,4015],"class_list":["post-16530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-natsgeneral","category-prospects","tag-jim-callis","tag-john-sickels","tag-jonathan-mayo","tag-keith-law","tag-rew-mendoza","tag-sam-dykstra","tag-seth-romerod","tag-yasiel-antuna"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16530"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16530\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16534,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16530\/revisions\/16534"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n