The aggregate Top 219 MLB prospect list

Before the season began, I gathered each Cardinals prospect list, and averaged them together in a way that told us the industry consensus on ranking prospects. That was a warm-up for today’s article. Today, we’ll look at six different Top MLB lists (Minor League Ball’s Top 200, Fangraphs’ Top 100, Baseball America’s Top 100, Baseball Prospectus’ Top 101, Prospect 361’s Top 100, and MLB pipeline’s Top 100) in order to reach a consensus on the game’s best prospects.

To help make this useful, we’ll use public methods for valuing these draft picks. To start with, most lists will be subject to the value determined by The Point of Pittsburgh’s research based on Top 100 rankings:

Rank only tells us how they fare relative to others at the time though. It’s a really good proxy, but a better one is a grade specific to the player. For instance, Fangraphs’ leaderboard contains grades on the 20-80 scouting scale for each player. Here’s the values Fangraphs uses per grade:

John Sickels’ list at Minor League Baseball also comes with grades, but they use letter grades instead of the 20-80 scale. Looking at both lists, and the distribution of players at each grade, I attempted to match up Sickels’ and Eric Longenhagen’s grades, to form an equivalent scale. This wasn’t as simple as just equating the best rating of each, the second rating of each, and so on, as Sickels uses many more grades than Longenhagen.

Here is two graphs with the results of my attempt to match up Sickels’ grades with Fangraphs’ values:

Using the best-fit lines for the above information, I could estimate a value for each of Sickels’ grades. Here’s the results:

Looking at all six lists, these values match up really well with the values used at Fangraphs as well as the research at TPoP. With that, we had a way to calculate a value for each rank. For players ranked on one or more lists but not all, the value assigned to them from that list defaults to the one provided at Minor League Ball. For the few players not ranked in MiLB’s Top 200, they were given a rank of B-/C+, which is the next lowest grade after B-, which was the grade of the player ranked 200th.

I could have searched through MiLB’s team specific lists and instead used that, but I will make that part of the second part of this project. I plan to go through both Fangraphs’ and MiLB’s lists to add in everyone worth ranking by those two lists. That way we can get an idea of a farm system’s total value, not just the total value of those found good enough to be ranked on a National list. However, for now we’ll have to be content with the value accumulated from these sources.

Also remember that these are built on a number of assumptions. I think they’re reasonable assumptions, but that doesn’t make them definitely correct. These valuations are averages built on those assumptions, and any given team could have a markedly higher or lower valuation of any of the below prospects.

With all that out of the way, here is your aggregate Top 219 MLB prospects list, in sortable table form for your pleasure:

One immediate take away is how much the top of the list is dominated by position players. Alex Reyes comes in 16th and first overall among pitchers. However, only MiLB’s list takes into account that he’ll be burning a year and a half of service time thanks to Tommy John Surgery. That makes new White Sox pitcher Lucas Giolito (17th) the game’s best pitching prospect.

It’s easy to see why the top of the list is so dominated by hitters: each valuation system we used had higher values for each level for hitters than pitchers. Once you get through the first thirty spots or so, pitchers start to be included just as often as hitters. The Cardinals place ten players on this list, more than average. They have eight players valued from $23.1M to $12.3M, with Reyes at $55.7M and DeJong at $6.5M

The next natural thing to do was sort this by team. This would give us a good representation of which teams have the best farm systems, as well as rough dollar amounts to ballpark the worth of those systems:

The Braves, Yankees, and White Sox pretty clearly mark the top three. Even if these estimates aren’t precise enough to say they’re definitely ranked in that order, the graph makes a pretty good argument that those are the top 3. The White Sox could top the Braves’ current figure by shopping Jose Quintanta and Todd Frazier and the deadline, though the Braves figure to be selling some pieces at the deadline too. If you sort the above list by team, you can see which prospects represent each team.

There’s a $140M gap between the Braves and the Brewers, who begin a thirteen team tier from $233 to $176M. The Cardinals are in the middle of that second tier, at eleventh overall and just short of $200M value, about $45M more than average.

The Yankees made quite a killing at last year’s deadline by trading Aroldis Chapman and Andrew Miller. They’ve also generally avoided trading prospects the last few years, stocking them up. The White Sox of course picked up a lot of talent this off-season with the Chris Sale and Adam Eaton trades. Only $68M worth of the White Sox’s $277M valuation was in the organization at the beginning of the off-season. Had they decided against selling, they’d have the 24th best rank here, assuming they didn’t trade any prospects away.

The Braves of course are nearing the end of a massive rebuilding effort. The public scouts like their system the best. They also place the most players of any team, fourteen, nearly twice the average. The Brewers are relatively early in their rebuild, and it looks way better so far than the Reds, who started rebuilding around the same time but still place in the second-half of the ranks.

The Pirates and Dodgers ability to place so high while competing every year is phenomenal. The Dodgers and Yankees’ high valuations here make me worry a little bit about high-payroll teams dominating. The Pirates did trade Mark Melancon at last year’s deadline, but the biggest piece going back to them is on the major league roster and not counted as a prospect. The fact that both teams rank higher than the Phillies, who have been rebuilding for a couple years, is pretty impressive. The Pirates are actually one of the most top-heavy, with only six players making the list, and four of those being consensus Top 50 prospects.

The Indians still have a strong system after trading for Miller last deadline, and can make some big moves at this year’s deadline if needed. That’s where the Cards come in, just barely ahead of the Phillies and Cubs, one team of which is in the middle of rebuilding, and another who just got done recently and still has a middling system after promoting what feels like dozens of top prospects at this point.

I mentioned in my previews that the Rockies are a fringey, but interesting team. Their farm system could help them turn into legitimate Wild Card contender in the near future. Dave Dombroski gets a lot of flack for trading prospects, but he still retains a middling farm system while the Red Sox project to win their division. Maybe it just underscores how good of a job previous executives did to build that farm system.

The Twins have a lot of work to do. The Rangers have mostly emptied out what was one of the best farm systems just a few years ago. The Diamondbacks and Marlins may be the worst positioned teams in the game at the moment, as they combine weak farm systems with only an outside chance at a Wild Card at best on the major league side. The Angels would be too, if they didn’t have the best player in the game. It’s hard to know since players of that caliber aren’t traded often, but if the Angels decided to trade Mike Trout to the highest bidder this deadline, their farm would be at least in that crowded second tier of teams. Anyone down with trading all of the Cardinals prospects featured here for Mike Trout?

Of course, prospects not found on one of these six lists have value too. For instance, when looking at John Sickels’ Cardinals Top Prospect list, seven Cardinals not found on his Top 200 ranked a “B-”, which was the last grade given in his Top 200. There was 38 other Cardinal prospects Sickels found to have at least a “C” grade, which is $2.3M a piece. Those 45 combine for over $120M extra value right there. Each other team has players like that of course, so it’ll take going through all the team-specific lists to see if that allows the Cardinals to jump farther ahead in the prospect standings. It helps give you an idea of what a organization with a lot of depth past the top 200 can be worth though.

I tried to make sure no one ended up on this list twice, as prospect writers don’t all agree on exact names. For instance, across the six sources, I encountered “Vlad Guerrero Jr.”, “Vladimir Guerrero”, “Vladimir Guerrero Jr.“ and “Vladimir Guerrero, Jr.” If you see someone listed twice, let me know in the comments and I’ll get it fixed. Same goes for position or team, though for those I almost exclusively relied on what the prospect elevator put down.

Again, these are just rough estimates, based on assumptions. I think they’re good assumptions, but they’re not perfect. They’re something to look back at and reference, when including each outlets’ ranking (or non-ranking) as context. We’re just getting the season started, but before you know it, it’ll be mid-season and the Trade Deadline will be a big topic again. This gets us a little more prepared for it.