Objectively ranking the top farm systems

E

Enscheff

Well-known member
Which team has the best farm? I am going to attempt to answer this question completely objectively by analyzing who I consider the top 4 farm systems: Braves, White Sox, Yankees, and Brewers. The first step will be to come up with an average rating for the Top 200 prospects for each team. Then, I will assign a monetary value to each prospect. Sum up the values, and declare a winner.

Step 1 - Calculate average ranking of all Top 200 prospects.

This is done by averaging the ranks given by BP, MLPPipeline, BA and Sickels (I will add in FG when it is posted). Any prospect that ranks as a Top 100 by any site, but is not rated by all sites, will be assumed to have "just missed" the other lists and will be assigned a ranking of 110. Any player that only appears on Sickel's list from 101-200 will be assigned his ranking based only on Sickel's list (since that is the only data available).

For example, Gohara is ranked 75 by Sickels, but outside the Top 100 by BP, MLBPipeline, and BA. Therefore, he is assigned a ranking of 110 for the other 3 outlets. Same thing happened for guys like Fried, Adams (Yanks), Chapman (Yanks), and Fulmer (Sox). Acuna was not listed in the MLBPipeline Top 100, so was given a 110 from them as well.

There were a couple oddities for the Brewers: Phillips and Clark. Both were Top 100 guys for BP and MLBPipeline, but didn't show up at all in Sickel's Top 200. I can only assume they were oversights, so I didn't include an entry in their Sickel's column (both were assigned a 110 from BA).

Step 2 - Determine what each ranking slot is worth.

For this, I used the expected surplus values of prospects, here http://www.thepointofpittsburgh.com/mlb-prospect-surplus-values-2016-updated-edition/.

Rather than using an imprecise step function, I calculated a linear progression from each known value. For example, we know 1-10 hitters are worth an average of $73.5M, and 11-25 hitters are worth an average of $62M. What this actually means is that a 5.5 ranked hitting prospect is worth $73.5M, and an 18 ranked hitting prospect is worth $62M. I calculated the linear relationship between all these known values to assign a dollar value to each spot, 1-200.

Example results: A #1 hitter is worth $77.33M, #100 hitter worth $19.74M, all the way down to a #200 hitter being worth $12.54M. A #1 pitcher is worth $80.2M, #100 pitcher worth $15.17M, all the way down to a #200 pitcher worth $11.57M.

Results - Here are the tables for all 4 teams (apologies in advance for how bad they will look):

Braves Position BP MLB BA Sickel AVG Value
Swanson 0 2 4 3 3 3.0 $75.42
Acuna 0 31 110 67 68 69.0 $22.11
Albies 0 35 12 11 10 17.0 $62.96
Newcomb 1 44 47 78 58 56.8 $19.69
Soroka 1 64 91 48 57 65.0 $16.50
Allard 1 67 61 37 26 47.8 $24.48
Gohara 1 110 110 110 75 101.3 $15.13
Anderson 1 96 77 66 89 82.0 $15.89
Maitan 0 100 90 77 98 91.3 $20.38
Fried 1 110 110 110 61 97.8 $15.24
Touki 1 123 123.0 $14.34
Riley 0 149 149.0 $16.21
Wentz 1 159 159.0 $13.04
Pache 0 183 183.0 $13.76
Total $345.16

Yankees Position BP MLB BA Sickel AVG Value
Torres 0 15 17 5 7 11.0 $68.71
Frazier 0 16 15 39 34 26.0 $52.48
Rutherford 0 49 51 45 39 46.0 $33.14
Sheffield 1 52 78 91 54 68.8 $16.36
Kaprielian 1 58 110 87 62 79.3 $16.00
Mateo 0 43 18 85 70 54.0 $28.09
Adams 1 110 110 110 78 102.0 $15.10
Chapman 1 110 110 110 79 102.3 $15.10
Abreu 1 82 110 110 101 100.8 $15.13
Judge 0 63 22 90 143 79.5 $21.32
Wade 1 101 110 110 107.0 $14.92
Total $296.33

White Sox Position BP MLB BA Sickel AVG Value
Moncada 0 5 1 2 2 2.5 $75.42
Giolito 1 10 3 25 14 13.0 $51.88
Kopech 1 36 30 31 15 28.0 $34.40
Lopez 1 30 38 32 31 32.8 $32.10
Collins 0 89 80 56 55 70.0 $22.04
Fulmer 1 110 58 110 67 86.3 $15.74
Burdi 1 128 128.0 $14.16
Dunning 1 130 130.0 $14.09
Hansen 1 97 110 110 133 112.5 $14.70
Total $274.52

Brewers Position BP MLB BA Sickel AVG Value
Brinson 0 12 14 27 33 21.5 $57.24
Hader 0 19 34 33 37 30.8 $46.53
Ray 0 41 27 42 48 39.5 $36.94
Diaz 0 59 97 93 90 84.8 $20.96
Dubon 0 118 118.0 $18.44
Ortiz 1 68 52 79 120 79.8 $15.96
Woodruff 1 110 110 82 121 105.8 $14.95
Bickford 1 110 54 124 96.0 $15.31
Diplan 1 181 181.0 $12.25
Erceg 0 200 200.0 $12.54
Phillips* 0 75 63 110 82.7 $21.10
Clark* 0 99 62 110 90.3 $20.46
Total $292.68

Conclusion - Braves win, for now...

At this moment in time, the Braves clearly have the most valuable farm system in the game. About a week into the season, Swanson will lose rookie eligibility, and the Braves will drop below all 3 of these teams listed here. When the ChiSox trade Q, they will add about $50M-$100M and take a commanding lead in these rankings.
 
interesting approach. not sure you can be totally scientific by using unscientific lists as your source documents. but you have to use something.

I agree when the sox trade Q (esp if it's to the Braves) they'll be the top system. But that's ok. Being the number one farm system isn't my goal. being at top 10 team in talent under 25 would be my goal.

i always say...predicting the future is hard.

Yes the braves will lose Swanson. They might lose Albies, Newcombe, Weigal, Minter, etc by next year. We shall see.

Other teams will lose guys too. Although these teams probably not much.

And we'll get some prospect fatigue since Braves are so high this year.

The Braves though:
1. still have a top 5 pick to add
2. Have a bunch of guys who could be high risers

Maitan is ranked on most of these, but if we actually see him and he's good....
Acuna is ranked on most of these, but if we actually see him and he's good....

The entire Rome rotation is a year up and gives you 5 chances for someone to really jump up lists.

We have an entire non-Maitan group of international guys who may play stateside and get on lists.

Pache, Yepez, etc......

If Gohard has turned the corner and is healthy...

And I'm someone who believes in D Peterson. He could be a guy that takes that next step and ppl figure out he's a darn good hitter at 22.
 
Russ2dollas said:
interesting approach. not sure you can be totally scientific by using unscientific lists as your source documents. but you have to use something.

I agree when the sox trade Q (esp if it's to the Braves) they'll be the top system. But that's ok. Being the number one farm system isn't my goal. being at top 10 team in talent under 25 would be my goal.

i always say...predicting the future is hard.

Yes the braves will lose Swanson. They might lose Albies, Newcombe, Weigal, Minter, etc by next year. We shall see.

Other teams will lose guys too. Although these teams probably not much.

And we'll get some prospect fatigue since Braves are so high this year.

The Braves though:
1. still have a top 5 pick to add
2. Have a bunch of guys who could be high risers

Maitan is ranked on most of these, but if we actually see him and he's good....
Acuna is ranked on most of these, but if we actually see him and he's good....

The entire Rome rotation is a year up and gives you 5 chances for someone to really jump up lists.

We have an entire non-Maitan group of international guys who may play stateside and get on lists.

Pache, Yepez, etc......

If Gohard has turned the corner and is healthy...

And I'm someone who believes in D Peterson. He could be a guy that takes that next step and ppl figure out he's a darn good hitter at 22.
Click to expand...

None of those hypothetical scenarios are exclusive to the Braves. All teams have guys that can shoot up these lists with a good half season. The fringe guys for the Braves are no more valuable than the fringe guys for any other organization. These are the rankings NOW, using the best data we have available NOW.

We know (with 100% confidence) Swanson will be off this list before the first week of the season is over, so that's why I mentally exclude him from discussions like this. However, he is included in this list because in order to stay objective I have to include him.
 
Fantastic work by Enscheff. One question. Why do Moncada (with a 2.5 average rank) and Swanson (3.0) have the same value.o

If you have some time, I have a suggestion to try. Toss out th

e high and low rankings for each prospect and average out the remaining two. For most of them it won't make much difference. But there are some where one of their rankings is way out of line with the others. This approach tosses out those outlier ratings. Not saying one approach is better than the other, but I'm curious how much difference it would make.
 
nsacpi said:
Fantastic work by Enscheff. One question. Why do Moncada (with a 2.5 average rank) and Swanson (3.0) have the same value.
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In order to look up their ranking value in the table I created, I needed to round all average rankings to the nearest integer value. If I created a step function I could calculate the value of being ranked 2.5, but I figured this came close enough. You can mentally adjust Moncada's value up to $75.9 if you want.
 
Enscheff said:
In order to look up their ranking value in the table I created, I needed to round all average rankings to the nearest integer value. If I created a step function I could calculate the value of being ranked 2.5, but I figured this came close enough. You can mentally adjust Moncada's value up to $75.9 if you want.
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See my additional suggestion that I added to my first post. Thanks for taking the trouble to do this.
 
It is worth contemplating what a $345M farm system means. If we wanted to convert all those chips into 2017 wins, we can trade for about 40 wins above replacement worth of major league talent. In practice you can't really do that since they guys we would be trading for in many cases would be on multi-year deals.

If you think of the value as being spread out over the six pre-arb seasons, it is an expected surplus value of about 58 wins per year. Lets say after covering for the pre-arb guys we have $100M of payroll left. That's worth about 13 WAR. So between the pre-arb guys and the market value guys thats a total of 71 WAR. I'll leave that number out there for discussion.
 
nsacpi said:
See my additional suggestion that I added to my first post. Thanks for taking the trouble to do this.
Click to expand...

That is not trivial since most guys in that scenario aren't ranked by all 4 outlets. Makes it non-trivial (though certainly not impossible) to loop through and exclude values when the data-set for each player isn't a consistent number of data points.

As a sanity check, we can look at some of the obvious outliers though:

Judge is definitely one that jumps off the page with rankings of 63, 22, 90, and 143. His average is 79.5, worth $21.32. Throwing out the 22 and 143, his average moves to 76.5, for a value of $21.54.

Guys like Giolioto (10, 3, 25, 14), Kaprielian (58, 110, 87, 62), Allard (67, 61, 37, 26) and Acuna (31, 110, 67, 68) end up working out similarly. They amount to insignificant changes of value.

Someone like Albies would benefit the most since he has one bad ranking, and 3 good ones (35, 12, 11, 10). Removing his best and worst increases his value from $62.96 to $67.75. That is a $5 jump, but we are dealing with total values in the $300 range, so the overall effect is almost insignificant (less than 2%).
 
Enscheff said:
That is not trivial since most guys in that scenario aren't ranked by all 4 outlets. Makes it non-trivial (though certainly not impossible) to loop through and exclude values when the data-set for each player isn't a consistent number of data points.

As a sanity check, we can look at some of the obvious outliers though:

Judge is definitely one that jumps off the page with rankings of 63, 22, 90, and 143. His average is 79.5, worth $21.32. Throwing out the 22 and 143, his average moves to 76.5, for a value of $21.54.

Guys like Giolioto (10, 3, 25, 14), Kaprielian (58, 110, 87, 62), Allard (67, 61, 37, 26) and Acuna (31, 110, 67, 68) end up working out similarly. They amount to insignificant changes of value.

Someone like Albies would benefit the most since he has one bad ranking, and 3 good ones (35, 12, 11, 10). Removing his best and worst increases his value from $62.96 to $67.75. That is a $5 jump, but we are dealing with total values in the $300 range, so the overall effect is almost insignificant (less than 2%).
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Judge and Albies were two that I noticed were affected by outliers. I think you are correct though that it won't affect the big picture.
 
thethe said:
Won't moncada and Torres lose their eligibility as well this year?
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Torres just played his age 19 season at A+. He won't be in NY for quite some time.

Moncada has a grand total of 207 PAs at the AA level, and was dreadful in his brief MLB debut. It would be a surprise if he didn't start the season in AAA.

Swanson has 129 successful MLB ABs, and is a 99.9% lock to be the starting SS in Atlanta. He will exhaust his eligibility when he picks up 11 ABs, which will happen after about 3 games.

Swanson is only included on these lists by the slimmest of technicalities, and was included in this analysis to maintain consistency and objectivity.
 
Enscheff said:
Torres just played his age 19 season at A+. He won't be in NY for quite some time.

Moncada has a grand total of 207 PAs at the AA level, and was dreadful in his brief MLB debut. It would be a surprise if he didn't start the season in AAA.

Swanson has 129 successful MLB ABs, and is a 99.9% lock to be the starting SS in Atlanta. He will exhaust his eligibility when he picks up 11 ABs, which will happen after about 3 games.

Swanson is only included on these lists by the slimmest of technicalities, and was included in this analysis to maintain consistency and objectivity.
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I agree that swasin will be off obviously. I don't think Yankees play around with service time. If Torres is ready he will play but I could see the argument he may not lose eligibility. Moncada to me seems like a definite.
 
Also as was said guys like giotto/lopez/judge/fraizer all have shots to get taken off the list. That's why you can't just say the braves will drop this time next year.

The analsysi you did was awesome. Just that last part seemed to be an intentional dig. I could have interpreted that wrong though.
 
thethe said:
Also as was said guys like giotto/lopez/judge/fraizer all have shots to get taken off the list. That's why you can't just say the braves will drop this time next year.

The analsysi you did was awesome. Just that last part seemed to be an intentional dig. I could have interpreted that wrong though.
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If you think Swanson being a 100% certainty to be taken off these lists 3 games into the season is even remotely equivalent to guys like Judge, Gio, and Frazier maybe taken off the list at some point next season, then there really isn't a discussion to have. It seems pretty clear to me Swanson is the most "non-prospecty" prospect on these lists by a fair margin.

When the most valuable prospect in a discussion about prospect values will no longer be a prospect after the first 3 games of the season, I think it is logical to point that fact out. I'm sorry if you took it as a "dig". What possible motivation could I have for making a "dig" on my favorite team?
 
Enscheff said:
If you think Swanson being a 100% certainty to be taken off these lists 3 games into the season is even remotely equivalent to guys like Judge, Gio, and Frazier maybe taken off the list at some point next season, then there really isn't a discussion to have. It seems pretty clear to me Swanson is the most "non-prospecty" prospect on these lists by a fair margin.

When the most valuable prospect in a discussion about prospect values will no longer be a prospect after the first 3 games of the season, I think it is logical to point that fact out. I'm sorry if you took it as a "dig". What possible motivation could I have for making a "dig" on my favorite team?
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Because you are on record in saying you don't believe the braves front office has done a good job?
 
thethe said:
Because you are on record in saying you don't believe the braves front office has done a good job?
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Right, I don't think they have. I think they have done an average job, or maybe a bit below average. I think any professional sports GM could do what Coppy has done.

So to follow your logic....

I state that I think the Braves FO has done an average or slightly less than average job during the rebuild. In order to prove myself right, I spend 2 hours making this analysis that proves they have assembled the most valuable farm system in the game. I post the analysis, but make a comment about two eminent changes to this analysis that will dramatically alter it: Swanson losing rookie eligibility, and the ChiSox trading Q.

Literally no other probable scenarios will alter this discussion as much as those 2 scenarios, and both are going to happen with as close to a 100% probability as is possible in sports.

Now your logic skills pick up on the fact I said Swanson will lose eligibility after 3 games as me making a dig on the Braves? Are you serious? How about coming up with an actual point to contribute?
 
Enscheff said:
Right, I don't think they have. I think they have done an average job, or maybe a bit below average. I think any professional sports GM could do what Coppy has done.

So to follow your logic....

I state that I think the Braves FO has done an average or slightly less than average job during the rebuild. In order to prove myself right, I spend 2 hours making this analysis that proves they have assembled the most valuable farm system in the game. I post the analysis, but make a comment about two eminent changes to this analysis that will dramatically alter it: Swanson losing rookie eligibility, and the ChiSox trading Q.

Literally no other probable scenarios will alter this discussion as much as those 2 scenarios, and both are going to happen with as close to a 100% probability as is possible in sports.

Now your logic skills pick up on the fact I said Swanson will lose eligibility after 3 games as me making a dig on the Braves? Are you serious? How about coming up with an actual point to contribute?
Click to expand...

A guy like judge has basically lost his eligibility.

If giotto doesn't than his prospect ranking will plummet. Same goes for lopez.

There are a lot of ways to play this game sir
 
thethe said:
Because you are on record in saying you don't believe the braves front office has done a good job?
Click to expand...

Is he wrong? Of the 3 teams mentions Swanson is 100% guaranteed to be off the mid season lists. You cant say that regarding anyone else.
 
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