After we’ve ranked the top 100 individual prospects in baseball heading into the 2021 MLB season, it’s time to turn our attention to each team’s farm system as a whole.
This ranking of the 30 organizations has been drawn up largely in the same way as last year. In summary, while at FanGraphs, Craig Edwards’ research revealed excess empirical dollar values for each level of leads, we can now create an objective rankings based on my individual team rosters.
You may be wondering how this could be so different from last year’s standings, given that there was no minor league season, and I’m glad you asked! Several factors currently changed the place of a team compared to last year. The obvious are the incoming players (draft, international transfers, trades) and outgoing (graduations, trades). Since we didn’t have a traditional minor league season, there’s little movement from the lower minors, with a few up / down arrow players from each club having a fall instruction league.
There have also been a handful of alternate relocations from the site, but both sides had fewer scouts compared to a minor league season; some teams shared data / videos on alternative sites, and some instructional games included scouts. The greatest value gains are in the top 100, both because the expected contributions from any player not in the top 100 are valued at less than $ 10 million, while that of the top player is worth $ 112 million in expected returns , and also because the best prospects are those who can earn a lot of value by playing well in the big leagues.
There are also two less obvious factors: first, I used generic values for each level of fair value last year, so the 50th and 110th job leads were worth exactly the same. In most cases, this would not move many farming systems as much. This year I used a graded scale with a slight difference between each place in the top 117 (all top 50 and top prospects). I also found that some players in the lower levels of the minors dropped a half mark just because they anticipated a calculated break in the past year, and a few of them went to the alternate site, trained at home for months, and some didn’t even get a formal instructional competition.
A new element this year, as it’s my second time doing this ranking for ESPN, is to show the movement of last year’s list. I didn’t check them out until I blocked all rankings so there are a few trends that showed up in the metadata. First, the 30 farming systems total $ 6,137 billion, nearly $ 400 million less than last year. This also comes with an additional 99 prospects on the team rosters. I think this is because the information I get from alternative sites and instructions is mostly positive, and the negative is judged with all the circumstances from last year. Without prospects who can set up a horrible statistic, it’s hard to get one off the list. So the bottom of the grids tends to be longer with a lack of bad data, while the top of the charts can’t go that far north without positive data on elite prospects.
So without a minor league season, the top of the roster is kept a little low and the bottom of the roster is pushed up a bit, or the roster isn’t cut as it would otherwise have been. More players on the squad, less overall value; that makes sense to me. I don’t think these particular circumstances will recur, and I really hope they won’t. On the classification of farms!