2010 Organizational Rankings: Kick-Off

In about 15 minutes or so, you’ll see the first of 90 posts that will make up the FanGraphs 2010 Organizational Rankings. We ran these on the site last year, but I’ve wised up and gotten the whole crew involved this time around. We’ll break down each team’s present talent, future talent, and the overall health of the organization, at least as we see it.

Let me get a few things out of the way up front.

1. By its nature, this is subjective. If your favorite team isn’t placed where you think they should be, well, nothing in life has really changed, right? Disagree all you want. Explain why you disagree. That’s what the comments are for. But try not to get personally offended. We’re not out to anger anyone. This is supposed to be fun.

2. In a lot of cases, there’s very little difference between spots in close proximity to each other on the list. There’s a pretty huge blob in the middle, for instance, where a bunch of teams are very even, and the fact that one team is #13 and another is #18 doesn’t mean that we’re much higher on the former organization.

3. Having a chance of winning it all this year is great. Having a great farm system is great. Having a forward thinking management staff is great. But by themselves, none of those things are enough to earn a high grade overall. We’re really trying to highlight the balance between winning now and winning in the future. There will be teams that are high on the list because of how good they may be in 2011 or 2012, while teams that are better in 2010 will be behind them. It’s not just a short term thing, and these aren’t projected order of finish for 2010. It’s our perspective on the total health of where each team is, relative to their peers, going forward.

With that out of the way, we hope you enjoy the 2010 version of the FanGraphs Organizational Rankings.