How the Draft and the Trade Deadline Affected Our Farm System Rankings

A large portion of every season’s prospect-related transaction activity takes place between the draft and the trade deadline, a window that, since the draft was moved to July, spans just a few weeks. We can use the way the FanGraphs farm system rankings are calculated to track movement during this period on the baseball calendar and hopefully come to more fully understand how successful rebuilds are born. Over time, we can better contextualize trade and draft hauls by using this methodology to build a historical understanding of prospect movement. Mostly though, these rankings track the depth and impact of talent in each farm system at a specific moment in time. Or, in the case of the below links and tables, four moments in time. There are some methodological caveats to pass along (I’ll get to those momentarily), as well as some very specific examples where the movement communicated in the tables below does not properly capture team activity during the last month of trades and draft signings (which I get into throughout this post).

Let’s start with some basic disclaimers. Remember that while the Craig Edwards research that facilitates this approach is empirical, my subjective player evaluations (and their resulting Future Values) feed the formula that spits out the farm rankings. Just one significant over- or under-evaluation of a player can shift the way a team lines up in these rankings pretty dramatically, especially if you’re focused on the ordinal rankings. The monetary values, in addition to providing an approximate measure and reminder of how the draft and international amateur processes suppress what these guys might earn on an open market, illustrate the ways systems are spaced and clustered with more nuance. If I’m way too light or way too heavy on any single impact prospect, I’m basically infecting a list with half a standard deviation’s worth of error in this regard because Craig’s math favors top-heavy systems rather than ones with depth.

It’s also important to remember that a team sliding in these rankings isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Teams tend to drop in the farm system rankings when their big league rookies graduate and are no longer part of the org’s contingent of prospect-eligible players. Turning prospects into big leaguers is a good thing. With this in mind, readers should familiarize themselves with the farm system rankings from before the 2023 graduates began to be peeled off lists, as they provide important context for the tables below. Conversely, climbing these rankings isn’t always good either. The Mets and White Sox are both big climbers in the rankings below, but that’s because they have each had disappointing seasons and were prominent deadline sellers. They’re making the best of the hand they dealt themselves, but I’m sure they’d rather be in the playoff hunt than padding their minor league coffers.

Again, these are snapshots of talent in a given system at a given time, according to Craig’s math and my evaluations. You’re going to see the way rankings and values changed during the draft in the first table, followed by some thoughts and commentary on that movement. In the second table, I outline movement during the deadline period and across both of them combined.

The Pre-Draft Rank column in this table is just the base 2023 rankings with the graduates removed. The Pirates and Cubs (with the Rays lurking just behind) were in a tier of their own here. The Brewers and Cardinals have been the most consistent NL Central contenders of the last five years, but the Reds’ excellent 2023 rookie class (they graduated so many big leaguers that they moved from third to 18th in the rankings), as well as the trajectories of the already-competitive Cubs and the scrappy, young Pirates, should make this division fun and competitive for the next several seasons.

The big movers in terms of value added via the draft are the clubs you’d expect. It’s the teams that drafted one of the best five players available (the Pirates, Nationals, Twins, Rangers, and Tigers) and the two clubs that drafted prospects who I thought had an argument to be considered among them (the Diamondbacks and Braves). Just beyond that group are the Red Sox, Brewers, and Giants, who all drafted at least one player I valued highly (Kyle Teel, Cooper Pratt, and Joe Whitman, respectively) later (or for a lesser bonus) than I projected.

The teams that pull up the rear in terms of value added during the draft sometimes highlight a hole in this line of thinking or dissonance in my own analysis. For instance, the Phillies (who didn’t have a second round pick) ended up spreading around a lot of mid-six-figure bonuses to high school prospects. That’s a perfectly reasonable strategy to try to have a deep and exciting class, especially when you’ve lost a high pick and its bonus slot, but the farm calculations don’t love that kind of prospect. Similarly, the ordinal rankings are misleading when you sort to see who fell during the draft process. For instance, the Padres dropped three spots not because their draft class was bad (if the bonus pool amounts are a proxy for ranking expected added value, the Friars outperformed theirs) but because the Giants, Nationals, and Diamondbacks were lined up right behind them prior to the draft.

Note that for four teams, the numbers above don’t exactly match their live ranking on the site. Matt Wallner, Reese Olson, and most significantly Luis Matos and Henry Davis graduated right around the trade deadline; had I included their loss in the calculations, it would have warped the way their teams’ deadline trends showed in the table. Well, mostly. The Pirates created enough space between themselves and the rest of the pack at the deadline that, even with Davis’ graduation, they remain first overall. The A’s deadline movement was impacted by clerical error, as I forgot to remove graduate Kyle Muller from their prospect list and did so during this time. Readers should consider their farm value to have moved $1 million-$2 million (Joe Boyle, and lower-ceiling, fringe 40-man arms Easton Lucas and Chad Patrick were acquired) during the deadline period rather than the -$7 million shown. Most of Oakland’s sell-off activity occurred during the offseason with the Sean Murphy trade.

If you sort the table to see which teams lost the most prospect value at the deadline, you see the impact of the AL West arms race, as the Astros, Rangers, and Angels make up three of the five most aggressive buyers. The Marlins and Rays were the others, and after that there’s a significant drop off. Tampa Bay and Texas remain among the top 10 despite trading valuable prospects, and join the Dodgers and Orioles as orgs that tout both a contending big league roster as well as a strong farm system.

In my opinion, the Marlins have tended to overpay in trades while the current regime has been in place, and particularly if you look at the way teams’ playoff odds trended from mid-July (just before the bulk of trade activity took place) to August 2, the drop in Miami’s farm system value, rank and postseason chances look pretty disappointing next to one another. My cutoff date punishes the Marlins heavily because the big league team lost nine of 10 at the start of that window. If we look at Miami’s playoff odds when they started adding pieces (49% on July 27) compared to August 2, the contrast isn’t nearly as damning, but it still isn’t great. You could argue they had to do something because they were sinking so rapidly.

Similar to the way one could argue the farm calculations didn’t properly capture the Phillies’ draft class, they don’t come close to capturing Kansas City’s deadline activity, for a few different reasons. For one, the Royals traded Aroldis Chapman before the window of time in which I’m capturing movement. They also acquired more complex-level players (either from the Florida or Arizona Complex Leagues, or the Dominican Summer League) than any other org during this year’s trade phase, and especially when those types of prospects are pitchers and corner hitters (like Jesus Rios and Derlin Figueroa), they are punished in my FV grades for lacking close proximity to the majors and/or a stable statistical track record, respectively. Finally, they got back some young, controllable big leaguers, like Cole Ragans, who are no longer “prospects” and therefore don’t impact the farm rankings. Ragans has had a four-tick velocity bump this year and will be a foundational piece of their rotation if he can sustain it.

When you combine action occurring during the draft and trade deadline, the Mets, Nationals, and White Sox stand apart from the other teams in terms of talent added to their systems. Several teams that more or less stood pat (like the Twins), or made a number of less splashy changes (like the Padres adding Ji Man Choi, Rich Hill, Garrett Cooper and a few reliable arms for what amounted to $5 million in prospect value) have had leaps in their playoff position during the last few weeks, which you can see in the table below.