Farm System Rankings Are Now on THE BOARD!

In November of last year, Craig Edwards published new research on how to value prospects by Future Value tier. We’ve used that research in conjunction with our prospect evaluations to assess the value of all 30 teams’ farm systems and arrive at our farm system rankings. Starting today, those rankings and valuations are available to view on The BOARD in the Farm Ranking tab. These rankings will automatically update as we move prospects between Future Value tiers, prospects change systems following a trade, or prospects graduate and lose prospect eligibility.

Within that tab, you’ll find:

  • A team’s rank
  • The value of a team’s system
  • A count of how many prospects a team has on THE BOARD
  • The average dollar value per player in a given system

We also break down how many pitching and position player prospects each team has within each Future Value tier. You can also sort on each batter and pitcher column within a given tier. Two-way prospects are split (0.5/0.5) between the batter and pitcher tiers for valuation purposes, as you can see below.

To navigate to the players contained within a particular team’s FV tier, just click on the number in the team’s row within that tier.

You’ll be automatically directed to the relevant part of THE BOARD — in this instance, Minnesota’s 13 hitting prospects with a 40 FV.

There’s some wiggle room in this otherwise fairly objective method of rankings farm systems, as two organizations with the same monetary total could end up being separated by which club has the higher per-prospect average. As we’ve discussed in the Trade Value Series and other places, all things being equal, teams would prefer that their WAR accumulate in as tight a time frame — and be concentrated in as few players — as possible. We don’t yet have an empirical way to express this, so for the time being, let’s say the the bonus you can give a system for concentration maxes out at about 10%.

We have a meaty roadmap of features we’d like add to the farm system rankings (more crosstab metadata on the makeup of a farm system, historical values, etc.), along with new columns and features we plan to add to THE BOARD before next season begins. Let us know what’s on your wishlist of new features to added by the wizard Sean Dolinar and the dark overlord David Appelman in the comments.





23 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
mattMember since 2023
5 years ago

Wow Seattle at 8, great year for that farm

thebearproofsuit
5 years ago
Reply to  matt

they also just reportedly picked up another J2 pitcher, Kristian Cardozo. FG and MLB both had him at #21 on their J2 lists. MLB has a 50 FV on him

mrmariner1
5 years ago

Yeah mlb.com hands out higher grades in general. FG has him at a 35+… and FG only has one guy (Dominguez) at a 50, and those guys are rare…