KATOH’s Farm System Rankings

‘Tis the season for prospect rankings. With little else going on in the baseball world, prospect writers typically spend the month of February releasing and discussing ordered lists of prospects and farm systems. Even within the past hour at this very site, our own Jeff Zimmerman published a farm-system ranking derived from the scouting grades produced by Baseball America.

This year, I showed up to the party a little early by putting out KATOH’s top 100 list last month. I still have more to give, however. And here I present you with KATOH’s organizational rankings.

My methodology for compiling this ranking was pretty straightforward: I simply aggregated all of the KATOH forecasts by team. Still, there a few caveats worth mentioning.

• To be considered in this exercise, a player must have recorded at least 200 plate appearances or batters faced in 2015. KATOH derives its forecasts from minor league stats, so it can’t really formulate an opinion on players who didn’t play much in 2015. As a result, many of the players who were drafted in 2015 are omitted.

• This exercise only considers players projected for at least 1.0 WAR over their first six years in the big leagues. Ideally, I’d consider all prospects, but that would involve verifying the teams for thousands of mostly nondescript minor leaguers. That obviously taken some time. This one-win threshold cuts pretty deep into a team’s farm system. The average team has 18 players above this cutoff, while none have fewer than 10. That feels like more than enough for these purposes.

• KATOH tends to favor hitters over pitchers, especially on the high end. So this analysis likely favors organizations with farm systems that are hitter-heavy over those that rely more on pitchers. This is likely because a pitcher’s stats capture a smaller portion of his future potential relative to hitters. Factors like velocity also very important when it comes to projecting pitchers.

• And as always, stats don’t tell the full story. This is the output from a flawed statistical model that fails to take into account many of the factors that go into evaluating a prospect. If an organization has a lot of raw, toolsy prospects, it’s likely to be underrated here.

Here’s that same list in the form of a graph.

And here’s that same chart with each bar broken up into three parts: WAR from players projected for 3.5+ WAR, WAR from 2.0-3.5 WAR players and WAR from 1.0-2.0 WAR players. This will hopefully help you visualize the distribution of talent in each system.

And here’s that same graph, but split by hitters and pitchers.

Both Baseball America Keith Law also put out their organizational rankings in the last week. Here’s a look at how KATOH compares to those rankings. KATOH favors the teams above the trendlines, such as the Padres, Yankees, Brewers and Rays. KATOH’s down on the teams below the trendlines, such as the Braves, Red Sox, Mets and Giants.

First Mr. Law:

And now Baseball America:

Some brief remarks on the top-five organizations:

#1 – Brewers

It’s almost as if the Brewers topped this list on purpose. Seven of their top eight prospects joined the organization in the past seven months, with Orlando Arcia representing the only holdover. Recently acquired KATOH darlings Ramon Flores, Josh Hader, Isan Diaz, Zachary Davies and Javier Betancourt are responsible for a lot of those wins. However, consensus top-100 guys Jacob Nottingham, Brett Phillips and Jorge Lopez also project very well.

#2 – Astros

The Astros have easily the deepest farm system according to KATOH. They have 31 players projected for at least 1.0 WAR, which is four more than any other team. A big chunk of their projected WAR comes from their not-so-small army of prospects in the 1.0-3.5 WAR range, including Joe Musgrove, David Paulino, Jamie Ritchie and many more. They also have quite a few top end guys in A.J. Reed, Tony Kemp, Francis Martes, Andrew Aplin, Alex Bregman and Kyle Tucker. The Astros have a lot of prospects who feel like “scouting the stat line” specials, but they also have a lot of prospects who aren’t. The Astros have a lot of prospects period.

#3 – Dodgers

With just 18 players projected for at least 1.0 WAR, the Dodgers don’t have a particularly deep farm system. However, elite prospects Corey Seager and Julio Urias push them up the list. Alex Verdugo, Austin Barnes, Micah Johnson, Zach Lee, Jose De Leon and Cody Bellinger also project very well, but there isn’t much beyond that. Their system is very top heavy, but the top is heavy enough to carry them. Interestingly, they also project for the most pitching WAR of any team by a pretty wide margin. Urias, Lee and De Leon shoulder most of the load on the pitching side, though lower-tier arms like Grant Holmes, Frankie Montas and Jharel Cotton also move the needle.

#4 – Rangers

It was easy to craft some sort of narrative around the top three systems. None really jump out with the Rangers, though, so I’m just going to name some highly-projected Rangers prospects. Nomar Mazara, Joey Gallo, Michael De Leon, Lewis Brinson, Hanser Alberto, Yeyson Yrizarri, Ariel Jurado. Odds are, a high proportion of those players will be good, which is why the Rangers have one of the top projected farm systems.

#5 – Yankees

The Yankees system looks a lot like the Astros in that a large share of their projected WAR comes from prospects projected for only one, two or three WAR. This tier features Aaron Judge, Rob Refsnyder, Abiatal Avelino and many more. They do, however, have a lot going on at the top end as well. Gary Sanchez and Jorge Mateo are the big names, and they’re backed up by KATOH specials Tyler Wade, Ronald Torreyes and Trey Amburgey.