Pre-Draft Farm System Rankings

With the team prospect lists wrapping up today, multiple top 100 types having recently graduated, and the draft coming early next week, it’s a natural time to take a snapshot of where things stand in terms of the game’s farm system rankings.

We’ve taken Craig Edwards’ values for prospects by tier and totaled up what each of the 30 clubs had in their farm system over the winter. We also have a “Now” ranking with graduated prospects taken out (see the sidebar here for a full list of graduates), as well as a post-draft number based on our valuations of what teams’ draft picks are worth (in other words, our expectation of what we expect them to sign). Orgs are ranked based on the “Now” ranking; the total number of prospects and average per prospect value are also from that “Now” figure.

The previous version of this org ranking from the end of the 2018 season can be found here. Below is the grid with the breakdown of prospects by FV and club, so you can see the shape of a system:

There is some wiggle room in the team rankings, as you could argue that a team with a couple million dollars less in value, but with that value concentrated in many fewer prospects, actually has more trade value. As a thought exercise, you’d want a $100 million prospect more than 100 $1 million prospects, which this ranking would technically call equal. Exactly where that cutoff lies and what the discount rate would be for a multi-player package isn’t clear just yet. Would you need $120 million of value in two prospects to part with one $100 million prospect? How much would you need for a three player package? These are questions we plan on answering down the road.

There will be an update moving the FV of dozens of prospects right after the draft, and draftees who haven’t yet signed but who we expect to sign (essentially all top 10 round picks) will also be added right away. With that in mind, because THE BOARD will change in a significant way right after the draft, we wanted to capture how things looked both during the winter and in this pre-draft, pre-trade deadline moment. At some point soon after the draft concludes, we’ll have dynamic farm rankings on THE BOARD that will update whenever we change a pro prospect’s FV, which will happen frequently after this first update goes live.