Now that we have ranked the top 100 prospects in MLB heading into the 2023 season, let’s turn our attention to how all 30 farm systems stack up.
Spoiler alert: You’ll notice the same teams that have the best prospects on the top 100 tend to land near the top of this list. It helps to have good players making their way through your farm system.
I’ve always found it too subjective to line up 30 lists of players and say this list is better than that one with any certainty, since the process of ranking them is already pretty subjective and over 1,000 players/data points are too many for one brain to effectively consider.
Enter science! These rankings of all 30 organizations were done, for the most part, the same way as last year’s version. In short, while at FanGraphs, research by Craig Edwards (who now works for the MLB Players Association) revealed empirical surplus dollar values for each future value tier of prospect, so we can now make an objective ranking of farm systems derived from my individual team lists, which have been completed and will be published next week.
Another benefit of this approach is that you can use your own judgment to disagree with a ranking if, say, a team has $500,000 more talent but the lower-ranked team has prospects of the sort you prefer. This gives you the tools to see exactly how close every team is and a more granular view of what their players are like, compared to the other 29 teams.
