John Sickels has finished up his Top 20+ prospects lists for each team. That means that it is time to rank all of the farm systems using the grades that he came up with. These rankings are not indicative of John’s actual farm system rankings, which he is currently working on and will soon be found on his website. These are based on a system, as described below.
I went through each system that John graded and took down the grade for both hitters and pitchers. Why did I do that? Well, hitters and pitchers have different values. The value’s that I used were the ones first identified by Victor Wang in an article at The Hardball Times. The guys at Beyond The Box Score took that and made it into a monetary value. Here is what the average prospect was worth who fell in these ranges:
| Top 10 hitting prospects | $32.5M |
| Top 11-25 hitters | $22.3 |
| Top 26-50 hitters | $20.8 |
| Top 51-75 hitters | $12.6 |
| Top 76-100 hitters | $11.1 |
| Top 10 pitching prospects | $13.5 |
| Top 11-25 pitchers | $14.2 |
| Top 26-50 pitchers | $14.2 |
| Top 51-75 pitchers | $10.8 |
| Top 76-100 pitchers | $8.7 |
| Grade B pitchers (as graded by Sickels) | $6.5 |
| Grade B hitters | $4.9 |
| Grade C pitchers 22 or younger | $1.9 |
| Grade C pitchers 23 or older | $1.3 |
| Grade C hitters 22 or younger | $0.62 |
| Grade C hitters 23 or older | $0.45 |
Now I did have to make some adjustments. As we can see, Pitching prospects in the 11-50 range tend to be more valuable than those in the Top 10. Since that doesn’t actually make much sense, I made every pitcher graded as a B+ or better worth the same “average” value of 14.2M.
| Team | A | A- | B+ | B | B- | C+ | |
| H | Value | 32.5 | 22.3 | 20.8 | 12.6 | 4.9 | 0.88 |
| P | Value | 14.2 | 14.2 | 14.2 | 9.8 | 6.5 | 2.6 |
For the C+ guys I had to change a little. I didn’t go through the 292 players who were graded C+ to find the age. So what I did was take the average C grade (split the difference between the two grades). That made 1.6 for pitchers and 0.54 for hitters.I used the weighting for the B grade prospects to wind up with the C+ being worth the same for a C as the B+ was for the B grades. Now that we had the value for each type of prospect, I just ran the numbers for the different teams. One thing to note, I didn’t include the grade C prospects because not all of the C prospects made each list, so the data was left out because it was incomplete. Here are the results:
| Team | Pitcher Value | Hitter Value | Total Value |
| Astros | 102.20 | 127.60 | 229.80 |
| Cubs | 41.50 | 154.32 | 195.82 |
| Red Sox | 67.50 | 106.84 | 174.34 |
| Pirates | 56.10 | 106.18 | 162.28 |
| Twins | 64.70 | 90.52 | 155.22 |
| Mets | 63.90 | 83.10 | 147.00 |
| Cardinals | 54.30 | 87.42 | 141.72 |
| Rockies | 40.90 | 99.54 | 140.44 |
| Padres | 70.90 | 60.38 | 131.28 |
| Rangers | 43.50 | 86.62 | 130.12 |
| Royals | 68.30 | 59.32 | 127.62 |
| Yankees | 49.70 | 75.78 | 125.48 |
| Giants | 89.80 | 33.62 | 123.42 |
| Dodgers | 61.00 | 50.90 | 111.90 |
| Reds | 43.70 | 64.16 | 107.86 |
| Mariners | 63.00 | 43.42 | 106.42 |
| Rays | 64.30 | 39.24 | 103.54 |
| Diamondbacks | 59.70 | 38.52 | 98.22 |
| Blue Jays | 68.00 | 29.44 | 97.44 |
| Orioles | 67.00 | 29.94 | 96.94 |
| White Sox | 30.70 | 64.84 | 95.54 |
| Athletics | 27.00 | 63.32 | 90.32 |
| Indians | 21.70 | 68.12 | 89.82 |
| Marlins | 57.70 | 29.22 | 86.92 |
| Phillies | 26.70 | 59.94 | 86.64 |
| Nationals | 42.40 | 40.62 | 83.02 |
| Tigers | 42.50 | 35.00 | 77.50 |
| Braves | 47.70 | 25.92 | 73.62 |
| Brewers | 33.80 | 19.98 | 53.78 |
| Angels | 16.50 | 18.76 | 35.26 |
The Reds come in right smack in the middle of the pack for the big leagues. They have a decent balance between hitters and pitchers, and you can see that in the graphic below that breaks down the valuation for each system a little better.
As I wrote when Sickels released his Reds rankings in January, I believe he underrated a few guys in the system, which would boost the system a little bit and probably put them in line with the Giants-Padres area, but still outside of that top eight that seems to have separated itself. The Reds system is rebounding well despite trades over the past few seasons to acquire Mat Latos, Sean Marshall, Shin-Soo Choo and Jonathan Broxton that have pulled players away from the system. With many of the positions on the big league team spoken for over the next season or three the system should continue to strengthen over the next few seasons.