Back in late November part one of this series came out based on some unscientific point system I came up with based on the Baseball America League Top 20 Rankings. According to those rankings, the Reds came out 10th. In this series, based on the rankings of each team by John Sickels at MinorLeagueBall.com. His grades are not final, but these were the grades he had posted and updated as of 4pm on Monday afternoon. Here is the description for the system that is a copy/paste from last years article.
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 all of the 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:
Breakdown
The Reds ranked 17th, middle of the pack, with this kind of data. It makes sense as most of the Reds top 10 prospects are all pitchers, who are viewed as less valuable as their position player counterparts with a similar ranking. When we look at the different breakdowns I used, here is where the Reds ranked among the 30 teams in the league.
| Rankings | ||||
| Top 5 | Top 10 | Hitters | Pitchers | |
| Reds | 13 | 16 | 24 | 13 |
The overall picture doesn’t look so well when we look at this data, but I think that unlike most teams, the Reds have some really intriguing C level prospects who could really break out. There are lots of very young and toolsy players in that range for the Reds who weren’t even considered for this kind of ranking system.
After all of the trades of the last two seasons, the fact that the system is as healthy as it is it’s a true testament to the entire minor league staff (scouts, directors, instructor, coaches and managers).