John Sickels Farm System Rankings

Update:The charts are up to date through Saturday night. Also included is the Cubs/Rays trade. Also fixed two errors I made.

John Sickels is now done with all of his rankings. I know he said he had a few changes to make still, so this could change ever so slightly, though I doubt it makes much of an impact overall.

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.

TeamAA-B+BB-C+
HValue32.522.320.812.64.90.88
PValue14.214.214.29.86.52.6

For the C+ guys I had to change a little. I didn’t go through the 268 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:

The Reds came in ranked 7th in his rankings, but really suffered by John’s ranking of Yorman Rodriguez as a C+ prospect. Had he rated him as a B+ or a B prospect the Reds would have ranked 5th (B) or a 4th (B+).

Here is a representation of how each team’s overall value broke down by Pitchers and Hitters value:

John has some more grade changes coming up, so there may be a few more changes to this post later today.