Now that we have ranked the top 100 MLB prospects heading into the 2024 season, let’s see how all 30 major league farm systems compare.
While it’s nice to have baseball’s best farm system, it is still one degree removed from what franchises really want: wins at the major league level. Because of that, it’s important to remember that some teams near the bottom of these farm system rankings are there because they’re either winning all the time (often subtracting prospects as often as they’re adding them) or have recently graduated a bunch of young core players and are waiting on the next group. Those are both great outcomes and how this is supposed to work.
These rankings of all 30 organizations were done, for the most part, the same way as my previous versions. 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 will be published next week.
A 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.
So just how bright does the future look for your favorite MLB team?
This is now the fifth year that I’ve done this prospect rankings package, including the farm rankings. It has covered the rise, peak and now slight decline of the Orioles’ farm system. You might be chortling at how being my top-rated farm system by $64 million is the beginning of the decline, but in this case it is:
2020: 17th-ranked ($211 million) “in the middle of a top-down rebuild.”
2021: 8th-ranked ($256 million) “starting to see some results of their rebuild.”
2022: Top-ranked ($344 million) “Elias appears to have taken what worked from the Astros while leaving behind the stuff nobody wanted.”
2023: Top-ranked ($466 million) “in line with recent top farm systems … the best … [were] just above $500 million.”
So, the number is a bit lower this year while also helped greatly by the top prospect in baseball, Jackson Holliday, who is worth $112 million and has a good shot to graduate by June, so the O’s will fall around more than other clubs around that time. At that point, San Diego, which isn’t graduating any of its top prospects, should be in a dead heat with Baltimore for No. 1.
