Future Redbirds

Sickels hasn’t to my knowledge actually ranked the organizations (although he may in his book) but I’m taking the general system I used in creating my own set of Goldstein rankings and applying it to Sickels.

I assigned a point value to each of the letter grades as follows:

As you can see we’re looking at a linear system until the A prospects. Just like the Goldstein method you can debate the point systems as they are undeniably arbitrary but I’m ok with that. I’m less concerned with the middle and more concerned with the outliers — and we would hope the outliers would be consistent provided you don’t get too crazy with the point system. Without drawing this out here’s the chart based on Sickel’s lists:

This group has an average of 88 and a standard deviation of 22. That places the top 5 teams as more than 1 standard deviation from average and the bottom 5 teams as well. Again, average falls near the middle of the list leaving me with an aesthetically pleasing, although still arbitrary result. Since Sickels ranks 20 prospects some of the concerns that I enumerated in the Goldstein piece are lessened but certainly not resolved.

The Cardinals look like an awfully good system in this method — top 10 even. I’m quite shocked by that but it probably speaks to the depth of low-ceiling, high-floor talent that exists in the farm system. You’ll notice the Cardinals are one of only 10 teams that avoid having to go into that “C” column.

The systems at the top seem right to me. Tampa has the best system without question and the Rangers have dramatically improved theirs by moving major leaguers in some blockbuster trades (see: Texieria, Mark). Cincinnati and Boston’s rankings both speak to the amount of true impact talent they have in their system. Oakland finds themselves in a situation like the Rangers having restocked the farm system by dealing off the major league club.

At the bottom, the Mets sold the farm for Satana and really only have Martinez to speak of at this point. The Blue Jays have never been good at drafting under Riccardi and the farm reflects that. The White Sox moved some pieces for Swisher but they were probably a bottom third club even before that move. The Tigers moved key pieces in the Cabrera/Willis deal. If there’s any club in the bottom 5 that I think can pull themselves out quickly it’s the Tigers because of their willingness to draft and sign players over slot reccomendations.

(Note: This list should reflect all trades including the Bedard, Haren, Santana and Tejada moves.)

[Update]

If I run the numbers again and give no credit for C prospects, the order changed slightly although no significant moves.