Kiley McDaniel’s 2022 MLB 30-Team Farm System Ranking

After ranking the top 100 prospects heading into the 2022 MLB season, it’s time to turn our attention to each team’s farm system as a whole.

I’ve always found it overwhelming and too subjective to line up 30 player rosters and say this roster is better than another for certain as the ranking process is already quite subjective and 1000+ players/data points is too much for a brain to handle. consider them effectively.

Let’s get down to science! These rankings of the 30 organizations were done, for the most part, in the same way as the last year’s version. In short, while at FanGraphs, the investigation of Craig Edwards (now working for the MLB Players Association) revealed empirical surplus dollar values ​​for each future value level of the outlook, so we can now make an objective ranking of farming systems derived from my individual team’s lists, which have been completed and will continue to be published soon.

The part I added this year is the number of players better than 40 FV (Future Value) along with the total ranked players that I think have commercial value. The idea is that a 40 FV is a player level that each team has several, so in any trade they look like common. You can’t offer five of that level of player and get a good big league player, but once you get past that level, you can probably do it. So I found that the number of players above that 40 FV cap is a good measure of a system’s quality depth, or the number of players almost every team would want in a deal. FV’s 40-man roster differs depending on which team you’re talking to, but above that level the picks tend to be more similar and the trade value more universal. If you want to be even more specific, players in the top half of the top 100 are almost never traded these days, so “tradeable players” would be this “above 40 FV” number, minus the players in the top 50 from the overall list.

One benefit of this approach is that you can use your own discretion to disagree with a ranking if, for example, one team has $500,000 more talent, but the lower-ranked team has the type of talent you prefer. This gives you the tools to see exactly how close each team is and a more granular view of what your players are like, based on the other 29 teams.