Keith Law prefaces his Top 100 prospects coming out tomorrow with organizational rankings today. It’s behind the subscription pay wall so no reprinting the text. The Cardinals rank 29 out of 30 with the admission that he may be slightly underrating some of the newer additions to the farm. FWIW, I doubt he’s underrating them and I’m not surprised the Cardinals are in the bottom 5.
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16 Responses to “Keith Law Organizational Rankings”
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The only reason I think the low ranking is unjust is due to how many prospects we will graduate next year. Almost certainly:
Hawksworth
Garcia
Walters
Greene
Freese
Craig
very probably:
Jay
Kinney
Possibly (probably need an injury for it to happen):
Ottavino
Sanchez
Descalso
Jones
Anderson
Juckich
I think you’ll see 7-8 at a minimum. How many other organizations can say that — particular teams that are contenders?
How many of those contribute significantly next year though? I’ll take Garcia and one of Craig/Freese to be more than 1 WAR players and potentially Sanchez. Everyone else is a replacement level player. Graduating guys that you can find freely as AAA veterans isn’t successful, imo.
Ouch ! Gotta agree that we probably have fewer (as in none) high ceiling prospects than almost any other teams. I do think, though, that we may be among the leaders in depth of potentially useful players at high levels who may fill roles immediately or during the next season. These are B minus and C plus prospects who who do not make for sexy team prospect rankings but may, in the end prove to be very valuable to the right team. The Cardinals are more settled in their starting nine and rotation than any other team in the division and most teams in baseball and really only need players for reserve roles or average starters. Craig, Freese, Greene, Anderson, Jay, Jones, Henley, Descalso, Mather, Lynn, Garcia, Ottavino, Sanchez, Kozma, Sanchez and others all fit this bill. Several of them have some outside potential to be more than that. This would not be a very valuable trove for a rebuilding team but it may be a very useful one for a team that already has a lot of A and B players.
In much the same way that the Cardinals had a number of players take a step back in 2009 they could see a number take a step forward in 2010. There’s a lot of good arms and raw athletes but they’ve been unable to translate that into production to date.
1 war as in for their career? I’ll definitely take the over on that!
1 WAR per year
That’s a good point about development. Most are using our graduation of Rasmus and trades as the reason for our poor ranking. Yes, that contributed greatly to it. However, our lack of development of top prospects also played a large role. Very few surprises on the upside and lots of stagnant or negative development. I hope that was an anomaly and the not the start of a trend.
I agree carioca, while losing Rasmus, Wallace, Mortensen, Todd, Motte, etc. from the farm has hurt it also didn’t help that we didn’t have much behind them. Yes Wallace was drafted last year and Mort/Todd were drafted recently as well but where are the guys like Motte that weren’t taken in the first few rounds? We need more of the 5+ rounders to develop into something and we can’t count on only our 1st rounders to make up the farm. Miller has upside and helps somewhat and like Rasmus should be a part of the farm for a decent amount of time, but that only exacerbates the situation since he won’t be helping the big club any time soon. The draft and foreign free agents are a place to start but the development in the low minors is where this farm system has lacked for several years and guys like Rasmus have just been covering it up I think.
@hugo Jaime Garcia was drafted in the 22nd round. Pete Parise, a reliever in Memphis who had a solid showing in 2009, wasn’t drafted.
I think we are under-selling our system a bit:
I think a legitimate argument could be made that the following folks could be ranked towards the back end of the top 50 pitchers and hitters in the minor leagues:
Jaime Garcia
David Freese
Lance Lynn
Daryl Jones
Shelby Miller
Eduardo Sanchez
Allen Craig
Robert Stock
Now – I realize on any given Top 100 list, we may get max 2 players on the list, however, if you look at the distribution of the lists I think it would be fair to say that all of these guys are reasonably amongst the top 150 prospects in the game. You figure 30 teams, the average should be five players. I count 8 players above. I realize that the value of a Top 20 prospect is far greter than these 100-150 guys, but if you look at John Sickels recent Top 50 hitters list in review (05) you will see that the hits came almost randomly throughout the list vs. being heavily weighted towards the top… Again, I know I am not unbiased but I do think we are underselling our system here.
Just to clarify I am saying and Top 50 hitters or Top 50 pitchers (e.g. Top 100 overall)
Also of note http://www.minorleagueball.com/2010/1/16/1255063/johns-farm-system-rankings
jjray,
I hadn’t looked at rounds for everyone but it doesn’t seem that we have very many people like Garcia that were drafted that late that have blossomed. I still feel this organization needs to do a better job developing players and not just relying on their talent to get them through. We also have Pete Kozma that has completely disappeared, was he just that poor of a 1st rounder or did we do a bad job of developing him?
I think you’re right Azru that our prospect rankings were hurt even more by the disappointing performances of so many of our guys last year than by the trades and graduations. I don’t know that we can identify a reason for that but there may be a correctable one or there may just be a natural correction and some of our guys may be considered more highly by mid season.
Kozma was just a bad selection in my opinion. When you take a HS position player in the 1st round, he should have a high ceiling. Kozma never fit that definition. I hated the pick.
Everyone agrees that it would be nice to have more high ceiling prospects, but with Rasmus and Wallace not in the picture they don’t have that beyond Miller….at least not at the moment. However the depth they do have it extremely important as they try to balance a payroll with a number of large contracts. If they can continue to fill the bench, the 5th (maybe 4th) starter, the bullpen and position players such as Schmacher and Freese and Ryan they will be just fine until the get/need high ceiling prospects.
My only complaint is that they are not relying on the current depth in the farm system to take chances in the draft to take high upside choices with lower round picks as the Red Sox do and pay the higher bonuses necessary to sign such players in the lower rounds of the draft.