The thing to remember about prospect rankings is that they are affected by a lot of editorial consideration that has little to do with actual scouting. Whether one weighs tools over current or historical performance (see: Daryl Jones), weighing performance in low minors v. high minors, upside v. risk, small sample v. career outcomes, draft reports v. organizational time, weighing values of position or type of pitcher…all that has little to do with actually watching the player in question, and all of that affects the prospect’s final position on an organizational prospect list. You bring up Taveras….even the fan lists disagree where he should be, because both Jeff at this blog and Dustin at Scout.com ranked Taveras outside of the Top 20 (Dustin actually ranked him at 23). Goold does a great job explaining some of that editorial decision-making and analysis in his blog post about the BA rankings: http://www.stltoday.com/sports/baseball/professional/article_0bf68e18-1e89-11e0-a06a-0017a4a78c22.html

Also…as the Cardinals beat reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Goold has access to club officials whose job it is to evaluate the prospects in the system, and its obvious that he uses their input in creating his own rankings. That’s an amount of access to knowledge evaluation from people who do see these players every day that the fan prospects do not have. Disregarding the Cardinals BA rankings because they disagree with what you believe is true based on the fan sites would be a mistake and a half. The fan sites do tend to be more familiar with the organization prospects than most media prospect services, but they are subject to the editorial considerations that we see in the media rankings, and because Goold writes the BA rankings, they do have the same familiarity that the fan sites do.