Archive for the “farm system values” Category

I wrote a post at Beyond the Boxscore on NL Central Farm System Values. The Cardinals and Brewers have the best collection of prospects in the division, while the Astros and Cubs are just plain bad.

Prospect evaluation and ranking can be somewhat of a nebulous task. John Sickels compares it to being a weatherman, we can tell you what we think looks most probable based on a variety of different information we’re given, but if it turns out we’re wrong…hey, what can you do? Even if we can project how a prospect will perform, how exactly do you turn that into a trade value, one that can determine what sort of a gold mine your team is sitting on?

Most recently Baseball America ranked the Cardinal farm system the 8th best in baseball. But what is that really worth? Thankfully with the hard work of others, a clearer picture has been given. Victor Wang has done a great job tackling this subject, and lays out in his chapter in The Hardball Times Annual 2009 the hidden value of these prospects we so closely follow here at FR. I’ll briefly explain his method, with his permission, and then we’ll get into how it applies to the Cardinals.

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