The dollars and cents of why the Braves have the best farm system in baseball

I have a confession to make: I truly think you guys (our readers and fans and Braves fans in general) are awesome.

Well, okay... not all of you, but most of you.

The interest in the Braves minor league system is greater now than it arguably ever has been. This is partially due to the sheer amount and availability of information these days (the internet is a wonderful and terrible place), but also due the quality and sheer depth of the farm system these days. Sure, there are the Dansbys, Ozzies, and Acunas for everyone to love, but there are lots of players that fans can have as their “pet prospect(s)” and such players in this system have a real chance of panning out.

What has been born from that interest is a lot of REALLY well-informed fans doing awesome things. Some folks who fit this description become lowly blog writers (Hi!) while others simply produce fascinating content and tidbits not from obligation, but just because they like doing it. That brings us to what this article is about...placing a dollar value on the Braves farm system and how it stacks up against the rest of the league.

First off, props to Ryan for putting this together. I am known a bit for being a bit masochistic in the assignments I give myself, but frankly I have little interest in researching the future values of the Marlins/Diamondbacks/Angels top 100 prospects among others. This was the result of true yeoman’s work....well done sir.

As for the premise here, it actually isn’t super complicated. Fangraphs recently updated their models for how to value prospects monetarily based on their future values and position (hitter vs. pitcher). You can find all that info right here. There was a lot of research that went into using this model, in particular using Baseball America’s stated future values analyzed over a long period of time, and frankly they are better at explaining it in the link above than I ever could. Using that data and information, Ryan took a team-by-team approach to determine which team has the greatest total dollar value in their system (based purely on top 100 prospects mind you).

While it isn’t surprising that the Braves came out on top in this analysis, the difference is a staggering $58 million. To put it another way, you could add the top 100 prospects from the Orioles, Angels, AND Diamondbacks (which would be Chance Sisco, Jahmai Jones, and Anthony Banda just for the sake of full disclosure) to the Yankees’ system who came in second on this list and they would still not be as valuable as the Braves farm system.

It is worth mentioning that this is using the Fangraphs top 100 prospect list and future values as created by Eric Longenhagen. Eric is a super smart guy with a great first name so you can do FAR worse than using his rankings and scouting grades, but if for whatever reason you disagree with his FVs and the prospects on the top 100, you can easily if tediously use Fangraphs’ model to apply to any top 100 list or any system with future values from the same source (well okay, I guess you could game the system using FVs from different sources but that would not make any objective sense).

One last note: there is certainly an argument to be made that limiting this analysis to just top 100 prospects isn’t completely accurate or representative of a team’s total farm system value. This is a reasonable concern. However, it is also a widely accepted opinion that the Braves have the deepest farm system in baseball in addition to having a wealth of top 100 prospects that represent the top end talent of the system. It stands to reason that if you were to compare, say, the top 30 prospects in the Braves system against the top 30 of every other team...while the ranks of the other teams may change, it seems probable that the Braves lead would grow even larger.