Jim Callis Likes Yankees Farm System
Posted by MJ Recanati on December 30th, 2010 · Comments (10)
It was just a little Tweet last night from Baseball America’s Jim Callis but it still resonates with me. In Callis’s opinion, the Yankees have the 6th best farm system in baseball.
Not too shabby.
Kudos to Oppenheimer and crew.
Cashman, of course, slept through the whole thing.
Evan3457 wrote:
LOL!
Meh, you should really grade farm systems five years down the road but this has to be a good sign.
Ryan81 wrote:
Not really sure what you mean?
Are you saying that the players currently in the Yankee system should be graded in five years’ time and that you retroactively grade the 2010 minor league system in 2015?
What purpose would that serve?
As a clarification, he said they were top 6, not that they were number 6. They could be anywhere from 1-6, though off the top of my head KC seems like a pretty sure bet to be ahead of the Yankees.
To Ryan’s point, what I would like to see is how many times BBA in the past said some team had a top five farm system and what that actually meant, in terms of the players in it, and the team later, say, five years down the road.
I’ve been a BBA reader since, at least, 1992, and can rattle off a million names like Marc Newfield, Eric Anthony, Phil Plantier, Roger Salkeld, et al, that BBA swore were the next great thing and they didn’t work out that way at all…
SAT wrote:
Correct; my mistake. He ranked them in the top 6 in baseball.
If I had to guess, I’d say the Blue Jays, Royals and Rays are in the top 6 as well.
@ Steve Lombardi:
If you took a snapshot of the 2010 Yankee minor league system as it stands today and then looked at how it turned out five years from now, I simply don’t see why that retrospective examination would matter.
Prospect ranking is an art in speculation. To line up all 30 farm systems today and rank the Yankees in the top 20% of all systems is merely to say that their farm system demonstrates strength relative to the other systems in baseball.
How it turns out is how it turns out. But since the Yankees use their farm system as an extension of liquid currency, being ranked higher (rather than lower) gives that currency greater value.
As we saw just a few years ago when the farm system was devoid of any players (impact or otherwise) it was a lot harder to dream of realistic trade scenarios. Now we’re talking about how Cashman failed as a GM becuase he didn’t trade for Halladay, Lee, Greinke or whoever else. Just a few years ago, such trades wouldn’t have even been possible.
Bottom line, this is a good thing. How the snapshot turns out five years from now doesn’t matter as far as the Yankees are concerned because a good number of the players on their current top-10 list will be used in trades. Only those that remain will matter.
Steve Lombardi wrote:
Granted prospects go bust more than boom more often than not, but I’d rather have a system with prospects than not.
Raf wrote:
Exactly. That’s the point.