I created this last year and it was really fun. I posted this last night on my website (http://www.redsminorleagues.com) and thought I would re-post it here again this season.

These rankings are not indicative of John’s actual farm system rankings, which he is currently working on and will soon be found on his website. These are based on a system, as described below.

I went through each system that John graded and took down the grade for both hitters and pitchers. Why did I do that? Well, hitters and pitchers have different values. The value’s that I used were the ones first identified by Victor Wang in an article at The Hardball Times. The guys at Beyond The Box Score took that and made it into a monetary value. Here is what the average prospect was worth who fell in these ranges:

Now I did have to make some adjustments. As we can see, Pitching prospects in the 11-50 range tend to be more valuable than those in the Top 10. Since that doesn’t actually make much sense, I made every pitcher graded as a B+ or better worth the same "average" value of 14.2M.

For the C+ guys I had to change a little. I didn’t go through the 292 players who were graded C+ to find the age. So what I did was take the average C grade (split the difference between the two grades). That made 1.6 for pitchers and 0.54 for hitters.I used the weighting for the B grade prospects to wind up with the C+ being worth the same for a C as the B+ was for the B grades. Now that we had the value for each type of prospect, I just ran the numbers for the different teams. One thing to note, I didn’t include the grade C prospects because not all of the C prospects made each list, so the data was left out because it was incomplete. Here are the results:

(If you are going to repost this somewhere else, please give credit)

Here is a graphical breakdown of the values for each team with hitters/pitchers values:

(If you are going to repost this somewhere, please give credit)

I think that the numbers are correct, but if you see any inaccuracies, please let me know and I will correct them later this evening (I am about to head to bed for the day).

With all systems, there are some flaws in it. But, it is a fun exercise to go through and it is at least based somewhat in reality and avoids bias and opinions (aside from John's of course, which is where the entire system is based around).

While John is away, he asked if I would be interested in writing up a piece comparing the Cincinnati Reds 2007 first round draft pick Devin Mesoraco to the Cincinnati Reds 2010 first round draft pick Yasmani Grandal. If you are unaware of who I am, I run and operate RedsMinorLeagues.com and have since 2005. Let me preface this by saying that I have never seen Yasmani Grandal play live, so everything is either second hand information or something I picked up while watching video online, while I have seen Devin Mesoraco play live over 40 times in the past year.

Continue reading this post »

John Sickels is now done with all of his rankings.I have updated the values through his most recent "Important Grade Changes" post, as well as included the prospects from the Cubs/Rays trade.

How I went about creating the data

I went through each system that John graded and took down the grade for both hitters and pitchers. Why did I do that? Well, hitters and pitchers have different values. The value’s that I used were the ones first identified by Victor Wang in an article at The Hardball Times. The guys at Beyond The Box Score took that and made it into a monetary value. Here is what the average prospect was worth who fell in these ranges:

Now I did have to make some adjustments. As we can see, Pitching prospects in the 11-50 range tend to be more valuable than those in the Top 10. Since that doesn’t actually make much sense, I made every pitcher graded as a B+ or better worth the same "average" value of 14.2M.

For the C+ guys I had to change a little. I didn’t go through the 268 players who were graded C+ to find the age. So what I did was take the average C grade (split the difference between the two grades). That made 1.6 for pitchers and 0.54 for hitters.I used the weighting for the B grade prospects to wind up with the C+ being worth the same for a C as the B+ was for the B grades. Now that we had the value for each type of prospect, I just ran the numbers for the different teams. One thing to note, I didn’t include the grade C prospects because not all of the C prospects made each list, so the data was left out because it was incomplete.

Here are the results:

Here is a representation of how each team’s overall value broke down by Pitchers and Hitters value:

Does this align with your personal farm system rankings? Discuss.

With all of the Cliff Lee trade talk and the Twins being the 'front runners' for the acquisition, I continue to hear Wilson Ramos brought up as the center piece to the deal. How on Earth is a catcher with terrible plate discipline who is hitting .204/.240/.313 the center piece of a trade for the team that is considered the 'front runner'? Ramos has never had a good season offensively in the minors. He hasn't been bad in the past, but he also has never OPS'd .800 at any level either. What am I missing here? I just can't grasp how this guy is a good to very good prospect at this point. He is a little young for his level, but he is completely overmatched by AAA pitchers.

Baseball tends to have a rule, the Verducci Rule as some call it, that a young pitcher doesn't exceed 30 innings pitched in a season over his previous career high. Mike Leake threw 142 innings last season for Arizona State, then took 5 months off before going to the AFL, so I can't really add those innings in like I have seen some others do. That ideally would put Leake on pace for 170 innings or so before you would like to 'shut it down' if you abide by the +30 rule.

This all got me thinking though, as Mike Leake isn't your typical 'young pitcher'. He is averaging less than 15 pitches per inning, routinely getting through 6 innings in 90 or fewer pitches. So I decided to look at all pitchers with 1 inning in either direction of Leake (between 59-61 IP this season) and how many pitches they would throw if they kept their current pace so far and threw 200 innings this season.

After the jump is the list, sorted by most pitches on pace to throw for 200 innings:

Continue reading this post »

The Reds have decided to let Neftali Soto catch during the season some, getting 2 starts a week behind the plate. He first caught last fall in instructs and the Reds liked what they saw. Could be pretty interesting if he can make the full transition at some point. For now he will be 'backing up' Devin Mesoraco in High A, but I don't think Mesoraco hangs around there for too long and its going to be interesting to see how much Soto catches once Mesoraco is gone.

http://cincinnati.com/blogs/reds/2010/04/02/while-were-waiting-soto-to-catch/

I am working on a project currently and I am really hoping someone out there can help me out. I have a working Perl script for MLB data as well as AAA and the Southern League in AA. They use the same format as the Majors do, so it was easy for me to manipulate to get the data even though I know next to nothing about Perl, I was easily able to figure out how to make that switch.  The problem is that I can't figure out how to get the script to work for the Eastern League in AA and the rest of the minors.

The Majors/AAA/Southern League use the format of Game-PBP-Batters/Pitchers-playerfile.xml

The rest of the minors use the format of Game-Inning-Inning_X.xml

The best I can get my Perl script is to create the game folders, download the box score and player list and create an 'innings' folder, but I can't get it to download the Inning_X.xml files. I tried to email Jeff Sackmann who runs MinorLeagueSplits.com and haven't gotten a response yet so I am now reaching out to you guys and hoping someone can help me out as I have spent about 14 hours of the last 2 days trying to tweak little things with my file to try and make it work and I just haven't had any success beyond what it listed to start this paragraph and that really doesn't help me much. Appreciate you taking the time to read it.

John is now done with all of his rankings. I know he said he had a few changes to make still, so this could change ever so slightly, though I doubt it makes much of an impact overall.

I went through each system that John graded and took down the grade for both hitters and pitchers. Why did I do that? Well, hitters and pitchers have different values. The value's that I used were the ones first identified by Victor Wang in an article at The Hardball Times. The guys at Beyond The Box Score took that and made it into a monetary value. Here is what the average prospect was worth who fell in these ranges:

Now I did have to make some adjustments. As we can see, Pitching prospects in the 11-50 range tend to be more valuable than those in the Top 10. To counteract that sense ideally, it shouldn't be that way, I made each pitching prospect in the Top 61 (B+ or better grade) worth 14.2M. Here is the value I gave each grade - split for pitchers and hitters:

For the C+ guys I had to change a little. I didn't go through the 268 players who were graded C+ to find the age. So what I did was take the average C grade (split the difference between the two grades). That made 1.6 for pitchers and 0.54 for hitters.I used the weighting for the B grade prospects to wind up with the C+ being worth the same for a C as the B+ was for the B grades. Now that we had the value for each type of prospect, I just ran the numbers for the different teams. One thing to note, I didn't include the grade C prospects because not all of the C prospects made each list, so the data was left out because it was incomplete. Here are the results(updated to include the grade changes John has posted as of 1:30 on Monday):

So I am getting pretty stoked on the work that Kevin Dame is doing over at The Hardball Times in his "Visual Baseball" series where he interprets Baseball Data with graphics. In his most recent article he represented the 2010 Mariners hitters vs the rest of the leagues starters in OPS. I liked the idea and how it was represented. I tweaked a few things though and decided to just use the position for each team and ranked them by OPS+ since it adjusts for the park one plays in. Here are the results for our 2009 Reds:

You may want to click and open it in a larger window to get the full view. The one thing that surprised me was just how well our right fielders performed in 2009. The next thing was second base. I give Brandon Phillips my share of crap around the internet because I feel fans overrate his bat dramatically because of his RBI numbers 'being so good'. With that said, for national leaguers he was quite good at the plate. He still is in the wrong spot in the lineup by far, but that one isn't on him at all.

What does it all mean? Well, looking at those rankings what spots do you think the Reds can improve upon in 2010? What about spots you see a decline at? Here are my thinkings, feel free to share yours:

Improvement Positions:

Center - Its going to be tough to be as bad in center next season. Even Willy Taveras playing there next year is likely to be much better than he was in 2009. Given that Stubbs is likely to see most of the time there, even the most pessimistic on Stubbs think he will hit better than Taveras did in 2009.

Third Base - Scott Rolen makes a lot of his value on the other side of the ball, but even at this point in his career he should very much be expected to provide better offense than what Edwin and Rosales brought to us in 2009.

Declining Positions:

First Base - Call me a pessimist if you will, but I don't expect Votto to replicate another .375 BABIP season in 2010. If he falls down even to a .325 BABIP he would have to have the same rate of strikeouts, walks, HBP, SF and SH while hitting 42 doubles and 35 HR to have a .979 OPS. I just don't expect that big of a jump in power for Votto. I think he can be around the .900 OPS range, but he isn't likely to sniff .950+ again this year.

The Rest

I expect just about every other position to be about where they were. I think Jay Bruce picks up the slack in 2010 and makes up for the guys who filled in for him very well in the season. We have the same catchers back and while Corky Miller and Craig Tatum did get some playing time I figure they wind up in roughly the same area overall.

Anyways, that is my opinion. What about you guys?

ProjectProspect.com has now gone through and made a Top 15 for all positions and a Top 30 for Pitchers. What I did was assign points based on all of that. 2 points for a 15 vote and 30 for a 1 vote. For the pitchers I just went 30-1 in points for the 1-30 spots. I added up all the teams points, multiplied by 2 then divided by 10 to give a Font Size to put the team name in the graphic. The idea came off of the work that Kevin Dame is doing at TheHardballTimes.com and I thought it was a pretty cool way to represent certain things. Obviously this is a little rough because there are some stronger positions and some weaker ones (2B jumped out to me as one of the weaker spots), but still I think it gives a decent look at the farm systems in baseball, at least as far as the teams Top 10's go (Boston actually had 12 players listed, San Diego was 2nd with 9). Here is what the graphic wound up looking like:

I plan to do something similar once John comes out with his Top 20s for each team, assigning point values for each grade, but that is a ways off still.

via minorleaguenotebook.com

I took in Ethan Martin's last start when he came through Dayton. I have some video up with a little bit of a scouting report Here.

He topped out at 95 a few different times. Inconsistent offspeed stuff, but flashed itself as very good.

There is also about 6 or 7 other videos of Martin ptiching over on my youtube page. Also videos of Devaris Gordon, Austin Gallagher and of course a ton of Reds videos.

Monday at 3PM (EST) we will be interviewing Kevin Goldstein of Baseball Prospectus about top prospects here, you can listen live and we will also have the chat room open during the show. If there is time, we will take phone calls.

If you can't listen live it will be available online here.

By the way, if anyone isn't aware, John does an appearance every Tuesday at BTR for Rotowire.com. So listen to those if you haven't been, there is always some good stuff in the show between Jeff and John.

From MLBTraderumors

ESPN.com's Peter Gammons heard from some club officials that top amateur pitcher Stephen Strasburg and his agent, Scott Boras, could demand $50MM over six years if he's selected first overall by the Nationals in the June draft. If the Nationals pick Strasburg and seem unwilling to pay him as much as he wants, Boras could threaten to send the prospect to pitch in Japan for a year. If the Nats are scared off, the Mariners and Padres are next in line for Strasburg.

So how could an amateur player get away with these lofty demands? Strasburg has struck out 74 and walked only seven in the 34.1 innings he's pitched for San Diego State and scouts rave about his stuff.

Here are two career stat lines of two guys who are/were Reds.

Player A - .253/.291/.407

Player B - .249/.294/.394

Know who each guy is?

Player A is of course, Corey Patterson.

Player B is the guy who will be our cleanup hitter for the 2nd year in a row against Right Handed Pitching for his career, Brandon Phillips. Its kind of a swift kick in the junk to Reds fans that somehow this is still going to happen in the middle of our lineup.