CPL Farm System Rankings

We’ll be doing a podcast on this next month, but here’s my rankings, same as I made last year. I took 4 major top 100 lists, and the dilligent grading of the entire Baseball America Handbook by Tom, and turned them into a scoring system that rewards top prospects, prospect depth, and having prospects worth owning.

For every top 100 player, they received 10 points for being 1-10 on a list, 9 points for being 11-20, etc. Also, every top 30 prospect from the BA Handbook(and 2020 J2s) got a single point as well. Prospects not in their team’s top 30(excluding the J2s) were worth -1 points.

Unsurprisingly, Pat has a firm hold on the top farm ranking with Jeff having some graduations and trading away some prospects this offseason. Jeff still has a top flight farm, however, solidly in second place, a mile ahead of third. The rest of the top half is somewhat bunched together, especially teams 3-6, then it’s massive steps down to the bottom half of the league, where it’s incredibly tightly packed, and nearly every team is just one really good prospect away from leapfrogging the rest of the bottom teams.

Having done this after roster cuts, unlike last year, I was surprised to find the amount of non-top 30 prospects owned in the league, given how many top 30 players are available. This is certainly not to say that only top 30 players are to be owned, and that they’re always more valuable than a non-top 30 prospect, the fact that literally every team has at least 2, and usually many more of those players, proves that.

Also despite doing this analysis after roster cuts, there was only 5 less prospects owned in the CPL compared to last year’s number done before cuts, which was probably helped by the roster expansion, but also gives us a good apples to apples comparison against last season’s numbers.

You can try not to chuckle at the mirroring of Eric and JK’s farms, but it’s just not possible(I know trades were made with other teams, but it’s still funny to me). Otherwise, aside from JK blowtorching his farm, my farm actually lost the most points, due to literally a dozen or so prospect graduations. Fred and Jeff also took steps back as well with graduations and trades, but still managed to stay near the top. Pat and Cale made some moves to add even more prospects this offseason which shows well here, while Eric’s near-complete tear down rocketed him up the standings from probably the worst farm in CPL history into the top half of the league.

And finally, for funsies, here’s a per-player breakdown of their scores, for each team’s top 100 players.