Do Farm System Rankings Relate to Minor League Standings?

MiLB’s regular season has recently come to an end. Affiliated ball, and those individuals who play in it, is increasingly scrutinized as teams and fans alike keep an eye on the future of the big league club. As a result, much is made of farm system rankings.

While the strength of a farm system very well can depend on its depth, more often those who care tend to focus on the elite few in any given system. MLB’s Top 30 Prospects list for each team has galvanized the uppermost quintile of farm systems. Many fans skip system rankings altogether to simply check how many players their team has in the cumulative Top 100. 

For this post, I figured it’s a worthwhile exercise to step back and check whether or not there is any meaningful link between farm system rankings and the actual on-field performance of those affiliates. The relationship between ranking and winning will be an interesting one to evaluate, partially because farm system rankings aren’t designed to project MiLB team-wide outcomes, but are still supposed to serve as a proxy for the talent within a franchise. 

First, a few specifics about what follows. Regular season statistics were taken from each team’s four full-season affiliates: their A, High-A, AA, and AAA teams. Those records have been aggregated, which leads to some smoothing, given that one atrocious single-A affiliate season can be neutralized, in part at least, by those three other affiliates. No MiLB league titles or first place finishes are taken into account, and no personal accomplishments are either.

Farm system win percentages have been plotted against two outlets’ rankings. First, MiLB.com’s own rankings released in March of this year. Second, FanGraph’s pre-season farm system Meta Value Rankings. This latter system is unique given that it ranks systems by quantifying the expected value in dollars of each system’s most projectable young players, opposed to simply ranking a system in its vast entirety.

These ranking are taken from sources who produced them immediately before this season. As such, former top prospects like Pete Alonso, Fernando Tatis Jr., and Yordan Alvarez are all still key components of what make up a franchise’s farm system rankings. Players like Justin Dunn and Jarred Kelenic will benefit the Mariners overall rank, as opposed to the Mets, whom they started the offseason with. Additionally, Baltimore’s rankings did not yet get the necessary boost from Adley Rutschman, nor did any other team rankings yet benefit from the players they drafted this June. 

This first table illustrates MiLB’s farm system rankings in a sorted order, to go along with those system’s aggregated records and corresponding winning percentage. 

It’s tempting to first scan primarily over the far righthand column to identify the highest and lowest organizational winning percentages. Important too though, is comparing those second and third columns from the right; as you can see, there is a fair bit of overlap (especially toward the top) between FanGraphs and MiLB.com‘s ranking. Still, there are notable divergences as well. MiLB, for instance, thinks particularly highly of the Cardinals’ system, but is bearish on the Marlins’ as opposed to FanGraphs’ method. 

Below is that same table, but sorted by win percentage.

Here, we can see that the Rays’ affiliates performed incredibly well across all levels, winning more than 59% of their games altogether. The Rangers and Diamondbacks also saw their affiliates perform very well, despite owning only mediocre standings in either ranking though. 

Of top ranking farm systems, in overall win percentage both the Braves and Padres seemed to underperform some. Of course, if key players in each of those systems (think MacKenzie Gore and Cristian Pache) experienced strong personal development and success in 2019, the Braves and Padres likely aren’t too worried about this high-level winning trend. 

On the other hand, the Angels had pretty distinctly the worst cumulative affiliate records, perhaps underscoring the possibly lopsided nature of farm system rankings. Jo Adell alone does a great deal elevating the Angels in system rankings, but a possible blindspot for rankings is system depth, which aggregated records might better indicate. The Angels brass would likely be quick to suggest that development takes precedent to winning in the minors, but a 42% win percentage (or 68-94 MLB extrapolated record) across all minor league teams seems to be of some concern. 

Finally though, here are some visualizations to better digest the relationship between rankings and win percentage, a proxy for system-wide quality.

There appears to be an only gentle positive relationship between FanGraph’s rankings and system-wide performance. The data are incredibly noisy and the linear trend line direction is only marginally sloped. Indeed, the R-Squared value for this relationship is just 0.111. It does not appear that FanGraphs Meta Value Rankings have a good relationship with system winning percentages.

But this is unfair. FanGraphs Meta Value Rankings aren’t trying to correspond to, or be predictive of, the win percentages of four levels of minor league affiliates. They aim to quantify the value of those most projectable individuals in each system. If anything, MiLB.com’s more traditional system-wide rankings should perhaps feature a stronger link to win totals.

But it doesn’t. Below is another scatterplot, this time using the MiLB.com rankings.

Here, the relationship is essentially nonexistent; MiLB’s released rankings simply seems to bear no resemblance to MiLB performance (R-Squared of just .025).

This line of inquiry isn’t aiming to say rankings aren’t of good use (or entertaining to track), but it does seem to highlight their potentially lopsided nature. Winning in the minors may rightfully take a backseat to development in the minor leagues, but it can help instill young players with a sense of focus outside of their personal endeavors. And for every MiLB team that wins 55% of its games, there are likely a few lesser-known players who are putting themselves on the map in the process. They may not be 55+ FV darlings, but they represent the fact that players get missed all the time in projections, and that depth is an asset unto itself.