After ranking the top 100 prospects heading into the 2022 MLB season, it's time to turn our attention to each team's farm system as a whole.
I've always found it both overwhelming and too subjective to line up 30 lists of players and say this list is better than that one with any certainty, since the process of ranking them is already pretty subjective and over 1,000 players/data points are too many for one brain to effectively consider.
Enter science! These rankings of all 30 organizations were done, for the most part, the same way as last year's version. In short, while at FanGraphs, research by Craig Edwards (who now works for the MLB Players Association) revealed empirical surplus dollar values for each future value tier of prospect, so we can now make an objective ranking of farm systems derived from my individual team lists, which have been completed and will be published soon.
The part I've added this year is the number of players better than a 40 FV along with total players ranked who I believe have trade value. The idea is that a 40 FV is a tier of player every team has a number of, so in any trade they are seen as common. You can't offer five of that tier of player and get a good big leaguer, but once you go above that tier you probably can accomplish that. So, I've found that the number of players above that 40 FV cutoff is a good measure of quality depth of a system, or the number of players almost every team would want in a deal. The list of 40 FV players differs depending on which team you're talking to, but above that tier the takes tend to be more similar and the trade value more universal. If you want to be even more specific, players in the top half of the top 100 are almost never traded these days, so "tradable players" would be this "above 40 FV" number, minus the players in the top 50 of the overall list.
One benefit of this approach is that you can use your own judgment to disagree with a ranking if, say, a team has $500,000 more talent but the lower-ranked team has talent of the sort you prefer. This gives you the tools to see exactly how close every team is and a more granular view of what their players are like, according to the other 29 teams.