Here's a look at the Orioles farm system and where it might stack up against the other 29 teams.
All I'm doing here is using the same method that Doug Gray used at Minor League Ball.
Each year, John Sickels ranks each team's top 20 prospects and assigns each a grade. Using these grades and rankings, Victor Wang at The Hardball Times found these values for different rankings and grades of both pitchers and hitters:
I added the adjustment Doug used:
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.
These are the values I used in this total (in $):
I used the rankings from our combined mid-season lists and gave grades as I saw fit:
As you can see in the chart, the total value is $122 million. That would have put them as the 11th best farm system on last year's list. The O's were #18 on this list last year.
Of course this could change even more depending on how you grade some of these players.
There are flaws with every system, but this should give you an accurate idea of the current state of the Orioles farm system.
