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The 2018 prospect rankings are coming!

I don’t know if you heard, but the Angels farm system is the most interesting it has been in over a half-decade.

MLB: Los Angeles Angels-Press Conference Jayne Kamin-Oncea-USA TODAY Sports

It’s that time of year!

Our goal here at HH is to synthesize all available information (scouting reports, statistics, video, etc.) in order to accurately provide more insight on how Angels prospects are faring and how the farm system is doing as a whole.

In these rankings and projections, we are attempting to estimate a player’s true talent level that may or may not already be evident in statistical analysis. Of course, there are always details that we cannot capture, as there are many baseball sources we lack the access to and plenty of information is not public altogether.

Methodology

The processes used will be similar to last year’s. In short, we will be ranking our top 30 prospects, but only the top 25 receive a point value in order to reward prospects with higher potential. The tiered point structure, as seen below, is designed to display both a traditional ranking within the system but also the distance between them, which provides additional context to how valuable a prospect is or may become.

A 1st-5th place vote is 50-45-40-35-30 points, 6th-10th is 28-26-24-22-20 points, and 11th-25th place is 15-14-13-12-11-10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1 points.

This year, we have eight writers voting for a maximum total of 400 points a prospect can receive.

We will be using the FV (future value) system and the 20-80 grading scale, where 50 is MLB average. Below is a guide to the future value system.

A guide to the FV system
Kiley McDaniel, Fangraphs

Here are guides to tool grades for hitters.

Fangraphs

We hope you enjoy!