Midseason Review of Minnesota Twins Preseason Top 10 Prospects
The author put up a Minnesota Twins Top 10 list this winter. How is it looking this year?
The opinions on the Minnesota Twins farm system this offseason in top 10/20/30 lists was incredibly diverse. As a writer for FanSided’s Call To The Pen blog, I put up a top 10 for every team this winter based on my own views and talking with scouts around the game. I’m going go through and see where, at the midseason point of the season, that list holds up and where there are holes.
As part of looking into the offseason rankings this year for the Minnesota Twins system, I looked at 10 different rankings (including my Call To The Pen rankings). Let’s open with a look at how those rankings broke down:
Industry Review
The ten lists that I looked at for this review were my own with Call To The Pen, MLB Pipeline’s, John Sickels’ list at Minor League Ball, Baseball Prospectus, Baseball America, Fangraphs, ESPN’s Keith Law, 2080 Ball, Prospect 361, and then the writers consensus rankings from Twins Daily.
Six players made all 10 lists – Nick Gordon, Stephen Gonsalves, Alex Kirilloff, Fernando Romero, Tyler Jay, and Adalberto Mejia. Kohl Stewart made 8 of the lists, Travis Blankenhorn made 7, and Wander Javier made 5.
The top 5 – Gordon, Gonsalves, Kirilloff, Romero, and Jay – were near-consensus in some order as the first five in every list. Jay was the one guy who upset that the most, not appearing in the top 5 in three of the four lists that broke from that grouping in the top 5. Part of that was when the list was released as well. I’m almost certain that Baseball America would have Jay out of the top 5, for instance, once the news of moving him full-time to the bullpen was announced in the offseason, which some of these lists had the benefit of knowing. All but one list had Gordon leading off the list as well, with Twins Daily being the one hold out.
I aggregated the lists and averaged the ranking for the lists that players appeared on to find the “most common” order. After a clear #1 in Gordon, the next three were bunched pretty close, with the order going Stephen Gonsalves, Alex Kirilloff, and Fernando Romero.
Kohl Stewart ranked fairly well on those lists he was on, though he missed two of the lists. Then there was another bunch like the bunch from 2-4. From 7-9, three players were bunched tight in their average performance on lists – Mejia, Javier, and Lewis Thorpe, even though Thorpe only appeared on two lists.
Now that we know how other lists were looking, let’s take a look at the one that I put out and see how things have gone in 2017