ESPN

If you're a fan of a particular team -- and you know you are -- few things are more exciting than a good crop of prospects down in the farm system. And the last thing I want to do is temper your excitement. Still, when you're reading the raves about your team's best young players, most of whom you've never laid eyes on, don't you wonder if they're really going to make a difference? Don't you remember all the young players who were supposed to help turn the team around, but didn't?

It's not easy to measure the impact of top prospects, because we don't have any rigorously objective method for measuring the "topness" of a prospect. So instead we'll do what we do occasionally: Settle for a method that's just moderately rigorous and somewhat objective. What I wanted was 10 impressive farm systems, and so I turned to Baseball America's annual Prospect Handbook. Specifically, I grabbed the top two organizations in the Handbook's "Talent Rankings" from 2001 (their first edition) through 2005, and then I grabbed the top five prospects from each of those organizations. This gave me 10 organizations and 50 prospects (counting repeaters), enough for the moderately somewhat work I had in mind ...

There were two things I wanted to know: How many top prospects actually develop into useful major leaguers, and how many teams with top prospects actually ride those prospects to short-term improvement?

To continue reading this article you must be an Insider