Blue Jays ranked 22nd in ESPN’s post-draft and trade deadline farm system rankings
Photo credit: © Jonathan Dyer-Imagn Images
The Toronto Blue Jays are in last place in the American League East and might also boast the weakest farm system of the five teams in the division.
Kylie McDaniel of ESPN released his post-draft and trade deadline farm system rankings on Tuesday and the Blue Jays still remain in the bottom third of the league. Formerly an analyst at FanGraphs, McDaniel’s rankings are more SABR-slanted than ones such as MLB Pipeline or Baseball America and are also based on dollar figures of expected value.
“The dollar amounts for each farm system come from projecting what each is expected to do, using historical examples. With that, it’s pretty easy to project how much they’ll be paid in their six-plus cost-controlled years for that projected performance, adjust for time value of money/performance, apply the price teams pay per win on the free agent market for how much that performance is worth and poof: each player has a dollar value. Then, you simply add up the values for each prospect and have the surplus value of the whole farm system.”
The Blue Jays came into the season ranked 24th with a farm system value of $126 million. Their mid-season valuation has them at $165 million, which is 22nd in baseball. The Baltimore Orioles came in first place at $361 million, the Tampa Bay Rays second at $323 million, the Boston Red Sox 10th at $260 million, and the New York Yankees 14th at $219 million.
McDaniel praised the work the Blue Jays did ahead of the trade deadline as sellers and said that their top draft picks were solid additions, but the organization didn’t see much of a rise on the list because many of the prospects they already had in their system have either been injured or haven’t taken a step forward.
“It has not been a good season for the Blue Jays. Former top prospect Ricky Tiedemann was not having a good season and then went down with elbow surgery. New top prospect Orelvis Martinez is now serving an 80-game PED suspension. Top 2022 draft pick Brandon Barriera also underwent elbow surgery. There hasn’t really been a big breakthrough performance in the system deserving of Top 100 attention.All that said, though, the Blue Jays handled the draft and trade deadline pretty well. The return for Yusei Kikuchi was excellent — Jake Bloss and Joey Loperfido were among the top seven prospects traded at the deadline while Charles McAdoo is intriguing — and the headliners of the draft crop (Trey Yesavage, Johnny King, Sean Keys, Khal Stephen) were solid values.”
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