Does Your Farm Team Matter?

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Does Your Farm Team Matter?

Everyone knows that there is “The Big Show” (MLB) and that all of the best players play in that league. But what some people don’t know, is that most of them didn’t go there straight out of college. They had to work hard everyday in the farming systems from single A, to double A, to triple A, then the minors, then to the big leagues. I read the article Baseball’s Best Farm Systems: How Much Do They Matter? By Neil Paine, and he explains why a farming system is important. He says that an MLB farming system isn’t as important as the payroll that the team has, but it still has some importance. This source is reliable because he pulls data from years in the past and compares them to what is going on now in the MLB.

In the article it talk about comparing MLB farming system rankings to their actual ranking. They go on to give support that “overall, there’s a strong correlation — a Spearman’s rho of 0.86 — between a team’s Baseball America organizational ranking and its ranking if we just add up the expected WAR values of its players in the Top 100 list.” This is saying that the WAR, Wins Above Replacement, of the top prospects coming through a MLB teams farming system, if added up and beats the current WAR of the players, that there is a strong correlation that those players will be more successful. So this means that that if an organization has a better WAR ration, then it will potentially mean they will be more successful later on in the years.

The article also says that “while the presence of an organization’s farmhands in the Top 100 matters a lot, it’s not everything”. He is saying that there are many other factors that play into a team, that could even make them better or make them worse. People might look to “the 1992 Atlanta Braves’ top-rated prospect class, which preceded a decade in which the Braves boasted the best record in baseball,” but “The 1997 Pirates also had Baseball America’s best crop of prospects, only to have MLB’s third-worst record over the next 10 years.” It really depends on what you can do with a team and the other factors that surround it, like what veterans you have on the team or what kind of money you have with the team. The correlation between the rating in farm systems to rating in the MLB is only 2.4. This means that there is a slight correlation between how good you MLB team is to how good your farming team is.