Which organization has the best farm system in baseball? This is a fairly pedestrian question that’s normally answered with an amalgam of various and sundry top 10 lists in tandem with thumbnail estimations of depth and projectability. Depending on which tools you’re wielding, evaluations of this nature can be all shades and hues of accurate.
Another common approach to this question is to look at the cumulative records of each system’s affiliates. If nothing else, it’s objective, and it’s this tack that informs my attempt at ranking the farm systems. But my angle is not without modifications.
Baseball is reducible to components beyond the run, but it’s the run–both scored and prevented–that is the fundament of the game. It’s also the run that forms the basis of many of the more useful metrics you’ll find at Baseball Prospectus. A team’s run differential plays a vital role in determining its record and is even more instructive, when plugged into the various flavors of the Pythagorean run formula, in predicting a team’s performance in forthcoming seasons. However, this method is most often confined to the major league level. So why not use run differential to evaluate an organization’s minor league system? (Rhetorical; don’t answer.) This may not resolve abstract notions of “best” and “worst,” but it will bring us reasonably close to knowing, and it’ll do so by dint of objectivity.