Thanks for joining us as we countdown the Top 30 Prospects in the Cardinals organization! These lists are a lot of fun and I hope that you have fun while participating with us!
Birds On The Black, The Redbird Daily, my co-ranker Colin Garner, and I are thrilled and proud of all of the work that we have put in. We know that you are in for a treat.
I wanted to take as little time as possible to explain to you how we came to the final conclusion of our top 30 prospects. This is the process:
At the beginning of December I told Colin that I wanted his list of the top 40 prospects in the Cardinals system. So, Colin and I both went hard to work on crafting our lists. We each spent about a month researching stats and scouting reports, watching video, and crafting countless drafts. At the beginning of January, when we had both finally (and mercifully, I might add) settled on our top 40, I got to the process of combining our lists to come up with what we are presenting to you.
Prospect #1 on my list was given a numeric grade of 40. Prospect #40 on my list was given a numeric grade of 1. Every prospect between those two was give the appropriate number between. So, my #2 prospect was given a grade of 39, prospect #3 was given a grade of 38, and so on. Then, I did the same thing with Colin's list.
Then, I combined the grades from both list to get to total value for each prospect. So, for instance, say we both had Luke Weaver as our 5th prospect (I'm using Weaver as an example because he isn't rookie eligible and thus isn't qualified for our list). Weaver would have received a grade of 36 from both of us, thus giving him a final score of 72. If he was 2nd on my list and 5th on Colin's list, he would have received a score of 39 from me and 36 from Colin, thus giving him a final score of 75.
Once we combined the final scores of each prospects I began to put them in order from one to thirty, with prospect number one being the prospect that got the highest score and prospect number thirty being the prospect with the 30th best score. We had a few ties, so we took to the Twitter polling system to break those ties.
Colin and I had 7 players exclusive to our top 40 lists. That's to say, there were 7 players in my top 40 that weren't in his top 40, and Vice Versa. That's why we started this process by ranking our own individual top 40; because, inevitably, there were going to be differences and I wanted to make sure there were at least 30 names that we both agreed on. But because of that, you'll see things that might not make sense to you at first. For instance, Prospect #30 on our list is 1B/2B Stefan Trosclair. Trosclair was Colin's 32nd ranked prospect and my 35th ranked prospect. But Trosclair ended up with the 30th highest final score of all of the prospects that were assigned a value, so he's prospect #30. The seven differences in our individual top 40 lists really changed the dynamic of our own lists and helped to craft a less bias-driven, more objective and fool-proof list.
And, honestly, it couldn't have worked out better. Stefan Trosclair is the perfect #30 prospect. That's probably where he should be and I couldn't be any more proud that it turned out that way.
So, that leads us to NOW. Here is where we are at: Colin goes first. He'll do his write up for each prospect first over at The Redbird Daily. Then, the next day, my write up of the same prospect will be here at Birds On The Black for your viewing pleasure.
We'll be doing this every day for the next two months. Every other day you'll get a write up from Colin. On his off day, you'll get a write up from me. I promise you that you won't find better free coverage of the Cardinals minor league system anywhere else on the planet.
So, strap in, have a couple of bottles of bourbon on standby, and prepare to be educated and excited!!!! And, please, feel free to get involved! I want your involvement, greatly! We've already built such a wonderful community here and this is just as much your list as it is our!!
Happy Hunting!