THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I disagree.  The translations from Goldstein’s rankings to Wang’s system which in and of itself was a mix of BA and Sickels rankings are so loose and speculative that I’m not sure what the rankings really are saying.

It’s certainly not a ranking of farm systems though.

I also wish he had included the dollar values that he found and a link to the original dougdirt study.  It would be interesting to see how a comparison of the spread in values based on the two methods. 

He has TB as the top farm at 123M and Minn in second place 25M behind that.  He doesn’t really go into any other details.  Those seem low to me both in comparison to my memory of the other ranking and to what I would expect based on following farms and prospects for years.

Googled up the original study which is here:

http://www.minorleagueball.com/2010/1/16/1255063/johns-farm-system-rankings

That study had the Indians on top at 150M.  98M which would be 2nd place in this study would be 17th in that study.  That’st a huge, huge discrepancy.

My best guess is that the dougdirt study yielded a more reasonable range and it’s likely that the extra translations of the rankings which added a big layer of potential error is to blame.

Thanks so much for the link to dougdirt’s work. It was positively asinine to link to dougdirt’s profile but the not the study.