An Update on the Twins Prospects

With the Twins just having signed their top three picks from the 2011 draft, among many others, at the deadline, today seems like an appropriate time to review their minor league system as a whole.  What I've done here is comb through 12 different sets of rankings of the Twins prospects prior to the 2011 season, from both national writers and Twins writers, in order to come up with a composite ranking.  I did this, rather than form my own list, because I quite honestly don't know nearly as much about these minor league players as these other writers.

For each of the top 40 prospects, I offered short quotes from both the high and low ranker to gain insight into their reasoning, in addition to examining the impact of their performance so far this season on their prospect status.  In cases where the high and/or low ranker didn't provide an explanation, I gave arguments from other writers.  Also, players who have moved down are not necessarily moving down in the rankings, and vice versa, as that depends a lot on how other players around them are doing.  And it depends on how you feel about Levi Michael, Travis Harrison, Hudson Boyd, and the rest of Minnesota's 2011 draft class.

First, here's the breakdown of which prospect lists I used:

Local
Aaron Gleeman, AaronGleeman.com (40 prospects)
Fan Vote (run by roger13), Twinkie Town (50)
La Velle E. Neal III, Minneapolis Star Tribune (10)
Nick Nelson, Nick's Twins Blog (10)
Seth Stohs, Seth Speaks (51)

National
John Manuel, Baseball America (10)
John Sickels, Minor League Ball (22)
Jonathan Mayo, MLB.com (10)
Kevin Goldstein, Baseball Prospectus (20)
Matt Hagen, The Hardball Times (10)
Reed MacPhail, FanGraphs (10)
Satchel Price, Beyond the Box Score (15)


And for today I'll just reveal those guys who were outside the top 40 in the composite rankings, but did appear on at least one list.

Click to enlarge

As you may notice, the list is not in order of average rank.  That is on purpose, as compiling a sensible composite ranking is not as simple as you might think since many lists rank a different number of prospects and not every prospect appears on every list.  For instance, Chris Herrmann averages a rank of 37 for the one list (Seth Stohs') that he is on, while Evan Bigley averages a lesser 44.  However, Bigley is on Twinkie Town's list in addition to Seth's, so you have to consider that Twinkie Town essentially rated Chris Hermann the 51st best prospect at best by leaving him out of their top 50.  The exact calculation of the order was a little confusing because of some problems this caused; if you want the full explanation, please ask.  It's a little wordy so I'm leaving it out of the post.

The top 40, with analysis as described above, will be revealed in the coming week.