Oh, it’s championship week in fantasy football? Yeah, ok, maybe I noticed. But everyone reading this knows it’s actually the height of dynasty baseball prep. Your farm drafts are quickly approaching and while I’m still a few weeks away from my annual Top 500 Prospects article, I figured it couldn’t hurt to at least get you the top 100 ahead of the industry curve. Yes, I’ll still be including amateurs and international prospects along with the usual minor leaguers. Because as you know, a 15-year-old Miguel Cabrera was obviously one of the top dynasty assets back in the day even before Miami managed to sign him. Likewise, we all knew well in advance than Yoenis Cespedes and Yu Darvish were going to be big deals in the fantasy baseball world. If your league allows for it, you should pick up these type of prospects. I’ll tell you exactly where they belong within MILB-only prospect lists.
Before we get to the data, I want to explain the way my prospect list is built. I am not a scout, although I watch as much tape as I can get my hands on. Rather, this is drawn from a consensus of industry information on each player. I then run the assessments of the most accurate sources through my correlation data and their ballpark/league/age-adjusted metrics. Think of this way: I am chewing up the watermelon and spitting out the seeds for you. Namely, my goal is to do all of your dirty work to save you the hours of research needed to filter through and discern the reliability of every website and talking point. What’s more, is that my player grades are not based on their real-life usefulness, but strictly their future fantasy usefulness. If a player is an excellent defender, that only matters to me in the sense that he is more likely to earn full playing time in the future. I care not whether he will help his MLB team save runs. Likewise, it doesn’t matter to me as much if Colorado has a future lights out ace in their system. If he is going to be pitching half his games in Coors, you can bet his fantasy stock will drop to a similar level as that mid-rotation pitching prospect who throw half his games in San Francisco. The reverse is, of course, true for hitters. Furthermore, on-base percentage matters less in my rankings and speed matters more. Assuming you play in the industry-standard 5×5 leagues, I don’t need to explain why that obviously is necessary. This isn’t to take anything away from great sites like Baseball America and Baseball Prospectus. Rather, it is only to say that my rankings are built specifically with you, the dynasty player in mind.
