2011 Tampa Bay Rays Top Prospects Meta-Analysis

It is time for our annual Meta-Analysis of the Rays top prospects. In the science community, a meta-analysis is what we do when we don’t want to do any work ourselves and instead want to take the work of a bunch of other people, tease the data a little, draw some conclusions that nobody had noticed before, and then pawn it off as our own.

Presenting the 2011 Tampa Bay Rays Top Prospects Meta-Analysis.

A few notes on the final rankings…

• See below for notes on how the list was constructed.
• Last year, everybody had the same top 3 prospects, although there was disagreement about the exact order. Two of those guys (Desmond Jennings, Jeremy Hellickson) are back this year and everybody agrees on the top 3 and their exact order.
• Chris Archer, Robinson Chirinos and Hak-Ju Lee (via the Matt Garza trade), and 2010 draftees Josh Sale and Justin O’Connor are all new to the list this year.
• Wade Davis and Reid Brignac are no longer eligible and Nick Barnese, Kyle Lobstein, Matt Sweeney and Wilking Rodriguez have fallen off the list.
• Tim Beckham had the biggest drop going from 5 to 13, although one could argue Nick Barnese fell further, going from 8 to off the list. Jake McGee, showing he has recovered from Tommy John Surgery jumped from 10 to 5.
• Of the players on the list, Robinson Chirinos had the biggest disparity between high (9) and low (24) rank.
• Four of the players have either Major League or triple-A experience. Seven of the players have never played above single-A. This is the exact same makeup of last year’s list.

A few notes on how the Meta-Analysis was constructed…

• We included rankings from Baseball America, Baseball Prospectus, Minor League Ball, ESPN.com (Keith Law) and our own Trade Value Index (which will be updated in the next week).
• Our Trade Value Index ranks players a bit differently. In addition to projecting how good a player will be, we also consider value to the organization and offers a mathematical approach to ranking the top prospects. For more information see the most recent TVI post.
• The final list includes all players that appeared in the top 10 of at least one list.
• Some players did not appear on every list. For players not on a list, we gave that player a ranking of 2 spots lower than the lowest ranked player in the list for the purpose of calculating the final average.