Making the case that Angels farm system rankings are worried about too much 

The Angels are not expected to succeed at either the major or minor league level in 2025. They have the longest playoff drought in the sport and have the 30th ranked farm system. Not what you want. The Angels' failure to add roster depth around Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani was in large part due to their top prospects not panning out at the major league level. Huge embarrassment for the franchise. All of this is true, and it stinks being an Angels fan. What can also be true is that national rankings are relatively arbitrary and not the be-all end-all of what a team has cooking in the minor leagues. Baseball America and The Athletic both rank the Angels' farm system last, and ESPN has them 28th. Time for some coping exercises.

Players come from out of nowhere all the time, and top prospects bust all the time. Zach Kram of The Ringer formulated : "the correlation between relative ranking on the top-50 list and future performance is itself rather small." At the end of the day, prospects are a coin flip. When the Angels likely draft Jace LaViolette or Ethan Holliday, there will be plenty of hype around them but the team will not know how good they can be until they see them every day.

Teams know players better than those who rank prospects. It's a fact. Staffers spend countless hours around their players and get to know their families. They understand on a deep, personal level how they operate. They know how their makeup (which Perry Minasian values more than anything), their personality, their physical development, their work ethic during drills, workouts, and game planning, their mental capacity for learning and growing, their intangibles, etc. more than anybody outside the building.

Scouts and analysts can look at empirical data from a database and assess how good a prospect is at any given point in time, track the progress, make assumptions on how that data will grow, and assign a numerical value to their overall value moving forward. What teams can do is evaluate how much progress a player has made and can make in a more wide-ranging way. A multitude of information is not divulged publicly, and people who cover baseball are not around teams enough. They are forced to grade prospects without a full array of knowledge.

Organizations identify their priority prospects and can get them into things like the fall league, instructional league, premier winter league teams, and big league spring training. Teams' priority prospects do not always align with how they perceived nationally. A player like David Mershon, who was drafted in the 18th round of the 2024 MLB Draft, became a high priority prospect for the Angels and was pushed to AA, fall league, and now big league camp. He has not even been in the system for a calendar year. He is not ranked highly nationally, but the team sees a lot in him. Players like Mershon become impact big leaguers all the time.

The Angels have a built-in excuse for poor rankings because they are forced to promote prospects quickly, as they try a "failing upwards" method. They try to develop as fast as possible at the major league level by getting the most talented youngsters around their best coaches and the major league front office. Yes, Neto, Schanuel, O’Hoppe, and Joyce would help rankings if they were still in the pipeline. It's not the strongest argument, but it's still relevant to an extent.

What’s more relevant to the poor rankings is that the Angels’ top prospects do not post great minor league results because they are getting pushed. Bad results lead to bad rankings. You can make the case that a player like Denzer Guzman should be higher in prospect rankings because he is out-kicking his coverage at AA, a level he should not be at. Guzman is not plummeting in the rankings, but he is losing his luster because he is striking out a ton while facing players who are much older than him.

A former top prospect like Jo Adell's value has plummeted because he is not developing at a Hall of Fame rate, which is what the Angels demanded of him. He needed years of seasoning to develop to where he is now, and should continue to see upticks in his game as he ages. Angels' prospects could turn into nice ball players (despite what rankings prognosticate), but, like all prospects, they need a lot of time and for everything to break near perfectly. The Angels' ability to move their prospects at a realistic rate cannot be equal to others orgs' because of their micro-managing and unrealistic owner.

OK, the excuses are over, time to assign blame for the state of the Angels the past decade. The front office is forced to be in an impossible situation by Arte Moreno. Moreno has such a weak grasp on how to develop talent and how a pipeline works. When he bought the Angels, did he know that he was purchasing the major league team AND their minor league affiliates? The front office cannot execute a long-term plan to rebuild because their owner demands lofty results now or else they lose their jobs. The whole front office is on the hot seat at all time, especially this season after the entire coaching staff and front office shockingly was kept intact. Best of luck.

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