TBLA members have spoken, the final TBLA prospect results are in. After tallying up the votes, the 16 – 20 prospects heading into the 2011 season are:
16) Jake Lemmermann
17) Ralston Cash
18) Leon Landry
19) Nathan Eovaldi
20) Matt Magill
If anyone is interested, the next 5 players in terms of votes were Brian Cavazos-Galvez, James Baldwin, Javier Solano, Joc Pederson, and Josh Lindblom. After Lindblom, there was a significant drop off in the number of votes for the remaining candidates. If I were guess which exclusion from the top 20 is "upsetting" to the most people, I would say that it’s probably BCG who had an outstanding 2nd half in 2010 and put up great all around stats. At the end of the day, however, I’m guessing that it was his age and level of competition that kept people from voting for him.
Refer to the left side bar for the TBLA’s #1 – 15 prospects. Overall, the TBLA top 20 prospects breaks down by position as follows: 10 right handed pitchers, 4 outfielders, 2 shortstops, 2 left handed pitchers, 1 second baseman, and 1 outfielder/first baseman. Of the 12 pitchers, 9 are still considered full time starters, one (Eovaldi) could be either a starter or reliever, and 2 are full time relievers.
Also, when you break down the group by how they were acquired by the Dodgers, you’ll notice that 12 were drafted as high school players, 6 were drafted as college players, and 2 were signed as international free agents. In addition, the youngest player of the group is Jonathan Garcia, who just barely turned 19 last week, and the oldest player is Scott Elbert.
While I do know quite a bit about the prospects from other organizations, that knowledge pales in comparison to what I know about the Dodgers. Therefore, I’m not the best person to discuss how the Dodgers farm system ranks against the other teams in baseball. However, if you want my opinion, I would say that our system would probably rank in the 10 to 15 range. I will be interested to see what rank Baseball America gives the Dodgers this year. For the record, the Dodgers were ranked 23 by BA last year, but were #6, #6, #2, and #2 in the four seasons before that.