I remember being really excited for my first crack at a public top 100 back in September of 2019. I actually started building it in early August because I had some time to simmer before my big debut at Razzball, and I wanted to come in hot with a ranking that reflected the way I see the game.
Click here to see that Top 100 Prospects for 2020 Fantasy Baseball
and/or click here to stretch to the Top 150 Prospects for 2020 Fantasy Baseball
As the deadline approached, the true scale of the task came into view.
In order to rank the top 100 minor league players for fantasy baseball purposes, you have to rank every single minor league player for fantasy baseball purposes. I suppose this is intuitive, but I didn’t realize as much on the front end, back in 2019. I also didn’t realize that’s a lie I was telling myself. It’s not that I have to rank every player, but I have to know generally where I would rank every player.
Even that’s not true. Something I learned doing the team’s organizational rankings (FIND LINK TO TOP TENS) top ten lists the last two off-seasons was that I needed more processes for eliminating players than for finding them. It’s not altogether different from dynasty roster management in some senses, where your squad is like a bonsai tree: if you’re not pruning the dead and dying branches on the regular, your tree will not grow. Early on in that org ranking process, I figured I’d just make each list as long as the org was deep. Seems fine on the front end, I suppose, but I realized I wasn’t really making any difficult decisions. I could always just rank a guy 11th, or 18th, or whatever, so who really cares about the 10th ranked prospect? Just write the blurbs and cover the system. I didn’t have to grind out the work and make real choices like I do with just ten. The same played out with the 100. Now that I’ve set that limit, it helps me shed light on the Korry Howells and Alec Burlesons of the world, and it helps me push guys like Nick Pratto up to where they belong because I just have fewer branches on the tree.
This year, for this list, I realized what I really needed was buckets into which I could put every player so I could really digest the task’s enormity. I tend to get lost in these spreadsheets. Make a tweak. Check some player pages. Find some video. Watch, think, drag and drop, rinse, repeat. I have no idea how many hours are in this spreadsheet, but it feels like most of them. Some days I know I can’t open it because I’ve got stuff to do, and time does not exist in that realm. Anyway, here’s how I broke it down.
Please, blog, may I have some more?
