Indians hop the Cubs, Braves Are Top-To-Bottom Terrible: Baseball Organizational Rankings Week in Review

Every week — or so, last week was cancelled because I welcomed my first child into the world — we take a look at the weekly changes in the Baseball Organizational Rankings that we here at AMSTS have created in an effort to quantify the quality of various team’s entire organization.

For those unfamiliar with the Baseball Organizational Rankings, they’re a simple metric that takes winning percentages and weights each tier of major and minor leagues by some AMSTS-defined defaults (but are also user-customizable to play around with different results!).

New this week, the Cleveland Indians take the top spot, hopping the Chicago Cubs. What makes this even more impressive is that the Indians are a full 20 points lower than the Cubs in the MLB ranks, which are the most heavily weighted in the model. Despite the .541 winning percentage in MLB, Cleveland has the winningest AAA and AA teams, while having the second-winningest A-advanced team. AMSTS has been a pretty harsh critic of the state of Ohio in general, but it appears that Cleveland, Columbus, and Akron are combining to be a powerhouse in the baseball world. Yet still, the Indians are the only team to draw fewer than 10,000 fans to a game this year. 

Meanwhile, in third this week is the Philadelphia Phillies‘ organization, who were able to jump five spots, just edging out the Texas Rangers, who dropped five points but remained in fourth. The Washington Nationals have been the big loser on the top, losing nearly eleven points, most of which come from going 5-5 in their past 10 MLB games.

In the farm rankings (excluding MLB performance), the Indians take the top spot as mentioned above, followed closely by the Rangers and then the New York Yankees, which means that the evil empire may soon be on the rise again. A terrifying thought for many.

On the bottom end of the scale, our worst organization of the week once again belongs to the Atlanta Braves, the owners of the worst record in Major League Baseball.  The Braves have dropped an additional 2.2 points this week. The worse news for Braves fans is that the farm rankings now have the Braves in 28th. It seems that the last season of Turner Field will be a lot different than the first.  Second worse, once again, are the Minnesota Twins, again mainly off of their MLB winning percentage. The Twins’ farm ranking sits at an impressive 8th.

When you remove the weighting for MLB teams, your worst minor league system belongs to the San Francisco Giants. Sitting atop the NL West, the Giants’ minor league teams are faring quite worse.  Giants’ affiliate Sacramento sits at 27th in AAA, while AA Richmond is dead last. The Baltimore Orioles are another example of a first place team with depleted farm systems, as the Orioles’ org sits in 29th overall, a mere .8 points above the Giants. Rounding out the bottom five are the Miami Marlins, Atlanta again, and the Chicago White Sox, who have been climbing rapidly since their bottom of the barrel appearance two weeks ago.

Biggest winner (organizational): New York Yankees, up 7 spots this week to 12th overall.

Biggest winner (farm): Milwaukee, up 7 spots this week to 17th overall.

Biggest loser (organizational): Miami, down 8 spots to 24th overall.

Biggest loser (farm): TIE Tampa Bay and Los Angeles Angels, both down 6 spots to 18th and 25th overall respectively.

Here are your full week changes for both the full organizational rankings and the farm-only rankings which exclude the MLB affiliates. Of course you can always play around with the Baseball Organizational Rankings yourself if you want to splice the data some more.

Full organization rankings (including MLB)

Farm rankings (excluding MLB)