2014 Washington Nationals Consensus Top 39 Prospects

Where no counsel is, the people fall: but in the multitude of counselors there is safety.

-Proverbs 11:14

Prospect lists are a tricky animal. Every prospect guru has his or her own biases, favorite prospects, sources, and philosophy, leading to quite a variety in the placement of specific players on his or her list. I like making lists and I like prospects, but I'm no scout and I have no inside connections, so my list wouldn't hold any particular weight. Instead of spending loads of time ranking the players with my own biases, I decided a few years ago to instead assemble a consensus list for each team. You can view all of the previous lists here. Hopefully this will bring safety from a multitude of counselors.

How do I do this? Each time a prospect appears on a list, he gets a number of points (51 minus his ranking). The prospect with the largest amount of points is ranked first.

This year, I made a few changes to the list. First off, I included as many lists as I could possibly find. This includes list from team-specific sites, not just from sites that post a list for every team. Second, I created a separate list for fantasy rankings. Fantasy baseball sites rank their prospects with a different flavor and so there are two rankings: one for real baseball and one for fantasy.

The trade that brought Drew Vettleson and Felipe Rivero over from the Rays happened after many of the lists were published. Of the lists that did rank them, the averages were 11 and 13, respectively. Due to this, I added these rankings for them for lists that went over 10, but left them unranked for lists that only went to 10.

You can also view the 2013 Washington Nationals top prospect list.

Sources

Regular Lists

Baseball America

Baseball Prospectus

Bleacher Report

Bullpen Banter

District Sports Page

Fangraphs

Federal Baseball

Grading on the Curve

Keith Law (ESPN)

MLB.com

MLB Draft Insider

MLB Prospect Portal

Nats GM

Prospect Digest

Rant

Top Prospect Alert

Fantasy Lists

Dynasty Sports Empire

Fake Teams

Prospect 361

Razzball

The List

The "Change" column describes how the prospect’s status changed from 2013. A positive number means the prospect moved up in the list, while a negative number means he moved down.

Here is a spreadsheet that contains all of the 2014 Washington Nationals top prospect rankings in one place. I have removed Keith Law's as his lists require a subscription, though his list is included in the final tally.

Rank	FRank	Player	Total	FTo	Change
1	1	Lucas Giolito	479	120	2
2	2	A.J. Cole	461	115	2
3	3	Brian Goodwin	451	111	-1
4	4	Michael Taylor	391	105	6
5	6	Sammy Solis	373	76	3
6	8	Jake Johansen	348	70	2nd Round
7	4	Matt Skole	334	105	-2
8	7	Steven Souza	293	73	17
9	10	Matt Purke	200	46	0
10	9	Drew Ward	199	49	3rd Round
11	NA	Pedro Severino	177		Unranked last year
12	11	Zach Walters	172	43	1
13	NA	Drew Vettleson	159		Rays, Jose Lobaton
14	NA	Felipe Rivero	145		Rays, Jose Lobaton
15	NA	Eury Perez	135		-8
16	NA	Jefry Rodriguez	133		Unranked last year
17	12	Austin Voth	123	22	5th Round
18	NA	Tony Renda	114		-4
19	NA	Jeff Kobernus	78		Unranked last year
20	NA	Brett Mooneyham	54		-1
20	NA	Aaron Barrett	54		Unranked last year
22	NA	Christian Garcia	53		-11
23	NA	Blake Treinen	38		7
24	NA	Rafael Bautista	33		Unranked last year
25	NA	Nick Pivetta	32		4th Round
26	NA	Richie Mirowski	18		Unranked last year
27	NA	Dakota Bacus	17		Athletics, Kurt Suzuki
28	NA	Erik Davis	16		Unranked last year
28	NA	Robert Benincasa	16		Unranked last year
30	NA	Sandy Leon	12		-15
31	NA	Cody Gunter	10		Unranked last year
32	NA	Nell Holland	9		Unranked last year
32	NA	Brandon Miller	9		-11
34	NA	Pedro Encarnacion	8		Unranked last year
35	NA	Blake Schwartz	7		Unranked last year
35	NA	Jason Martinson	7		-14
37	NA	Estarlin Martinez	5		-10
38	NA	Anderson Franco	3		Dominican IFA
39	NA	Randy Encarnacion	2		Unranked last year
39	NA	Paul Demny	2		-15

2013 prospects not on 2014 list

Graduated:

Anthony Jordan, #1
Taylor Jordan, #27

Traded:

Nate Karns, #6 - To the Rays in the Jose Lobaton trade
Robbie Ray, #17 - To the Tigers in the Doug Fister trade

Unsigned:

Carlos Rivero, #20 - Signed by the Red Sox

Dropped Off:

Destin Hood, #12
Chris Marrero, #16
Daniel Rosenbaum, #17
Stephen Perez, #23
Cutter Dykstra, #26
Kylin Turnbull, #27
Rick Hague, #30
Adrian Sanchez, #32

Visual Representation

Here is a chart of the Nationals' top prospects. The error bars represent the minimum and maximum ranking for each prospect.

It appears that clicking the above graphic makes it slightly larger

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Chris St. John is a writer at Beyond The Box Score. You can follow him on Twitter at @stealofhome.