2014 Oakland Athletics Consensus Top 51 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.

Billy Burns was not eligible for all of the lists, since he was traded to the team in the middle of the offseason, after some lists were already created. However, he did not appear on every list where he was eligible, so I didn't change his ratings at all.

You can also view the 2013 Oakland Athletics top prospect list.

Sources

Regular Lists

Athletics Nation

Baseball America

Baseball Prospectus

Bleacher Report

Fangraphs

Grading on the Curve

Keith Law (ESPN)

MLB Prospect Portal

Oakland Clubhouse

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 Oakland Athletics 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	Addison Russell	600	200	0
2	2	Billy McKinney	567	193	1st Round
3	4	Raul Alcantara	555	187	7
4	6	Daniel Robertson	513	173	1
5	5	Michael Ynoa	501	184	10
6	11	Nolan Sanburn	462	42	2
7	3	Renato Nunez	451	188	-1
7	7	Bobby Wahl	451	141	5th Round
9	8	Matt Olson	395	132	-2
10	9	Max Muncy	380	130	Unranked last year
11	12	Dylan Covey	286	41	4th Round
12	10	B.J. Boyd	242	43	0
13	NA	Miles Head	232		-9
14	NA	Dillon Overton	192		2nd Round
15	NA	Billy Burns	165		Nationals, Jerry Blevins
16	NA	Chris Kohler	154		3rd Round
17	NA	Chad Pinder	147		Comp Balance B
18	NA	Bruce Maxwell	74		4
19	NA	Arnold Leon	70		0
20	NA	Tanner Peters	62		Unranked last year
21	NA	Dustin Driver	60		7th Round
22	NA	Tucker Healy	59		Unranked last year
23	NA	Kyle Finnegan	46		6th Round
24	NA	Shawn Duinkerk	34		Unranked last year
25	NA	Drew Granier	33		-1
26	NA	Blake Hassebrock	31		0
27	NA	Ronald Herrera	30		Unranked last year
28	NA	Bobby Crocker	29		-11
29	NA	Anthony Aliotti	27		Unranked last year
30	NA	Ryan Dull	26		Unranked last year
31	NA	Chris Jensen	24		Rockies, Brett Anderson Trade
32	NA	Murphy Smith	23		Unranked last year
33	NA	Sean Murphy	20		Unranked last year
34	NA	Seth Frankoff	19		Unranked last year
35	NA	Iolana Akau	18		20th Round
36	NA	Jake Goebbert	17		Unranked last year
37	NA	Shane Peterson	16		-15
38	NA	Ryon Healy	15		3rd Round
39	NA	Conner Crumbliss	14		Unranked last year
40	NA	Josh Bowman	13		Unranked last year
41	NA	Jeff Urlaub	12		Unranked last year
42	NA	Josh Whitaker	11		Unranked last year
43	NA	Sam Bragg	9		18th Round
44	NA	Vicmal De La Cruz	8		-31
45	NA	B.A. Vollmuth	7		-29
46	NA	Austin House	6		Unranked last year
47	NA	Aaron Shipman	5		-26
48	NA	Seth Streich	4		Unranked last year
49	NA	Ryan Huck	3		27th Round
50	NA	Justin Higley	2		13th Round
51	NA	Jean Carlo Rodriguez	1		Venezuelan IFA

2013 prospects not on 2014 list

Graduated:

Dan Straily, #2
Grant Green, #3
Sonny Gray, #4

Traded:

Michael Choice, #2 - To the Rangers in the Craig Gentry trade
Chris Bostick, #9 - To the Rangers in the Craig Gentry trade
Ian Krol, #16 - To the Nationals in the Michael Morse trade
Dave Freitas, #17 - To the Orioles in the Jim Johnson trade

Released:

Pedro Figueroa, #19

Dropped Off:

Michael Taylor, #11
Beau Taylor, #24
Jefry Marte, #27

Visual Representation

Here is a chart of the Athletics' 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

. . .

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