2014 Texas Rangers Consensus Top 38 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.

Michael Choice and Chris Bostick were not eligible for all of the lists, since they were traded to the team in the middle of the offseason, after some lists were already created. I gave Choice a ranking of 4 for every list he was not eligible for, and Bostick a ranking of 11 for the lists he was not eligible for that also went above 10.

You can also view the 2013 Texas Rangers top prospect list.

Sources

Regular Lists

Baseball America

Baseball Instinct

Baseball Prospectus

Bleacher Report

Fangraphs

Grading on the Curve

Keith Law (ESPN)

Lone Star Ball

MLB Draft Insider

MLB Prospect Portal

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 Texas Rangers 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	Rougned Odor	424	121	11
2	1	Jorge Alfaro	421	121	3
3	4	Michael Choice	391	110	Craig Gentry Trade, Athletics
4	9	Joey Gallo	371	83	4
5	10	Luke Jackson	356	74	5
6	7	Luis Sardinas	341	98	-2
7	3	Nick Williams	325	116	14
8	5	Alex "Chi Chi" Gonzalez	320	106	1st Round
9	6	Lewis Brinson	227	99	2
10	11	Ronald Guzman	211	45	4
11	8	Nomar Mazara	209	96	2
12	NA	Travis Demeritte	196		1st Round
13	12	Chris Bostick	143	24	Craig Gentry Trade, Athletics
14	NA	Jairo Beras	138		1
15	NA	Alec Asher	77		Unranked last year
16	NA	Wilmer Font	69		0
17	NA	Cody Buckel	53		-11
18	NA	Nick Martinez	52		8
19	13	Akeem Bostick	51	23	2nd Round
20	NA	David Ledbetter	42		3rd Round
21	NA	Connor Sadzeck	40		Unranked last year
22	NA	Marcos Diplan	34		Dominican IFA
23	NA	Keone Kela	33		Unranked last year
24	NA	Ryan Rua	30		Unranked last year
25	NA	Cole Wiper	26		10th Round
25	NA	Kelvin Vasquez	26		Unranked last year
27	NA	Brett Nicholas	24		Unranked last year
28	NA	Frank Lopez	22		Unranked last year
29	NA	Joey Butler	21		Unranked last year
30	NA	Victor Payano	19		Unranked last year
31	NA	Jose Leclerc	18		Unranked last year
32	NA	Alex Claudio	13		Unranked last year
33	NA	Drew Robinson	8		Unranked last year
34	NA	Ben Rowen	7		Unranked last year
35	NA	Lisalverto Bonilla	5		Unranked last year
36	NA	Roman Mendez	4		-19
37	NA	Kellin Deglan	2		Unranked last year
38	NA	Sam Wolff	1		6th Round

2013 prospects not on 2014 list

Graduated:

Jurickson Profar, #1
Martin Perez, #3
Leonys Martin, #7
Justin Grimm, #9
Tanner Scheppers, #23
Nick Tepesch, #24

Traded:

Mike Olt, #2 - To the Cubs in the Matt Garza trade
C.J. Edwards, #18 - To the Cubs in the Matt Garza trade
Neil Ramirez, #19 - To the Cubs in the Matt Garza trade
Leury Garcia, #20 - To the White Sox in the Alex Rios trade

Dropped Off:

Will Lamb, #21
Hanser Alberto, #24
Eduard Pinto, #27

Visual Representation

Here is a chart of the Rangers' 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.