2014 Atlanta Braves Consensus Top 37 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 (31 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.

You can also view the 2013 Atlanta Braves top prospect list.

Sources

Regular Lists

Baseball America

Baseball Instinct

Baseball Prospectus

Bleacher Report

Fangraphs

Gondeee

Grading on the Curve

Keith Law (ESPN)

Minor League Ball (John Sickels)

MLB.com

MLB Prospect Portal

Prospect Digest

Rant

Talking Chop

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 Atlanta Braves 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 Sims	450	120	2
2	3	Christian Bethancourt	423	107	2
3	2	J.R. Graham	405	114	-1
4	6	Jason Hursh	389	98	1st Round
5	4	Mauricio Cabrera	381	106	1
6	4	Jose Peraza	363	106	2
7	7	Tommy La Stella	344	79	3
8	8	Victor Caratini	284	47	2nd Round
9	8	Cody Martin	236	47	4
10	NA	David Hale	194		15
11	11	Wes Parsons	175	43	Undrafted Free Agent
12	NA	Aaron Northcraft	154		4
13	11	Victor Reyes	135	43	Unranked last year
14	13	Josh Elander	105	22	5
15	NA	Johan Camargo	103		Unranked last year
16	NA	Shae Simmons	100		Unranked last year
17	10	Edward Salcedo	94	46	-7
18	NA	Kyle Wren	82		8th Round
19	NA	Carlos Salazar	81		3rd Round
20	NA	Ian Thomas	77		Indy Leagues
21	NA	Kyle Kubitza	71		2
22	NA	Todd Cunningham	70		-4
23	NA	Luis Merejo	32		-11
24	NA	Carlos Perez	26		Unranked last year
25	NA	Juan Jaime	24		-6
26	NA	Alec Grosser	23		11th Round
27	NA	Matt Lipka	22		-13
28	NA	Andry Ubiera	17		0
29	NA	Ryan Buchter	16		Unranked last year
30	14	Robby Hefflinger	14	21	Unranked last year
31	NA	Gus Schlosser	13		Unranked last year
32	NA	Mark Lamm	10		Unranked last year
33	NA	Ronan Pacheco	9		Unranked last year
34	NA	John Cornely	7		-15
35	NA	Bryan De La Rosa	6		Unranked last year
36	NA	Wilson Rivera	2		Unranked last year
37	NA	Eric Pfisterer	1		Unranked last year

2013 prospects not on 2014 list

Graduated:

Julio Teheran, #1
Alex Wood, #7
Evan Gattis, #9
Joey Terdoslavich, #15

Traded:

Sean Gilmartin, #5 - To the Twins in the Ryan Doumit trade

Dropped Off:

Navery Moore, #17
William Beckwith, #22
Carlos Franco, #24
David Peterson, #25
Yeral Torres, #27

Visual Representation

Here is a chart of the Braves' 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.