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2014 St. Louis Cardinals Consensus Top 53 Prospects

What is the consensus ranking for each of the Cardinals' top prospects?

Oscar Taveras is the Cardinals' top prospect this year
Oscar Taveras is the Cardinals' top prospect this year
Scott Rovak-USA TODAY Sports

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.

Carlos Martinez is technically not a rookie, but was ranked on many of the lists. Because of this, I included him in my rankings and gave him a two ranking in the lists he was not eligible. Randal Grichuk was traded to the Cardinals in the middle of the offseason, after some of the lists were created. To offset this, I gave him a ranking of 10 where he was missed.

You can also view the 2013 St. Louis Cardinals top prospect list.

Sources

Regular Lists

Baseball America

Baseball Prospectus

Bleacher Report

Cardinals Farm

Fangraphs

Future Redbirds

Grading on the Curve

Keith Law (ESPN)

MLB.com

MLB Draft Insider

MLB Prospect Portal

Prospect Digest

Rant

Red Baron

STL Cup of Joe

The Cardinal Nation

Top Prospect Alert

Viva El Birdos Community

Fantasy Lists

Dynasty Sports Empire

Fake Teams

Prospect 361

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 St. Louis Cardinals 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 Oscar Taveras 849 150 0
2 2 Carlos Martinez 834 147 1
3 3 Kolten Wong 814 144 3
4 4 Stephen Piscotty 800 140 6
5 6 Rob Kaminsky 754 131 1st Round
6 5 Marco Gonzalez 728 137 1st Round
7 9 Randal Grichuk 693 84 David Freese Trade, Angels
8 12 Tim Cooney 647 42 20
9 7 Carson Kelly 637 90 0
10 8 Alexander Reyes 630 89 18
11 10 James Ramsey 585 82 2
12 12 Charlie Tilson 434 42 3
13 11 Tyrell Jenkins 364 45 -5
14 NA Mike O'Neill 269 12
15 12 Patrick Wisdom 260 42 -4
16 NA Oscar Mercado 250 2nd Round
17 NA Zach Petrick 213 Unranked last year
18 NA Lee Stoppelman 178 Unranked last year
19 NA John Gast 159 -5
20 NA Samuel Tuivailala 146 Unranked last year
21 NA Cory Jones 145 Unranked last year
22 15 Greg Garcia 138 41 0
23 NA Jordan Swagerty 125 -5
24 NA Thomas Pham 122 Unranked last year
25 NA Juan Herrera 113 Indians, Marc Rzepczynski trade
26 NA Seth Blair 95 -6
27 NA Sam Freeman 94 Unranked last year
28 NA Kenny Peoples-Walls 84 Unranked last year
29 NA Boone Whiting 76 3
30 NA Vaughn Bryan 74 35th Round
31 NA Edmundo Sosa 62 Unranked last year
32 NA Mike Mayers 57 3rd Round
33 NA Anthony Garcia 48 -21
33 NA Ian McKinney 48 5th Round
35 NA Jacob Wilson 46 Unranked last year
36 NA Breyvic Valera 45 -4
37 NA Chris Rivera 41 7th Round
38 NA Steve Bean 37 -22
39 NA Sam Gaviglio 36 Unranked last year
39 NA Keith Butler 36 Unranked last year
41 NA Nick Petree 35 9th Round
42 NA Colin Walsh 31 Unranked last year
43 NA Eric Fornataro 28 -15
44 NA Jonathan Rodriguez 19 Unranked last year
44 NA Fernando Baez 19 Unranked last year
46 NA Audry Perez 18 Unranked last year
47 NA Mason Katz 14 4th Round
48 NA Dixon Llorens 10 Unranked last year
49 NA Malik Collymore 9 10th Round
50 NA Ryan Sherriff 5 Unranked last year
51 NA Ronald Castillo 3 Unranked last year
52 NA Jimmy Reed 2 6th Round
53 NA Steven Farinaro 1 11th Round

2013 prospects not on 2014 list

Graduated:

Shelby Miller, #2
Trevor Rosenthal, #4
Michael Wacha, #5
Matt Adams, #7
Tyler Lyons, #22
Seth Maness, #27

Traded:

Michael Blazek, #25 - To the Brewers in the John Axford trade

Placed on waivers:

Ryan Jackson, #17
Maikel Cleto, #18

Dropped Off:

Starlin Rodriguez, #20
Victor De Leon, #24
C.J. McElroy, #31

Visual Representation

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

Cardinals2014prospects

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.