2014 San Diego Padres Consensus Top 40 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.

Jesse Hahn was traded to the team very late into the off-season after most lists were already out. I gave him an eight ranking on all the lists that missed him, which was the average of his ranking for the two lists on which he appeared.

You can also view the 2013 San Diego Padres top prospect list.

Sources

Regular Lists

Baseball America

Baseball Instinct

Baseball Prospectus

Batting Leadoff

Bleacher Report

Bullpen Banter

Fangraphs

Friars On Base

Grading on the Curve

Keith Law (ESPN)

MLB Prospect Portal

Prospect Digest

Rant

Top Prospect Alert

Fantasy Lists

Baseball HQ

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 San Diego Padres 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	3	Austin Hedges	411	136	0
2	2	Matt Wisler	401	143	5
3	1	Max Fried	397	146	-1
4	3	Hunter Renfroe	370	136	1st Round
5	6	Casey Kelly	355	125	0
6	5	Rymer Liriano	333	128	-2
7	7	Jesse Hahn	322	115	Rays, Logan Forsythe trade
8	8	Jace Peterson	292	110	7
9	10	Keyvius Sampson	261	92	4
10	11	Burch Smith	243	68	13
11	9	Joe Ross	229	93	-3
12	12	Zach Eflin	168	45	0
13	15	Reymond Fuentes	118	21	14
14	18	Cory Spangenberg	93	17	-5
15	13	Dustin Peterson	90	27	2nd Round
16	14	Alex Dickerson	89	25	Pirates, Jaff Decker trade
17	16	Walker Weickel	88	19	-6
18	NA	Franchy Cordero	67		Unranked last year
19	NA	Travis Jankowski	63		-2
20	NA	Gabriel Quintana	49		Unranked last year
21	NA	Franmil Reyes	47		Unranked last year
22	NA	Adys Portillo	46		-12
23	NA	Yeison Asencio	44		Unranked last year
24	17	Joe Wieland	42	18	-10
25	NA	Jordan Paroubeck	32		2nd Round
26	NA	Juan Oramas	31		Unranked last year
27	NA	Andy Lockett	22		Unranked last year
28	NA	Donn Roach	19		-12
29	NA	Josh VanMeter	17		5th Round
30	NA	Mallex Smith	15		Unranked last year
31	NA	Carlos Belen	13		-7
32	NA	Corey Adamson	11		Unranked last year
33	NA	Leonel Campos	10		Unranked last year
34	NA	Ruben Mejia	8		Unranked last year
34	NA	Tommy Medica	8		Unranked last year
36	NA	Jeremy Baltz	7		-7
37	NA	Alberth Martinez	5		Unranked last year
38	NA	Kevin Quackenbush	4		-13
39	NA	Jose Urena	2		Unranked last year
40	NA	John Barbato	1		-18

2013 prospects not on 2014 list

Graduated:

Jedd Gyorko, #3
Robbie Erlin, #6

Traded:

Brad Boxberger, #20 - To the Rays in the Logan Forsythe trade
Matt Andriese, #21 - To the Rays in the Logan Forsythe trade
Matt Stites, #27 - To the Diamondbacks in the Ian Kennedy trade

Released:

James Darnell, #18
Edinson Rincon, #25

Dropped Off:

Fernando Perez, #19

Visual Representation

Here is a chart of the Padres' 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.