2014 Cincinnati Reds Consensus Top 41 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.

David Holmberg was traded to the team during the off-season. I gave him a rank of 7 on the lists that missed him.

You can also view the 2013 Cincinnati Reds top prospect list.

Sources

Regular Lists

Baseball America

Baseball Prospectus

Big Baby Bruce

Bleacher Report

Fangraphs

Grading on the Curve

Keith Law (ESPN)

ManBearPig

Minor League Ball (John Sickels)

MLB Draft Insider

MLB Prospect Portal

Prospect Digest

Rant

Red Reporter Community

Reds Minor Leagues

Top Prospect Alert

Uncle Weez

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 Cincinnati Reds 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	Robert Stephenson	424	75	1
2	2	Billy Hamilton	408	72	-1
3	3	Phil Ervin	389	69	1st Round
4	4	Jesse Winker	372	66	2
5	5	Yorman Rodriguez	328	61	9
6	7	David Holmberg	266	58	Dbacks, Heath Bell trade
7	10	Ben Lively	265	35	4th Round
8	9	Michael Lorenzen	264	37	1st Round
9	6	Nick Travieso	259	59	-4
10	8	Carlos Contreras	207	38	Unranked last year
11	11	Daniel Corcino	140	34	-7
12	NA	Jon Moscot	138		16
13	NA	Tucker Barnhart	122		12
14	NA	Jose Ortiz	71		Unranked last year
14	NA	Ismael Guillon	71		-6
16	NA	Chad Rogers	57		Unranked last year
17	13	Amir Garrett	52	16	11
18	NA	Seth Mejias-Brean	50		3
19	13	Jeremy Kivel	49	16	8
20	NA	Kevin Franklin	35		2nd Round
21	NA	Jackson Stephens	29		Unranked last year
21	NA	Ryan Wright	29		-5
23	NA	Aristides Aquino	20		Unranked last year
24	12	Tanner Rahier	19	17	-13
24	NA	Junior Arias	19		Unranked last year
26	NA	Friar Tucker	18		Unranked last year
27	NA	Kyle Waldrop	17		-8
27	NA	Henry Rodriguez	17		-15
29	NA	Sean Buckley	16		-8
30	NA	Cory Thompson	10		5th Round
31	NA	Mark Armstrong	8		3rd Round
32	NA	Drew Cisco	7		-11
32	NA	Kevin Garcia	7		Unranked last year
32	NA	Gabriel Rosa	7		-1
35	NA	Zack Weiss	6		6th Round
35	NA	Tyler Mahle	6		7th Round
37	NA	Rydel Medina	4		Dominican IFA
38	NA	Juan Silva	3		Unranked last year
38	NA	Ryan LaMarre	3		-21
38	NA	Neftali Soto	3		-20
41	NA	Sal Romano	2		-17

2013 prospects not on 2014 list

Graduated:

Tony Cingrani, #3
J.J. Hoover, #10
Donald Lutz, #20

Released:

Kyle Lotzkar, #9

Dropped Off:

Dan Langfield, #7
Jonathan Reynoso, #13
Jeff Gelalich, #15
David Vidal, #25
Pedro DIaz, #28
Juan Duran, #32

Visual Representation

Here is a chart of the Reds' 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.