2014 Kansas City Royals Consensus Top 33 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 Kansas City Royals top prospect list.

Sources

Regular Lists

Baseball America

Baseball Prospectus

Bleacher Report

Fangraphs

Grading on the Curve

Kansas City Star

Keith Law (ESPN)

Minor League Ball (John Sickels)

MLB Prospect Portal

MLB Reports

PineTar Press

Prospect Digest

Rant

Rany on the Royals

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 Kansas City Royals 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	2	Kyle Zimmer	443	116	0
2	1	Yordano Ventura	436	119	1
3	3	Raul Mondesi	423	112	2
4	6	Miguel Almonte	385	102	8
5	7	Jorge Bonifacio	382	97	-1
6	4	Sean Manaea	381	103	1st Round
7	4	Bubba Starling	357	103	-5
8	8	Hunter Dozier	343	94	1st Round
9	NA	Jason Adam	255		-1
10	11	Orlando Calixte	250	23	0
11	10	Cheslor Cuthbert	175	64	-5
12	NA	Christian Binford	171		Unranked last year
13	NA	Sam Selman	128		-4
14	9	Elier Hernandez	115	66	0
15	NA	Zane Evans	93		4th Round
16	NA	Chris Dwyer	53		3
16	NA	Christian Colon	53		-1
18	12	Cody Reed	49	21	2nd Round
19	NA	Cameron Gallagher	40		-6
20	NA	Donnie Joseph	34		-3
20	NA	Alexis Rivera	34		1
20	NA	Bryan Brickhouse	34		-4
23	NA	Samir Duenez	32		Venezuelan IFA
24	NA	Brett Eibner	27		0
25	NA	Lane Adams	26		Unranked last year
26	NA	Michael Mariot	23		Unranked last year
27	NA	Pedro Fernandez	17		Unranked last year
27	NA	Brian Fletcher	17		-1
29	NA	John Lamb	7		-22
30	NA	Humberto Arteaga	6		-7
31	NA	Jack Lopez	4		Unranked last year
32	NA	Daniel Rockett	3		9th Round
33	NA	Terrance Gore	1		Unranked last year

2013 prospects not on 2014 list

Traded:

Kyle Smith, #11 - To the Astros for Justin Maxwell
David Lough, #30 - To the Orioles for Danny Valencia

Dropped Off:

J.C. Sulbaran, #18
Angel Baez, #19
Kenny Diekroeger, #22
Robinson Yambati, #24
Brooks Pounders, #26
Colin Rodgers, #28
Ramon Torres, #28
Wander Franco, #30
Cristian Cano, #32

Visual Representation

Here is a chart of the Royals' 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.