Texas Rangers: Latest rankings prove farm system is disrespected

Minor league systems can be difficult to evaluate and the talent within one isn’t easy to project long term, either.

But we’ve seen enough Texas Rangers prospect rankings over the last month or so to come to this simple, but profound conclusion: this organization’s farm system gets very little respect, and undeservedly so.

Granted, most of the sites that produce these rankings have their specific formulas for compiling these lists. However, they seem to be quite superficial.

Just look at Keith Law of The Athletic’s top-100 MLB prospect list released on Thursday, for example.

His rankings had OF Leody Taveras make the cut as the lone Texas Rangers representative.

This isn’t to say we don’t appreciate Mr. Law showing Taveras some much-deserved love, but we think he omitted a pretty obvious name from his list: only one top third base prospect Josh Jung, who cracks every other list we’ve sorted through.

That brings us to our other point: Baseball America’s top 100 list only featured Josh Jung as the Texas Rangers’ prospect representative.

At least Baseball Prospectus and more recently, MLB Pipeline, showed a little more esteem towards the Rangers’ farm system, listing four and three prospects apiece, respectively.

Dane Dunning, Sam Huff and Jung each made BP and MLB Pipeline’s lists, with Taveras also cracking BP’s as well.

These lists all have something more significant in common, however: a thorough disrespecting of the Texas Rangers’ minor league talent.

Recency bias was surely a factor in devising the rankings, as nearly every prospect awarded a spot has had either brief MLB experience or is close to earning their cup of coffee.

The Texas Rangers might not have a lot of young talent ready to scratch the big league surface at this point, but to assume that they don’t have plenty more intriguing players further down the pipeline would be a short-sighted presumption to make.

At the end of the day, we know how flushed with talent this Rangers farm is, even if it takes names like Maximo Acosta, Bayron Lora, Hans Crouse and others years to blossom and reach their MLB-caliber potentials.

It’s unfortunate that these prospect ranking sites don’t seem to realize this fact yet.

Keep sleeping on the Texas Rangers minor league system, though, because you’ll want to be fully awake when the time comes to reap the rewards of an arduous player development process.