mlb(dot)com's list of the top 100 Prospects:
The Official Site of Major League Baseball
www.mlb.com
The success rate of prospects in baseball is not that great.
Below is a link to a site which covers the top 100 prospects covering the years from 1990 to 2003 (there is an updated web page that covers up to 2012 which I do not have access to).
Over the last decade, Major League Baseball organizations have treated top prospects as their most valuable commodity. They are inexpensive (at least for the first six or seven years) and they can...
www.royalsreview.com
.
The methodology in the article identified three categories - Bust or Success and the percentage of Success that ended up as Superior players.
Overall, Bust/Success was 70/30. Out of the success group 17% were superior.
Further, the top 20 prospects had Bust/Success rate of 47/53. Position players were 40/60 and pitchers were 60/40.
As fans I think we put too much weight into MLB prospects. Back in 2015 when the Jays traded away many of their top prospects to take a run at the World Series, people thought they were trading away their future. Which was not the case as we had 2-3 years of prosperity and most of those prospects did not pan out.
This post is not meant to diminish prospects, rather it is meant to confirm that most of the top 100 are busts and teams which are good at eyeing prospects, end up with more trade bait to use to get proven "Success" players to build or strengthen a team in the stretch drive (like the Jays did in 2015).
Below is the link that covers the most recent period, however I am not a subscriber of that site:
We examined every team’s farm system from 1998 to 2012 to see how many future major leaguers they had each year.
www.baseballamerica.com
My guess is the stats would be fairly close.
www.baseball-reference.com
