Seattle Mariners Top 30 Prospects: Laying Down Some Primer

That time has finally arrived. It is time for us to update our ranks for the Top Seattle Mariners Prospects list. But before we do, we need to lay down some groundwork.

The Seattle Mariners have had a ridiculously busy off-season. The organization decided to rebuild and has now watched its farm system gain some respect on these type of rankings lists. However, these ranks won’t influence our ranks.

Instead, we made some tweaks to our process, to try and put out the best list we could. Amongst the tweaks, this is no longer a 1 man process. This year, both site experts got involved, which caused us to change the way we calculate our ranks.

Basically, our process is as follows: both rankers make their own list, without any consultation with each other. Then, we take our list and assign point values to each slot. The most points go to the number 1 slot, the second slot gets the second most points, and so on.

We then added up the point total for every player on our list and ranked them based on points received. In the event of a tie between two players (we had several), we let you decide on Twitter, and those results are now factored in.

In addition, with an extra set of eyes available to us, we upped our top prospect list from 20 last year, to 30 this year. This will be our first set of ranks since last July. If you want a quick refresher, or to look at how quickly things can change, read our last list by clicking here.

If you think a few names are missing, fear not. Unlike other prospect ranks, we do not consider Yusei Kikuchi a “prospect” at least for the purpose of this list. Also just missing the cut for “prospect” status are J.P. Crawford and Daniel Vogelbach. If we had ranked all 3 as prospects, Crawford and Kikuchi would have comfortably landed inside our Top 6 and Vogelbach would have likely been inside our Top 20.

While they may not be prospects anymore, they are, none the less, young, unproven MLB assets. They won’t factor into our ranks here but are a large part of the Mariners future going forward (maybe not Vogelbach, but you get the idea).

Next up on our Top 30 Prospect series, we will take a look at a few of the names you just missed the cut, and could easily find their way into our re-ranks by mid-season. Spring Training starts tomorrow, and many of these names will be seen at big league camp. Follow us as we count them down this month, from 30 to number 1.