Tigers fans' Dodgers prospect ranking conspiracies are funny, but miss major point

Somewhere on Detroit Tigers social media there was a graphic that's been making the rounds, and I get why it stung enough to go viral.

Before the season, the Tigers were ranked as the No. 5 farm system in baseball, with the Dodgers at No. 2. Now MLB Pipeline's midseason rankings have LA at No. 1 and Detroit down at No. 8.

The conclusion a lot of Tigers fans jumped to was that the industry is just propping up the Dodgers because they're the Dodgers, and fans are taking jabs and commenting on the “alleged” prospects they got.

If you actually read Pipeline's full write-up on both systems, the real explanation makes the conspiracy fall apart pretty quickly. Let’s start with Detroit. Kevin McGonigle graduated off the prospect list this year and conventional wisdom says losing your best prospect should tank your ranking, right? Nope. In Pipeline's own words: even accounting for McGonigle's graduation, Detroit "actually boasts more Top 100 prospects now than it did in preseason."

The Tigers currently carry five Top 100 guys — Max Clark at No. 13, Zyhir Hope at No. 28, Bryce Rainer at No. 48, River Ryan at No. 66, and Josue Briceño at No. 69 — which is more than they had in March.

Tigers fans are missing the point about the Dodgers farm system

Detroit didn't get worse. Instead, everybody else just had a bigger summer of development and made sharp deadline moves. That’s today’s reality: where good teams are also good at building organizations and developing players, and this cycle a handful of them came together at once.

Now, as a Dodgers fan, let's be honest about our side of it too, because there's a version of this where we don't get to be smug about any of it. The front office moved Hope and Ryan to land Tarik Skubal, a two-time, unanimous Cy Young winner, yet leads baseball with six prospects in the Top 100.

Per Pipeline, no team could match the package Los Angeles put together for Skubal, and that's the whole story of how an organization survives trading away a true difference-maker at the big-league level and moves up to the top spot. LA was able to acquire Skubal without touching Josue De Paula, Eduardo Quintero, Mike Sirota, or Emil Morales. That's not the rankings favoring Los Angeles. That's just how deep this thing actually is.

So Tigers fans, take the real story here instead of the conspiracy: your minor league system has more elite talent in it today than it did on Opening Day, McGonigle is out there hitting like a future superstar, and you were leapfrogged by teams having great organizational and development years of their own, not by a rigged system. Eighth in baseball, with more Top 100 prospects than you started with, is nothing to be that mad about.

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