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How did Brewers build their No. 1-ranked system?
- Updated: August 4, 2016
PHOENIX — Ranking prospects is subjective business, but here’s one thing on which the armchair farm directors and actual farm directors can agree: In the 13 months since the Brewers dove into rebuilding mode, they have vastly improved their Minor League system.
How improved? Well, that is where the interpretation begins. By one view unveiled Wednesday by MLBPipeine.com, it’s the No. 1 collection of talent in baseball.
• Midseason ranking of MLB’s Top 10 farm systems
It has been a rapid ascent to that position for the Brewers, who, still recovering from their “go for it” seasons earlier in the decade, entered 2015 in the bottom third of system rankings. Now, 18 of the Brewers’ Top 30 Prospects, including seven of the top eight, were acquired via the Draft or a trade within the past 14 months. Those eight players all rank among the Top 100 Prospects in baseball, up from five Milwaukee farmhands in the Top 100 entering this season, and one in each of the three years before that. The Brewers and Astros are tied for the most players on the latest list.
The common denominator between those two clubs is David Stearns, who was Houston’s assistant general manager for three years before taking over the top job in Milwaukee from Doug Melvin last fall. Melvin started the rebuild by trading the likes of Carlos Gomez for prospects, and Stearns continued it by dealing Adam Lind, Jean Segura, Will Smith, Jeremy Jeffress and Jonathan Lucroy. All of those trades netted players among the Brewers’ current Top 30.
“The most important thing I’ve stressed to our group is that we stay on strategy, and that strategy is to continue to try to acquire as much young talent as we possibly can,” said Stearns, repeating a line so engrained in his thinking that a version of it appears in his media guide …
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