Baseball America, MLB Pipeline, and us here at RFR have all released some version of a midseason ranking for Royals prospects. I thought it would be a fun exercise to compare those lists and see where everybody was at with certain guys in the system. So here you go:

Thoughts:

• First things first, we probably would have had Nick Pratto #1 and Michael Massey #4 (behind Loftin, in front of Waters) on our list had we decided to rank them. The fact that we didn’t rank them is mostly due to the fact that that everyone had them top-5 and we didn’t feel it was necessary to rank them anymore. Just felt like folks would ask since BA and MLB left them on, because they are technically still prospect-eligible.
• I’m guessing Baseball America just forgot to rank Nate Eaton. I don’t *think* there’s anyway they would have left him off otherwise.
• I kind of figured we’d be looking at this, but Gavin Cross will pretty unanimously be the Royals top prospect once Pratto and Massey officially graduate. This makes sense considering he was the 9th overall pick this year, but I understand how also having a former 4th and a former 7th overall pick in the system makes that a little disappointing.
• The back ends of our lists varied greatly which is kind of unsurprising the way this current system stacks up. I would argue that most of the guys we had ranked 30-48 are fairly interchangeable. I wouldn’t argue hard against any of them and…they’re all kind of hodgepodged together right now.
• The love for Ben Kudrna is pretty cool to see. I know he’s having a good year, but he hasn’t been dominating guys lately the way he was early on and I was kind of unsure how the bigger sites would view him. MLB Pipeline is about to have him ranked as the organization’s second best prospect in a few weeks. We obviously like him a lot to rank him in our top-10, I just didn’t expect him to be ranked so high by the bigger sites.
• Having Austin Charles ranked ahead of Drew Waters is pretty silly to me (BA). Isn’t what Waters is doing in Omaha right now a great outcome for Charles in five years? I know Baseball America loved Charles before the draft, and I love how high they have him ranked on their list, just seems a bit premature to knock Waters that hard is all.
• I’m glad both BA and MLB decided Mason Barnett was worthy of a top-30 ranking. I don’t see it, and Barnett hasn’t pitched professionally yet to give us a better look, but it makes me feel better about the pick…as long as this isn’t just a lazy pedigree thing on the bigger sites’ part.
• No Shane Panzini on any of the three lists is…something. I found it interesting that neither of the big lists had Anthony Veneziano ranked either…

Thanks for following along with our rankings. Here are the write-ups we did for our top-50:

• Honorable Mentions
• 50-31
• 30-21
• 20-11
• 10-6
• 5-1