Finally, it's consensus top prospect time -- my favorite time of the year. What's better than a top 100 prospect list? Twenty of them! Every time a player appears on a list, he is given 151 minus his ranking number of points (A ranking of No. 1 gives 150 points). All of the points are added up and the player with the highest total is ranked at the top. The reason I do this instead of taking the average ranking is very simple: It's better. Take Braden Shipley for example. He appears on eight lists with an average ranking of 54. However, his total points ranking is 69. We must take into account the fact that not all players are ranked by all lists, so an average ranking is misleading.

This year, for the first time, I have split the list into two - regular and fantasy. Each type of list focuses on different parts of a player and they should be separate. Thankfully, there are enough types of each lists to make this worthwhile. I found 11 regular lists and nine fantasy lists.



Unfortunately, not all lists have the same criteria and as a result, many did not rank Masahiro Tanaka, Jose Abreu, or Carlos Martinez. Kiley McDaniel at Scout went one further and didn't rank any prospect with a good shot at a major league job. In order to keep a good ranking system, I placed the average of each of these player's rankings from the other lists in those empty slots. This is how Tanaka placed as the number five prospect, even though he was only ranked on seven of the 20 lists. Alex Guerrero and Miguel Gonzalez were in a different category and were not even ranked by all lists where they were eligible. I did not include any extra rankings for them.

Taking a look at 2014 pre-season prospect rankings A comparison of each of the lists on the 2014 consensus prospect list.

Here is a spreadsheet with all lists together (excluding Keith Law's as his listing is for ESPN insiders only). In the list below, I put 200 (NA) for those players unranked in each type of list. This was in order to make the sorting work for each column.

Regular Lists

Baseball America

Baseball Haven

Baseball Prospectus

Bleacher Report

Fangraphs (Marc Hulet)

John Sickels (Minor League Ball) (I used Sickels' end of season update list as he has yet to put out an offseason one.)

Keith Law (ESPN)

Major League Baseball (Jonathan Mayo)

MLB Draft Insider

MLB Prospect Guide (I only took the top 100 from this top 300 list)

Prospect Digest

Scout

Fantasy Lists

CBS Sports

David Gonos

Deep Leagues

Dynasty Sports Empire

Fantasy Assembly

Fantasy Squads

Prospect 361

Rotoanalysis

The List

Prospects by team

Just for good measure, here is a table with the number of prospects per team. I have also included the total number of ranking points for all of the prospects on each team. Ranking by descending total gives a fairly good measure of organizational strength. (Cubs, Red Sox, Pirates, Astros, Twins at the top and Giants, Athletics, Tigers, Brewers, Angels at the bottom.)

Team Players Total ARI 4 3326 ATL 5 1840 BAL 6 5213 BOS 10 7868 CHC 9 8165 CHW 6 3232 CIN 4 3079 CLE 5 3286 COL 7 4295 DET 4 1508 HOU 9 7438 KAN 8 5558 LAA 3 122 LAD 6 4494 MIA 4 3164 MIL 3 350 MIN 8 6754 NYM 8 4248 NYY 10 3261 OAK 2 1565 PHI 6 2702 PIT 8 7479 SDP 9 3988 SEA 6 2778 SFO 4 1649 STL 7 4989 TAM 8 2215 TEX 10 3495 TOR 8 2885 WAS 3 2689

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Chris St. John is a writer at Beyond The Box Score. You can follow him on Twitter at @stealofhome.