Rockies prospect rankings: Making sense of the full preseason 2017 top 30 PuRPs list

After revealing the Purple Row community's Colorado Rockies top prospect list over the last few weeks, it's time to wrap up the series by showing the whole list at once. Without further ado, here is the full preseason 2017 Top 30 PuRPs list, including some voting stats:

It was an easy first place finish for Brendan Rodgers in this edition of the PuRPs poll, his first top billing. He received 31 of 39 first place votes — the others were distributed to the next four prospects on the list. The top five players all cleared 1,000 points over the 39 counted ballots.

As a reminder, 30 points were granted for a first place vote, 29 for second, etc. Until a player was named on 13 ballots, his vote totals were modified on a sliding scale to avoid an individual ballot having too much say over the community forecast. In this edition of the list this rule wasn't applied to anyone in the top 30. For more info on voting numbers for players that didn't quite make the top 30, please check out the intro post to this edition of the PuRPs list. One tie was broken in the voting, with the higher ranking granted to the player who ranked highest on an individual ballot.

There was a pretty good consensus about the top 15 prospects, forming a clear tier of players that the electorate felt were potential MLB impact players by virtue of the fact that they were named on almost every ballot. Indeed, there seemed to be consensus across most of the list, as only PuRP 30 Jose Gomez was named on fewer than half of the ballots. Looking back on past PuRPs lists, it appears that Colorado's farm system is slightly weaker than it was at midseason thanks to the graduation of David Dahl and Tyler Anderson. The system is also weaker than it was a year ago at this time, which was stronger than it had been since I started charting it in Spring 2010 thanks to the presence of players like Jon Gray and Trevor Story.

Some more notes:

• In all, 13 players were on every ballot, 69 players received at least one vote for this PuRPs list (up from 68 last time), 56 got mentioned on multiple ballots (down from 59), 32 were named on at least 13 ballots (and therefore were unmodified), and all of the top 29 were named on at least half of the ballots, showing that most of the list was more or less agreed upon by the community, if not necessarily the order. Here is a link to the polling thread.
• In this edition of the PuRPs list there were five new names compared to the midseason 2016 list. The new PuRPs are Welker (19), Hampson (22), Diaz (24), Cabrera (29), and Gomez (30).

Breaking the list down by position, reflecting Jeff Bridich's prospect strategy there are 17 pitchers (15 of them are nominally starters with a couple being a question mark, 12 are righties, five are southpaws, three are in the top five and eight are in the top 12), four middle infielders, four outfielders, two catchers, and three corner infielders. It looks like there will be many top prospects that will be MLB ready in the 2017 (including five of the top ten), so it won't be long before we start seeing some of these guys producing as regulars for the Rockies.

With that, I declare the preseason 2017 Purple Row Prospects List complete.