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

Wrapping up the latest edition of the Purple Row Prospects 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:

Preseason 2017 PuRPs List

Rank Player Total # Ballots High Ballot Mode Ballot ETA
Rank Player Total # Ballots High Ballot Mode Ballot ETA
1 Brendan Rodgers 1,154 39 1 (31) 1 2019
2 Jeff Hoffman 1,106 39 1 (4) 2 Now
3 Riley Pint 1,075 39 1 (1) 3 2020
4 Raimel Tapia 1,028 39 1 (1) 4 Now
5 German Marquez 1,021 39 1 (2) 4 2017
6 Tom Murphy 966 39 3 6 Now
7 Ryan McMahon 896 39 3 8 2018
8 Kyle Freeland 880 39 3 8,9 2017
9 Ryan Castellani 880 39 5 7 2018
10 Antonio Senzatela 802 39 5 9 2018
11 Peter Lambert 737 38 7 10 2019
12 Yency Almonte 680 38 9 12 2018
13 Jordan Patterson 655 39 7 13 Now
14 Dom Nunez 608 39 7 16 2019
15 Forrest Wall 564 38 9 16 2019
16 Pedro Gonzalez 431 32 8 15 2020
17 Ben Bowden 395 36 11 19 2018
18 Robert Tyler 374 34 12 18 2019
19 Colton Welker 373 34 12 13,16-17,20,26 2020
20 Sam Howard 363 30 10 16 2018
21 Daniel Montano 337 31 14 14,20 2021
22 Garrett Hampson 282 28 14 16,21-22,26 2019
23 Tyler Nevin 280 30 15 19 2020
24 Jairo Diaz 261 23 2 17 2017
25 Harrison Musgrave 215 24 14 23-25,29 2017
26 Parker French 208 23 13 17 2019
27 Mike Nikorak 205 27 15 24,29 2020
28 Sam Moll 191 18 11 15,26 2017
29 Wander Cabrera 144 19 13 21 2021
30 Jose Gomez 118 15 16 25,29 2020

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.