Every spring, someone publishes a ranking of the best player development systems in baseball, and every spring fans argue about it. Here's what most of those arguments miss: the rankings disagree because the methods disagree. There is no single scoreboard for development. Right now, analysts essentially use two well-documented approaches — a financial value-added model and industry insider surveys — with a third, metrics-based direction emerging from minor league tracking data. Understand those frameworks and you can read any "best development system" list critically, instead of just absorbing its conclusions.
Methodology 1: Financial Value-Added Models
The boldest attempt to quantify development I've seen comes from the performance training company Driveline Baseball, which built a metric it calls Value Generated. Writing on the company's blog in 2019, Kaitlyn Neiswender explained the idea: put a dollar figure on the value a team realizes — or destroys — through how it develops prospects. The model's purpose is to measure efficiency, weighing what a team got out of its players against what it invested and the talent those players arrived with.
The 2019 analysis produced striking numbers. Driveline's Value Generated metric estimated that the Cubs, widely criticized for failing to develop pitching, had lost $126 million in expected value on pitching prospects over a seven-year window. The Astros and Yankees, praised for integrating advanced technology into their pitching programs, had each realized more than $200 million in profit on pitchers over the same span, by the model's estimate.
That's the appeal of the financial approach: it converts a fuzzy reputation into a comparable number. The trade-off is that any dollar figure rests on the model's assumptions about expected value, and a 2019 snapshot is a demonstration of the method, not a current verdict on any franchise.
Methodology 2: Industry Insider Surveys
The second approach skips the math and asks the people inside the game. In March 2026, analyst Lance Brozdowski published a survey-based ranking of pitching development and acquisition organizations on his Pitcher Notes newsletter. He sent four questions to 68 of his baseball contacts and received 54 anonymous responses, then built a tiered ranking of all 30 organizations from #1 to #30.
His respondent pool wasn't just club employees. It included directors of pitching, assistant general managers and general managers, but also facility owners, non-MLB trainers and even a few agents, whom Brozdowski added because he believed their outside perspective would be valuable. The questions covered who is best, who is worst, and which organizations will improve the most, across both major league and minor league pitching.
The strength of a survey is that it aggregates judgment no dataset fully captures — organizational culture, coaching quality, how decisions actually get made. The weakness is that it measures reputation, and reputation can lag reality. Brozdowski himself flagged one respondent's view that "you could honestly argue there isn't a huge delta between teams 3 and 20, which is where the league has changed the most."
