LA Angels Wednesday News Crash: Angels > Dodgers

Nah – I know that Angels fans, after 11 straight seasons of losing, and a perennially dissed farm that’s always in the bottom third of the rankings, can be tempted to think there’s some systematic bias against the team among prospect analysts, but I don’t think it’s really the case.

BA only included eleven of the 2025 draftees in their Top 100. Bremner was #11 in their final pre-draft rankings, so it’s bullish that he’s included, and BA was in fact higher on Bremner than some other publications.

This makes sense – the Top 100 is basically the compilation of 4-5 domestic drafts, plus the same number of international draft classes. Flooding it with just-drafted guys whose college competition is largely A-ball level stuff wouldn’t be wise, and would just exhibit a lot of recency bias. MiLB ball is harder than college ball, and a lot of the guys ranked ahead of Bremner have been excelling in pro ball for 2-3 years.

Also, Bremner didn’t go to the MCWS, his Big West competition was markedly inferior to SEC/ACC pitchers, and he was a bit of a mess for the first 4-6 weeks of his season. Seems reasonable to rank him with caution, vs a guy like Anderson who dominated the best teams in college ball and was the college pitcher of the year.

And just one more thing I’ll say:

These lists really aren’t assembled on team by team basis in the long run. These lists are constructed bottoms-up.

Meaning, BA follows prospects at the high school level, and the collegiate level, they monitor UDFAs and indie ball, and they’re the first ones to publish who each team is taking internationally weeks before contracts are signed. They also have access to all sorts of proprietary performance data to color pitcher and hitter projections.

The main point to absorb is that they know a lot about the prospects before they enter a franchise – and this allows them to be responsive and adaptive when flurries of trades happen. They have long histories and scouting reports of guys agnostic of the systems that ultimately get assigned to.

So people that say “they don’t know shit about the Angels system” – well, that’s not how they go about evaluation. They are analyzing a universe of players in a 360 fashion, and many of them they’ve been following since they were 13-15 years old, as they provide rankings of draft classes as much as three years before they happen.