We’ll do these state of Smokies and Iowa Cubs every so often — especially Iowa since we want to keep track of Kyle Schwarber who will have another storybook year if he comes out of Iowa and helps win another World Series for the Cubs.

We have a dataset from 6/22 which should be good enough to get an idea of what is going on with the Cubs’ AA team.  Here is team status.

BAT a little under water, PITCH above average and they’re 3 wins up which gets divvied amongst their players.  Let’s look at their top players right now.

They have three guys in top 25 which isn’t bad for a dataset of 30 MLB franchise affiliates.  On average each affiliate should have around 1 in the top 25.  I don’t know who any of these players are so cannot comment.  The model just crunches numbers and makes these reports.  That you can hit in AA does not mean you can hit in MLB or even AAA.   We only show the value stat (WAA) in these reports because the purpose of a value stat is to discern the myriad numbers you will see on other sites into something simple to identify.

Let’s look at the top 20 players as of 6/22 to get a glimpse as to what franchises are doing well with player development in this league.

I don’t know who any of these players are.  Minor league rankings can be deceiving.  Since value accumulates through playing time, a standout player who came from A+ or A mid season will start off at 0 and could get lost in  lower rankings.  It might be worthwhile to show WinPct to find streaking players working their way up the ladder.   We’ll see.

We’ll do Smokies once every two weeks and the Iowa Cubs every week.  We’ll wait until July so Schwarber can get some playing time in.  Until then….