Despite Jarred Kelenic, Logan Gilbert, Jake Fraley, and Taylor Trammell graduating, the Seattle Mariners now have the #1 farm system in baseball per Baseball America. The venerable scouting organization released their midseason update to their “organizational talent rankings” today. The metric is both helpful and mildly misleading, as BA does not consider any player who has lost prospect eligibility by playing in enough big league games in these rankings, hence the exclusion of Kelenic, Wander Franco, and a few other top prospects from the start of the season.
By the same coin, Seattle has graduated two of its top prospects as well as a handful of other members of its organizational Top-15, yet still has improved at both the top and with depth throughout enough to impress Baseball America, who ranked Seattle dead last as recently as 2018 and started them at #2 behind Tampa Bay in 2021.