Astros farm ranked eighth by Baseball Prospectus

Baseball Prospectus, long one of the major players in the online prospect evaluation game, has released its 2016 organizational rankings today, and have ranked the Astros 8th, four spots higher than their ranking of 12th last season.

They say of the Astros:

It’s not every day you see a franchise graduate a face of the franchise like Carlos Correa and sell off a couple other would-be top-ten guys to shore up the big club for a playoff run and still improve over last year’s ranking, but…here we are.

Please read the article for their full write-up on the Astros. Needless to say, this is high praise, considering the following moves in the past year:

• 2016 Top 100 catcher Jacob Nottingham traded away
• 2015 Top 100 outfielder Domingo Santana, 2016 Top 100 outfielder Brett Phillips, and Top 100 starting pitcher Josh Hader traded away
• Former #1 overall pick Mark Appel traded away, along with Astros Top 10 prospect Vincent Velasquez
• Former Top 5 prospect Carlos Correa graduated to the majors
• Former Top 5 Astros prospect Lance McCullers graduated to the majors

A few months ago, the readers of The Crawfish Boxes debated in the comments whether the farm was depleted and was now a weakness after all the moves noted above. A follow-up article we published covered the topic and concluded that, based on MLB's scouting grades, the current farm system is as deep as it was a year ago, and arguably deeper if you looked past the Top 30.

Baseball Prospectus seems to corroborate our conclusion by ranking the 2016 Astros farm system four spots higher than they did the 2015 one.

What are your thoughts on this ranking and how it compares to last season?