Back in August, I did a quick look at the Cardinals minor league system here, done after the 2025 trade deadline. That article attempted to capture all the new players the Cardinals had just brought in via trading and drafting and what impact they would have on prospect depth. It was a before-after comparison using a before-the-draft Fangraphs update and an MLB.com after-the-deadline update. At that time, I focused on the individual players acquired, more than the system as a whole. Based on what I was seeing, I surmised that the Cardinals had increased their system depth by a fair bit, primarily in the FV 40 and 40+ area. Now, Fangraphs has published a system-wide ranking across MLB shown here. As the title indicates, Fangraphs now ranks the Cardinals’ system #1 in all of baseball, using player valuations as the metric.