Everybody – RANKS, RANKS, RANKS-RANKS-RANKS! Today we go 500 deep, on base flavored. The Dynasty Guru, Bret Sayre, posts his Top 500 later this month so don’t forget to … hey, where are you going? Get back here! Bret may be the dynasty guru, but I am at least a dynasty

This site now has four years’ worth of Bret’s top 500. The consensus rankings have changed a bit over the years, but the top 500 has remained. Since 2013, the top 500 has been a great tool to evaluate players across the span of age and position. It’s been an indispensable resource for teams preparing for drafts, comparing trade values, or considering how some of the game’s top prospects stack up against productive veterans. Compared to the consensus ranks, the top 500 represents the undiluted opinion of a singular Pepsi One-addled mind. We may not all agree on each player’s individual ranking, but we keep coming back year after year for more.

While these lists have been a great tool for evaluating players against each other, they also provide, as a whole, a window into the state of the player universe. By stepping back from the player-by-player comparison and looking at trends in this year’s’ list compared to the previous lists, we can find trends around the state of each position. What can comparing the 2016 top 500 to previous years tell us about which positions are shallow or deep heading into the year? What can we learn from these lists about the strength of prospects at each position in order to predict future positional scarcity?

We’ve now reached the midpoint of the 2013 season. When we last took a look at this list in mid-May, we were still dealing with relatively small sample sizes from both major leaguers and prospects, so there weren’t huge shake ups to the order. This time is a little different.