Maybe you didn't need Baseball Prospectus to tell you this, but, according to them, the Padres have the best farm system in all of baseball.

The nice thing about BP telling you this is that their analysis leans, in my opinion, much more predicatively inclined than the Baseball America rankings or ESPN rankings. That being said, there would appear to be almost consensus among the talent evaluators that the Padres are stacked in prospects in 2012.

From Kevin Goldstein:

System At a Glance: They might lack that one marquee name, but no system in baseball can boast of having as many players at the upper levels who project as average or better big leaguers.

I realize that maybe one of the reasons the minor leagues never interested me much in the past is that the Padres typically didn't have a whole lot in the minor leagues. Because at this point, with everybody and their mothers telling us that the Padres system has this much talent under team control for the next three to five years and that a lot of the talent will be Major League ready soon, I'm anxious to see it at Petco.

Also, I love the idea that there isn't consensus as to who the "top" prospect is in the Padres. I would much rather have that than a single star and a bunch of maybe type guys. Makes it easier for my head to imagine the 2013 lineup.

[UPDATE] Here's a video I took while in the Matrix.