Seattle Mariners reportedly lay off 10 scouts, but it could be six scouts.

Differing reports from Bob Nightengale and Jim Bowden came out Wednesday about the Seattle Mariners laying off scouts.

When it comes to minor league prospects, teams like the Atlanta Braves, San Diego Padres and New York Yankees usually rank near the top of the lists. The Chicago White Sox, Toronto Blue Jays (Vlad Junior!) and Tampa Bay Rays also have good systems. Even the high-payroll Dodgers have a good collection of talented players down on the farm.

One team that has not placed high on the farm system rankings lately is the Seattle Mariners. Their minor leaguers were ranked 29^th of the 30 MLB teams by Bleacher Report in June. They were in that same spot on John Sickels farm system rankings in March. In the recent MLB Pipeline update, the Seattle Mariners only had one prospect in the top 100 (Kyle Lewis, ranked 82^nd).

So it was interesting to hear that the Mariners may have laid off 10 scouts on Wednesday, based on a tweet from Bob Nightengale. According to Nightengale, five of the ten were from the professional side and five were from the amateur side. About 20 minutes later, Jim Bowden tweeted that this wasn’t unusual for MLB teams and that the Seattle Mariners were “making a change at six scouting positions . . . they are expected to replace all six positions . . . with an effort to upgrade their evaluators.”

Until more information comes out, it’s hard to know what’s happening here. On the one hand, if a team with one of the worst farm systems in baseball fires ten scouts, it’s easy to be critical and think they don’t value their farm system like other teams do. On the other hand, if these scouts have been around for a while and contributed to the organization’s low ranking, perhaps it’s time they be replaced.

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Whatever the case, the Mariners definitely need to improve a farm system that doesn’t have much in the pipeline to help the big league club. They also lack highly-regarded prospects who could be useful in a trade. That’s in part because Mariners GM Jerry Dipoto has traded away many prospects since taking over in September of 2015 in an effort to get the Mariners to the postseason. The franchise is mired in the longest active postseason drought of any team in baseball. They haven’t made the playoffs since 2001.

In their most recent draft, the Mariners went heavy on college players, which has been a trademark of Dipoto. Their first 10 picks and 32 of their first 34 picks were college players. It wasn’t until the last six rounds of the draft that they focused on high school players.

With such a strong emphasis on older players, the Mariners were making a conscious decision to pick players who will be ready to play in the major leagues sooner rather than later. The downside to this strategy is that these players often have a low ceiling. They can be productive but are unlikely to be breakout stars. Essentially, they’re already closer to being the player they’ll become than a high school player is because a high school player has more room to grow as he rises up the ranks.

Hopefully, we’ll get more information soon about the shake-up in the scouting ranks of the Seattle Mariners. Are the Mariners downsizing their scouting department or are these scouts being replaced? Ideally, the team is making changes that will get them out of the basement in the farm system rankings.