Current ratings are based on Zips. Potentials are set by our team. Lukas can answer more questions about this, but the key point to remember is that it's very easy to look at your teams' prospects and think they're better than they are.
Hicks, since he was mentioned in the top post, is MLB's #7 Cards prospect. Fangraphs has him #11 (although could be as high as 6th since they're all 45s on their list). So definitely seems like he's far from a top starting prospect.
But the best thing to do is if you feel like certain players are underrated in the game, please turn scouting off, and report them, with any other evidence you have (MLB pipeline/BA/Fangraphs/etc... rankings) to the roster issues thread here (
http://www.ootpdevelopments.com/boar...d.php?t=286238). The roster team continuously is updating player rankings, so maybe certain guys should be ranked higher.
But also as mentioned, if Reyes and Kelly are missing from our lists due to service time calculations (we do use a slightly difference calculation for when guys count as prospects than MLB actually does), well, that's basically the Cards top 2 prospects missing, and so it definitely makes sense that they'd be ranked very low as an organization. Add them back in and they would definitely move up higher.