White Sox pitching prospect
Cristian Mena carries a reputation from his coaches and instructors as even-keeled, self-scrutinizing. With a measured, not gushing tone, he assesses how 2022 went for him.
“For me, it was an amazing season,” Mena said by phone call.
To his point, the 2022 campaign saw the Dominican-born Mena leave the team complex in Arizona, where he’d spent the offseason, and pitch in full-season affiliated ball for the first time. He moved through three different minor league levels. He learned a new slider grip from a longtime big leaguer to complement his 12-6 curveball. He earned his way into the Sox organization’s advanced English classes for Spanish speakers, while also working toward his high school degree. Mena’s involvement in Project Birmingham meant that he completed his season by reaching the Double-A level before his 20th birthday.
Birmingham had Mena facing the best hitters he had ever seen, at the tail end of the longest season and heaviest workload of his young life. Mena bludgeoned overmatched Low-A hitters with his standout curveball to the point where it was a challenge for him to develop his other pitches, and there were stretches of his time in High-A where his focus dipped when he wasn’t being challenged. So roving pitching coordinator Everett Teaford prepped his pupil on what he wouldn’t be able to get away with on the next level. The potentially daunting task was met with Mena’s now-typical response to challenges so far in his career.
“‘We’ll see,’” Teaford recalls his pupil always saying. “Then a shrug.”
Other than the 13-to-1 strikeout-to-walk ratio, Mena’s three-start, year-end stop in Birmingham was rough, as expected. Hitters who were more than five years older than Mena (on average) connected on 16 hits in 10 innings, and spiked his final line to a 3.80 ERA in a career-high 104 1/3 innings, with 126 strikeouts across three levels. After his last start, he asked if he could head back to the Dominican Republic to visit family a few days early, because he was planning on returning to the team’s complex in Arizona to work through the winter for the second straight offseason.
“There’s never been a time where I felt like Cristian was intimidated by a situation, or intimidated by an opponent,” said assistant general manager Chris Getz.
“This kid does not have big highs and big lows,” said minor league education coordinator Erin Santana. “You see him throwing a bullpen and he’s loose. He’s into it, he’s listening, he takes in everything and remembers it forever. He’s the same way in class. He’s very loose and he just wants to soak it all in.”
“He’s almost stubborn in a good way,” said John Ely, his pitching coach at Kannapolis. “And I’d say he’s a little bit cocky at times, but in a good way. He kind of just screams, ‘I’m going to be a big leaguer.’”
Mena’s love of tongue twisters, an exercise Santana says helps him grapple with pronunciation through his accent, has helped him handle English quicker than expected. With a slew of high draft picks spent on high school arms the last few years, it’s a bit of a surprise that Mena is the teenage pitcher threatening to be a top-5 prospect in the organization. But the $250,000 bonus Mena received as a 16-year-old was the largest the White Sox gave to any pitcher in their 2019 international class. A fast start wasn’t out of the question if he was willing to put the work in, and that’s what Mena does.
“I expected a year like that,” said Mena, navigating through most of his interview in English despite only beginning instruction a few years ago. “Because last year I stayed in Arizona, working hard through the offseason.”
“He did what he had to do,” said special assistant to the general manager Marco Paddy, who signed Mena as a 16-year-old. “When the guys are that good, they are going to make sacrifices. He has made the sacrifices and he’s getting the results right now.”
Growing up, Mena idolized pitcher Yordano Ventura, which is ultimately a reminder that Mena was 12 when he watched his Dominican countryman pitch in the 2015 World Series. Their arsenals are different. They don’t really look alike. Mena’s coaches who played with Ventura don’t exactly see the connection. Mena’s passion for the game is more steady than fiery.
“I’m aggressive like him,” said Mena. “But I’m more patient, under control and calmed down.”
Mena is listed at 6-foot-2 and gets the “projectable” label plenty, but he’s already started to fill out. And with their belief that rehab pitching coach Donnie Veal ironed out the spin efficiency issues with Mena’s fastball, the Sox would be perfectly happy if it sat 92-93 mph with consistent carry, above-average extension and the ability to reach back for 95 mph when he needs it. He is young, he has not had many long outings and just cleared 100 innings in a season for the first time, but for the most part has done all of this in spurts already.
The selling point on Mena is a curveball — that he knows how to use it, and what it means for him to have a handle on these facets of pitching at such a young age.
“There’s a lot of things about (Mena’s curveballs) that makes them special,” said Danny Farquhar, who was Mena’s pitching coach at Winston-Salem. “One of them: they’re very hard. The harder the breaking ball, most of the time, the better it performs. The shape to them: it’s very sharp and very late, with how much velocity and how much spin he puts on it, it’s a late break. Then the final and probably the most important component of it, he can command them. We joked last year: in 3-2 counts, what do you think his curveball percentage was?”
50? Surely it was high, but…
“It was either 90, or 100 percent,” laughed Farquhar. “I was like hey, man, like, you know they have the report on you?”
“He has the ability to manipulate it, so the average movement of it doesn’t jump off the page,” Ely said. “It’s late-breaking, which there’s no metric for. It spins well and it moves in the hitting zone. He throws one at minus-6 (inches of inverted vertical break) and then he’ll throw one at minus-13, and one’s a putaway and one is for a strike.”
Mena ascribes no great origin story to his ability to spin the baseball. He said he’s always been comfortable with it, and since he’s dedicated himself to his dream since he was 12, the spin is now second nature. The comfort to execute a breaking ball pretty much every time in a full count gives the team confidence that he can continue to build out a horizontally sweeping slider from the new grip Farquhar showed him in the second half of the season. Mena probably needs to get comfortable with his changeup, beyond just throwing it eight times per game, because Farquhar (jokingly) threatened to fine the Winston-Salem catchers if he threw it less than that.
“I never actually fined Adam Hackenberg, Keegan Fish or Colby Smelley any money,” said Farquhar, though he has had plenty of luck challenging Mena to get more efficient to stay under his pitch count.
No one with the Sox is trying to sell Mena as the next ace of the staff, since they can’t suddenly give him Norge Vera’s towering frame and velocity. He’ll need another “amazing season” to get on the radar of top-100 prospect lists and start the conversation about his major-league ETA. There are some who wouldn’t blame any evaluator for looking at Mena now — an average-sized right-hander with average velocity and one major league-viable off-speed pitch out of a high three-quarters slot — and think that for all his makeup and pitchability, he’s a future fifth starter until he proves otherwise.
Being every coach’s favorite White Sox pitching prospect doesn’t actually make him the best prospect. But those coaches would argue Mena can’t be ruled out to get better and make his mid-rotation potential a reality — because it’s so easy to help him get better.
“He’ll throw a pitch in the bullpen and we’re looking at the TrackMan and watching it with our eyes, and he’ll immediately have this grimace and immediately be like ‘What happened? That one wasn’t as good,'” Teaford said. “He knows instinctively when he gets off, to make corrections. As a coach, that’s what you’re dying to have: a person that can feel that and change it on the fly in one pitch. He can do that with his breaking ball.”
“If he makes a bad pitch, and let’s say the guy fouls it off or swings through it, when we’re watching video he’ll be like, ‘Ooh, I made a bad pitch right there and I got away with it,’” Farquhar said. “Even though it was a swing and a miss, he understands at higher levels that he’s not going to get away with that. He shows accountability.”
“He is always trying and willing to make a fool of himself,” said Santana, who says only Bryan Ramos really compares to Mena as a quick learner of English in the Sox system. “He asks for advice when he needs it. He’s not afraid to ask for help. He’s not afraid to like, say, ‘Hey, this situation is happening to me, what should I do?’ Whereas some kids his age think they already know what to do. He’s not like that.”
Mena spoke with The Athletic from Arizona, near the team complex where he’s preparing for spring training. He’s already lauded by his coaches for moving his fastball to different quadrants of the zone, understanding how to throw his curveball, and relative to his age and experience level, not departing his mechanics to throw harder. But when asked what he’s working on, “my location” is still his fallback answer. It’s always something.
“I was, like you said, younger, but I’m always trying to learn from everybody,” Mena said. “And I was close to good people and that helped me. My teammates are older than me, so every time I’m trying to listen to everybody. If they say something good, I’ll take it and that helps me a lot.”
There are a host of pitching prospects who have dominated A-ball with an incomplete skill set, only to later reveal they did not have another wave of development in them. Mena’s precocious maturity is impressive and allowed him to defy his age with early success, but it doesn’t necessarily mean there’s untapped upside for him to unfurl against more sophisticated hitters who have seen curveballs as good as his before. Which is all to say, it’s not going to get any easier from here.
But Mena finally zeroed in on why he liked watching Ventura.
“I’m never afraid,” he said. “I think I took that from him.”
https://theathletic.com/3996193/2022/12 ... tian-mena/