3B:
Miguel Vargas, Tulsa Drillers (Double-A)
(Dodgers No. 9)
.444/.462/.840, 6 G, 11-for-25, 3 HR, 1 2B, 8 RBI, 6 R, 1 BB, 2 K, 1 SB
You won’t find many doubting Vargas’ offensive potential, and he put that on full display last week against Wichita. His biggest performance of the week came Saturday when he notched his first multihomer game of the season with a pair of solo dingers in a 5-2 win. Playing in his age-21 season, Vargas has handled a midseason jump to Double-A quite well and is hitting .314/.366/.532 with seven homers in 37 games at the Minors’ second-highest level. He still faces questions about an ability to stick to third base, but his bat gives him a decent floor.
OF:
Jairo Pomares, San Jose Giants (Low-A)
(Giants No. 13)
.435/.444/.826, 6 G, 10-for-23, 2 HR, 3 2B, 8 RBI, 3 R, 0 BB, 7 K
Since signing for $975,000 out of Cuba in July 2018, Pomares has shown a knack for hitting in the Giants system, and that has continued this season at Low-A. The left-handed masher strung together back-to-back three-hit games on Friday and Saturday and followed them up with two more knocks on Sunday. A late start to the season has kept him from qualifying for a batting title, but his .372 average, .693 slugging percentage and 1.122 OPS are all tops among Low-A hitters with at least 200 plate appearances at the level this season.
https://www.mlb.com/news/prospect-team- ... e-coverage
Prospect analysis often requires making predictions about an unpredictable game and its unpredictable players. That sense of the unknown is one reason why breakout prospects intrigue us so much.
Every year, a player who entered the season as a relative unknown ends up dominating as soon as the first pitch is thrown on Opening Day.
The Nationals’ Juan Soto was that way in 2018, when he returned from a series of injuries in the prior season to rip through Low-A, High-A and Double-A in just 39 games on the way to big league stardom.
This year, Blue Jays catcher
Gabriel Moreno stands as one of the biggest breakouts in baseball. Through 32 games at Double-A he hit .373/.441/.651 with eight home runs. He drew 14 walks against 22 strikeouts.
But to those who got to watch the 21-year-old Venezuelan in 2020, this isn’t an opening act. It’s an encore performance.
Blue Jays minor league hitting coordinator Hunter Mense puts it this way: “I talked to some reporters before the season and their first question was: ‘Is there anybody we’re missing or anybody that might be a little bit too low?’ and my answer was always emphatically Gabriel Moreno.
“What everybody missed out on last year was just seeing some of the strides that guys made and, for him, improving some of the strength that he had.
“He was already one of my favorites in the organization because of what he can do offensively, but then you fast-forward a year and—and nobody got to see him—and it was like, ‘Yeah he’s the absolute real deal.’ ”
Moreno entered the season ranked as Toronto’s No. 8 prospect. Internally, the Blue Jays knew his stock was about to explode because of the work he’d done behind the scenes at the team’s alternate training site.
Now, Moreno has quickly joined the Mets’ Francisco Alvarez and the Orioles’ Adley Rutschman in the conversation for the game’s best young catching prospect.
“He’s already pretty much a plus defender,” one scout said. “The receiving is excellent. The blocking’s really good. He can throw. The release is good. Everything you want to see, he already does, and he’s 21.
“He does it all. To be honest, I do not think I saw him make a single mistake. I saw at least four games, maybe five, of him catching and I don’t think I saw any mistakes.”
If standout defense were the bulk of Moreno’s tools, he would still be a quality candidate for a long big league career, but his work behind the plate is only half of his talent. He can really hit, too.
Moreno began the 2021 season as the fifth-youngest player in the Double-A Northeast, yet he was just the third-youngest on his own team, behind righthanders Simeon Woods Richardson and Elvis Luciano. Moreno had been an offensive menace since Day One.
Only a late-June thumb fracture that resulted from a hit by pitch could slow Moreno. For now.
“His approach is aggressive, but it’s good aggression,” the scout said. “It’s swinging at balls that he should be swinging at, which is really the mark of a good hitter . . . No matter if the rest of his body gets a little bit fooled, his hands are always back. He uses the whole field
“He just smoked balls back up the middle, and is totally content to do that. Obviously in today’s game, number one, those guys are rarer. Number two, they’re extremely valuable because no one does that.”
When he got to Low-A in 2019, Moreno made an immediate impact, swatting a home run in his first game with Lansing. He finished his stint at the level with impressive numbers, but the Blue Jays wanted to see more oomph behind the balls he put in play.
A 19-year-old needing to get stronger is understandable, because many players that age are still growing into their bodies. But Moreno was already showing an innate ability to make contact, so the Blue Jays knew they had to work carefully to thread the needle of adding power without sacrificing any of his raw hitting ability.
Because of the travel restrictions in Venezuela during the pandemic last year, Moreno stayed in Florida before the Blue Jays’ alternate training site opened in Rochester, N.Y. There, just as he had in Low-A in 2019, Moreno made a quick, loud impression.
“The first ball that he hit was—I think it was off of (Blue Jays reliever) Julian Merryweather—and it was a line drive into left field at 104-105 (mph), which he hadn’t touched when he was in Low-A in 2019,” Mense said.
“So it was like, ‘Oh, wow. OK, so he’s already reached a new peak, one swing into this thing.’ And then there were times where he would hit balls 109-110 And we’re like, ‘OK, this is starting to come together now.’ So that’s the next piece that I think we could check off.”
In today’s game, the high-spin fastball at the top of the zone is the favorite weapon of many pitchers. Most hitters struggle to get the bat on the ball, and if they do, it’s likely going to result in weak contact. One of the early things that stuck out about Moreno was that he was the rare hitter who wasn’t overly susceptible to that type of pitch.
“When we watched him, it was always one of those things that, with how the game is being pitched nowadays, he was going to be OK because he wasn’t going to get blown away by these fastballs, especially these fastballs up in the zone,” Mense said. “He could kind of launch the barrel high and stay quote-unquote above the baseball a bit longer than what most guys can because he grew up not being very strong.
“Because of that, he had to hit balls low because he knew that for him to get hits, he wasn’t going to be able to hit them in the air and get them over guys’ heads and get him over the fence . . . Even when he first got with us, the path was a little bit more above the ball to where it was like a low line drive-type of stroke. The more he worked like that, it helped when he got into games because he didn’t miss underneath those fastballs that now you see a lot of those guys miss underneath.”
Moreno still has areas to polish before he’s ready for the big leagues. In particular, the Blue Jays would like to see him tighten his pitch selection a little bit more in terms of deciding which pitches he can impact before letting it rip.
Taking what he showed in the controlled atmosphere at the alternate site and translating it into the upper levels of the minors has made Moreno one of the season’s breakout stars.
https://www.baseballamerica.com/stories ... m-in-2021/
Bryan De La Cruz | MIA, OF – 113 wRC+, 2 HR, 7 RBI in 60 PA
Sticking in Miami, De La Cruz came over in the Yimi Garcia deal and immediately joined the Marlins where he has been installed in rightfield. He is hitting a bit with a .298/.333/.439 line, but strikeouts are a concern. He has a 32% K rate with a 38% O-Swing rate being the biggest issue in his profile. His 11% SwStr rate is about average so there could be some strikeout improvement if he stops chasing so much. De La Cruz hit 12 HR with a 112 wRC+ at Triple-A, though the .324 AVG stands out. At his best, he can curb the strikeouts and hit .270 or better with a little pop.
https://fantasy.fangraphs.com/who-are-these-guys/