As we wind into the final weeks of the 2024 minor league season, here's this month's A's system Q&A, wherein I got a lot of questions about the state of things headed toward the offseason.
These two notions are a bit amorphous, because both performance and tools interact with age and so forth, but for a fun rough sense, let’s say this is the tools/upside version:
Denzel Clarke
Henry Bolte
Luis Morales
Steven Echavarria
Jacob Wilson
All these guys except Clarke are young for their levels (and Clarke is basically an AAA player anyway, which he’s young for) and have a ton of tools. Clarke has become an excellent center fielder in addition to the obvious ridiculous strength and big bat speed, and he has feel for the game that doesn’t really cut into his ability to flash all of them consistently. Same with Bolte–the arm isn’t quite there right now, but he’s got a great swing, huge bat speed, is a terror on the bases, and has very good overall feel for what he’s doing. Morales and Echavarria can throw in the upper 90s with projection remaining and have strong slider/changeup combinations. Wilson ends up fifth because he’s so much less imposing physically, but his overall body control in the box and in the field are special.
And on performance:
Wilson
Max Muncy
Nick Kurtz
Bolte
Chen Zhong-Ao Zhuang
You could also argue for Mason Barnett fifth or even Nate Nankil. Here you’ve really got to think about adjusting for age relative to level, something I wrote a whole giant thing on a couple years ago. It’s hard to say with Kurtz since he’s so new to pro ball, but he’s obviously not so much a tools guy, being 1B-only, as a performance guy, and so it makes sense to credit him here.
This is also where Muncy shines. I got a couple questions specifically about him that I’ll get into later on, but he’s performing well in Vegas in what would’ve been his draft year if he went to college–he’s younger than almost every position player in Lansing, as is Bolte. Zhuang has obviously been dominant this year: he doesn’t stand out as much in an age relative to level sense, but he does so more if you account for his lack of pro experience, since he missed a year and a half with shoulder trouble. Barnett is debatably over Zhuang because he’s a similar age with a much longer Texas League track record–more on him as this Q&A proceeds as well.
Sure, if you’ll allow me to disregard Gage Jump for the time being–since he has yet to make his pro debut, I don’t have much of a read on him. He may well fit somewhere in the top 5, but I can’t really say as of yet. Otherwise, we have this:
Tier 1:
Luis Morales
Steven Echavarria
Tier 2:
Mason Barnett
Chen Zhong-Ao Zhuang
Jack Perkins
And that’s a clean break–the third tier begins with # 6 (probably J.T. Ginn, followed by guys like Hoglund, Basso, Beers, Salinas, Morris, etc.).
What separates these five guys from everyone else is that when they’ve been healthy, they’ve:
Touched 97 mph or higher
Had decent or better life on the fastball that produces swinging strikes with it
Shown a legitimate out pitch
Shown a consistently usable tertiary pitch (or pitches)
Thrown at least a fair number of strikes with a delivery that seems mechanically workable
Right away, A and B make for an exclusive club. The only other starting pitcher in the system who’s met those two criteria this year is Franck De La Rosa, who isn’t there on D and E. Royber Salinas was there last year to some extent but his fastball shape backed up this season, and command is a question for him too.
That doesn’t mean that these are an airtight set of criteria or anything, but the thing I come back to with this quintet is that they’re always displaying this across-the-board aptitude when they’re healthy (which unfortunately hasn’t been all the time save Barnett and Echavarria, but the same can be said for most of the pitchers the next tier down). The next tier down, you not only get some of these criteria questionable (97+ for almost everyone, tertiary pitch for Ginn, out pitch for Basso/Morris, fastball life for Beers/Salinas/Hoglund, command for Salinas), but also more fluctuations in form that often translate to fluctuations in performance. When those guys are the best versions of themselves, they look like they belong in that second tier, but often they aren’t, and that knocks them down to the next tier.
The highest upside in the system would be one of the Tier 1 guys. Morales has a rarer set of athletic gifts than Echavarria, but Echavarria probably already has more aptitude for pitching and is more likely to maximize what he has in the long run. He’s also less of a finished product, since he’s so much younger, which means he’s more variable. Overall, I guess I’d give the highest ceiling to Morales, but not by much.
The highest floor in the system is probably Barnett, because he’s been the most durable of these guys and has a frame and motion that suggest continued durability, along with a strong and diverse set of pitches with good shapes. He’ll have to prove he can pitch efficiently to be more than a five-and-dive type of starter, but he’s got more of a chance to make 100 MLB starts than anyone in the system, in my opinion.
This basically piggybacks on the prior question, with the addition of the MLB guys, which certainly complicates things. It really is a dizzying list:
JP Sears
Osvaldo Bido
Joe Boyle
Joey Estes
Ken Waldichuk
Luis Medina
Mitch Spence
Hogan Harris
Gunnar Hoglund
J.T. Ginn
Brady Basso
Blake Beers
Chen Zhong-Ao Zhuang
Jack Perkins
James González
Royber Salinas
Mason Barnett
That’s 17 names, and there are easily more I could include, but (will Miller start? What if Morales is ready? Jake Walkinshaw is carving in Midland right now!), but we can at least say these are the 17 guys currently in the org who probably have the cleanest shot at the Opening Day 2026 rotation.
We can look at this in basically two directions: Who is easiest to put toward the bottom of the list, and who is easiest to put at the top? Well, at the top, Joey Estes is 22 and pitching reasonably well in the bigs, so that feels like an easy first call: he won’t even be arbitration-eligible in 2026, so it’s hard to imagine the A’s trading him before then, too. On the bottom, González feels like something of a long shot to break through all of the names in front of him. 2026 will be Salinas’ last option year if he’s still around, and he’s now behind most of the other yet-to-debut guys in terms of MLB readiness; there'll be some reason to think about the bullpen at that point. Medina will just be getting back from Tommy John and likely at least initially gets eased in in a relief role. One in, three out, 13 more names for five remaining spots.
It really does become a challenge to find a slam-dunk second name. I think the organization will prioritize Ken Waldichuk coming off of TJ and he should be healthy by then, and I just talked about Barnett having a high floor, so sure, I’ll go ahead and pencil them in. Conversely, much as I still hold out some hope for Starter Joe Boyle, as these names come up and challenge for spots, there’s a very solid chance he moves to the pen, so we’ll take him out of the running. I like Hogan Harris’ potential as a reliever who can swing into a starting role when needed midseason, and with 2026 being potentially their first 40-man seasons, let’s say Zhuang and Perkins don’t quite make it in April 2026–Zhuang could run into issues with the home run ball in Vegas, in particular.
So that narrows it to Sears, Bido, Spence, Hoglund, Ginn, Basso, and Beers for the final 3. I wouldn’t be surprised if Sears is traded by then, even as soon as this offseason–he’s an extreme flyball guy who’s benefited from the Coliseum, and perhaps they try to do the Cole Irvin thing there. He’ll be in arbitration in 2026, too. Beyond that, I really feel like we’re starting to split hairs. I guess Spence feels a bit less exciting than the other options, and Beers’ sweeper could play up in relief. I really want to include Ginn, but he’s slightly less of a complete pitcher than the other guys and I guess that would point slightly more to a bullpen role than them. So we’re left with:
Estes
Waldichuk
Barnett
Bido
Basso
Hoglund
I can’t stress enough how difficult it is to figure out how to rank like # 2-14 in probability, though. It’s really close.
It’s a good problem to have, no? I mean, sure, there’s something of a logjam if you put it that way, but:
Stuff always happens (more on this later), and
It’s not as though the other positions are comparatively starved for talent.
I mean, at catcher, the MLB team has two young guys in there, and then you’ve got a former first-round pick opening next year as the presumed Triple-A starter, and there’s Soderstrom as still a possibility if something happens with the current catchers and Kurtz takes over at 1B. Infield, you’ve already got a pileup at or near the bigs with Gelof, Hernaiz, Schuemann, Wilson, Allen, Harris, and Muncy. So it’s not as though you can’t make a similar sort of two-players-per-spot logjam hypothetical at every position other than pitcher. I don’t think the position player talent in the org vastly tilts toward the outfield or anything, and if it did, the 2024 draft class tilts it pretty heavily away from that (as interesting as Green, Jr. and Leary have looked in Stockton in the early going).
But back to the first point. Stuff happens. So, you’ve given me eight names there. Off the top, I’d say Bowman has a lot of work to do to project as a straight-up starter and has pretty consistently projected as a CF/2B utility/pinch-runner type since he got in the A’s organization. For him to be someone you’re really happy going into the season as a starter with, he has to hit probably his…85th percentile projection, something like that? Similarly, time’s running short on Ruiz carving out a starting role, given the defensive concerns and struggles consistently impacting the ball. Definitely possible it comes together, but not something to really count on at this point. We also don’t know what Milone in LF looks like: it’s an interesting possibility, but it may be that he ends up as more of a roving lefty-masher in a sort of 1B/LF role (platooning Soderstrom or Kurtz if they fall short of projections, maybe?).
So that gets you down to five: Butler, Bleday, Clarke, Thomas, Bolte. All exciting players for sure, but a couple of things stand out to me in looking at that. First, how much are Bleday and Bolte even going to overlap? Bolte isn’t Rule 5 eligible until after 2026; I’d project he’d maybe be ready August ‘26 or so if things go reasonably well. So he and Bleday probably don’t have huge overlap until 2027, at which point Bleday will be 29 and well into arbitration. He’s certainly put together a nice year and deserves to enter 2025 as a starter, but I don’t think it’s a lock that he’s a no-doubt starter two-plus years from now. If he is and the other guys have hit reasonable ceilings, then great, he’s a trade candidate I suppose, or someone is. Thomas, Bolte, and Clarke all have some risk to them as prospects too, with Thomas’ extremely aggressive approach and the strikeout issues of the other two. I like all three guys and think they’ve got all sorts of potential, but there’s also reason to expect something to go wrong for someone somewhere…which of course makes it nice to still have guys like Ruiz, Bowman, and Milone around on the chance that they can step up if the more highly-touted guys have unexpected struggles.
So, yeah, overall, nice problem to have, but I see that list of names more as good insulation for the inevitable twists and turns of career paths than a giant pileup of 3-WAR players in the making (much as we can hope for the latter). Should be a solid starting outfield that comes from it, but it doesn’t seem out of step with the depth at other positions, and if it becomes so, then that’s when you really think about moving resources around in trades.
There are three distinctly different reasons those three guys strike out a lot. Clarke has a big body to coordinate, quite a bit of length to his swing, and a big strike zone to cover. Thomas has no trouble making a ton of contact in the zone, but he chases a lot outside the zone and isn’t the sort of bad-ball hitter who can keep his strikeout rate low with that tendency. Bolte has way less chasing in his game than a lot of national reports say he does (same with Ryan Lasko, who every report seems to say chases a ton of breaking balls; he doesn’t. Will Simpson does though, and reports don’t say that. Always interesting what gets mainstreamed)–he’s always had a plus approach–but tends to have trouble adjusting to quality sequencing within the zone.
Clarke is always going to strike out a lot. His 30.9% rate as of today does undersell what he’s capable of–he’s at 23.1% since June 12–but I have a hard time seeing him sustain much under 25% in the big leagues unless he were to adopt a very aggressive approach that would compromise him in other ways.
Thomas could definitely get under the 28% he’s currently running in Vegas as a big leaguer, but it’s always going to be solidly in the twenties unless he really alters his approach. He could–I think it’s more just an aggressive mentality than underlying pitch recognition stuff–but he’s showed little desire to move his game in that direction, and what he’s doing has obviously gotten him to Vegas in under two years with no real hitches. I suspect he settles in as a 23% type guy if things go relatively well.
Bolte is the one with the biggest chance to reshape his contact profile, because his swing covers the zone pretty well and is quite simple and he’s got the plus approach dialed in. He’s still very young and simply needs to get a bigger database of high-quality pro stuff–i.e., upper-minors reps–to be able to master the finer points of everything, mostly in terms of timing and two-strike hitting. He’s always cut his strikeout rates as he’s adjusted to levels–check his Lansing April vs. May, for instance. I wouldn’t be surprised if his development from here takes a Matt Chapman 2017-19 kind of trajectory on the contact front–not that he’ll be a 22% strikeout big leaguer in 2026, but that we’ll see rapid year-over-year progress as he settles into pro ball further. There are some right-tail outcomes where he’s not over 20% some years in the bigs.
If it's too early, then I've sure been guilty of thinking about it too early as well!
Actually breaking this down fully is something that I think would take a full-length, 5,000-word-plus article in itself, and I don’t want to take up half the space in this whole thing just talking about it. So I’ll give you the quick version.
Here are the Rule 5-eligible players in the upper minors (I don’t think anyone in the lower minors is likely to be a serious R5 consideration) not currently on the 40-man roster who feel like they have a nonzero chance of being drafted:
Euribiel Ángeles
Cooper Bowman
Blake Beers
Brayan Buelvas
Denzel Clarke
Danis Correa
Ryan Cusick
Logan Davidson
Jordan Díaz
Stevie Emanuels
James González
Gunnar Hoglund
Kyle Muller
Pedro Santos
So that’s 14 names. Correa, Díaz, and Muller technically aren’t Rule 5 concerns, but they hit minor league free agency if they’re not 40’d.
Now, if I had to rank these names in terms of importance to protect (which is a mix of how good the player is and the likelihood of losing them if left unprotected), I’d come up with something like this:
Clarke
Hoglund
Bowman
Beers
Cusick
Correa
Díaz
Santos
Muller
Davidson
González
Ángeles
Emanuels
Buelvas
Personally, I’d definitely want to protect the top five, and I’m fine leaving the bottom five unprotected. The middle four are the tough calls.
So you look at that up against the A’s current 40-man situation. There are currently 44 guys on the roster if you include the 60-day IL quartet, but for offseason purposes, it drops back to 39 with the pending free agencies of Trevor Gott, Ross Stripling, Alex Wood, T.J. McFarland, and Scott Alexander. So, okay, boom, we’ve got room for Clarke.
From there, you’re really doing a comparison game of the existing 40-man guys to the guys on this list. It’s not hard to find a couple of players who are pretty clear non-tender/DFA options to make room for the top couple of names on the list. Where it gets tricky is again, those middle guys. Would you rather have Ryan Noda or Kyle Muller? Daz Cameron or Jordan Díaz? Tyler Nevin or a moderate risk of losing Pedro Santos?
Ultimately, I think it’s overall doable to get seven or eight of these guys on the list without feeling like you’ve lost a lot off of the existing 40-man. It’ll be interesting to see if the A’s also elect to go down to 39 and make a selection themselves: something that’s been productive the last two years with Noda and Spence. But barring some new developments between now and then, I’d say not protecting anyone in that top five is a mistake and protecting anyone outside of the top eleven probably is as well. The interesting dynamic beyond that is with those three pending free agents and who gets DFA’d to make room. I’ll probably explain all of this in more detail sometime in the offseason, but that’s my position right now on the 40-man picture.
Hmm…this is a tough one. Guys don’t just jump into the top 10 out of nowhere; recall I had Zhuang # 14 on my midseason top 50 in 2022. As it stands, a ton of guys in the 10-40 range are upper-minors types who will graduate to the bigs very quickly if their performance improves, and many of the lower-minors guys (Nankil, Kuroda-Grauer, Simpson, Johnston, etc.) are performing well. It’s more a matter of translating/sustaining that performance than improving it.
So, acknowledging that this is all a bit of a dart-throw and that big breakouts don’t come all that often, we can think about a couple of types of players. First, there are guys who are performing pretty well and sit fairly high on the A’s prospect list but could take a bit of a step forward. If Brennan Milone really slugs in Vegas and finds a non-1B position, I could see him getting there. Same with Nankil in Midland, though I think he won’t get there until the second half of the year.
Then you’ve got the 2024 draft picks, who obviously are largely wild cards outside of the top 3 rounds. Rodney Green, Jr. is talented, has hit the ball hard so far and shown a good approach, so if he finds a way to cut the strikeouts, he’s a breakout candidate. Sam Stuhr could be said to have some Jack Perkins-esque attributes as a fifth-rounder, and Perkins broke out to near-top 10 status once his first full season got going.
Then you’ve got projectable younger guys, mostly pitchers. Kade Morris has plenty more room to fill out his frame and add strength; it would only be so surprising to see him show up in April sitting 96 and blowing guys away. Will Johnston is a guy who could maybe add another tick of velo and for whom continued strong strikeout performance in Midland would provide a huge boost to the likelihood he can be a big league starter. Jackson Finley isn’t as projectable, but he already has good stuff and could see his pitchability come together in Lansing next year. Donny Troconis is a name to keep an eye on–still a teenager, already can push his fastball into the mid-90s, struck out a lot of guys in Arizona, and has more present feel for pitching than some of the other hard-throwing teenagers in the org. Outfielder Carlos Pacheco is a top-of-the-scale runner and impact defender who could burst onto radars if he can hit well in Stockton next season. And I wouldn’t rule out the chance of a much better Myles Naylor showing up next season.
If any of those guys actually make it into the top 10 I don’t know, but for various reasons, they all have better chances than most other guys to be significant risers from where they are now in 2025.
Good question. I assume those rosters will be out in the very near future.
Yeah, you look for guys who’ve missed some time this year as maybe comprising three of the spots, with the other three going to guys they just want to send to get exposure. In terms of injury returners, you’ve got Walkinshaw excelling in Midland right now. Perkins, Muncy, and Cusick have AFL experience but could go there again, I suppose. And then Clark Elliott, though he’s missed this past week himself (though isn’t on the IL as of this writing). If any currently-injured pitchers get healthy over the next month, they’d be candidates too.
Beyond that, you’re just looking for guys mostly in that High-A/Double-A area who could stand to have a strong conclusion to their seasons. Starting pitchers would probably have to come from Lansing, because they’ve worked the Midland staff pretty hard…could see someone like Mitch Myers or Grant Judkins sneaking in. Reliever-wise, you could be looking at Diego Barrera, Micah Dallas, or Colton Johnson.
I expect a heralded position player to be in there. Henry Bolte seems fairly likely, but I could also see Susac or Milone headed there, and I wouldn’t be shocked if they send one of the draft picks, either…Kurtz, White, and Kuroda-Grauer all feel like the sorts of guys who might not wilt under that test. Brayan Buelvas and Caeden Trenkle could also be possibilities in an effort to get them more momentum against upper-minors-type arms. It feels less likely to me that they’ll reach to Lansing/the 2023 draft class for position players, but if they do, I wouldn’t be surprised to see them tab Will Simpson, perhaps in a bid to send him to a non-1B position given that there’s now Soderstrom and Kurtz in front of him there, to say nothing of Milone as well. Guys like Lasko and Nate Nankil would be very interesting, as would pitchers like Will Johnston or Jackson Finley, but if I had to guess, I’d guess they’ll let the 2023 draftees rest after their first full season.
Overall, then, something like a Bolte-Elliott-Susac-Walkinshaw-Johnson-Barrera group feels like about the best guess there is. I don’t have huge preferences personally, but I do want to see them get Elliott moving and give him a more appropriate test than the Cal League this season, because you’d really like to see him open 2025 in Midland if possible.
One variable that really hangs over this question is what format the A’s A-ball rosters take next year. This season, spearheaded by special assistant Grady Fuson, the organization primarily used a tandeming strategy, so they essentially had 20 A-ball starters instead of 10. If they opt to go back to more traditional rotations, even with some tandeming next year, right away that’ll lop off a half-dozen starting spots and thus necessitate a ton of conversions. Otherwise, it’ll be relatively few. Since we obviously don’t know what direction they’ll go right now, all we can do is think about a few of the names that are most likely.
The biggest one is Franck De La Rosa, assuming he’s healthy. He’s already 24, is a free agent after 2025, and has to get moving; I think the A’s had him start this year in a bid to get him more innings to make up for lost time, but the injury obviously scuttled that. Still, he’s got a huge fastball-slider combo and should get on roughly a Pedro Santos kind of track once he’s healthy again.
Corey Avant is another obvious one. He was a college reliever and the A’s had him in the Stockton tandem most of the year to try to get him a more diverse arsenal (check, three solid pitches now) and more command (better than he was early in the year, but a long way to go). Since he was a senior sign, the A’s may be better off pushing him to Lansing as a reliever next year rather than having him repeat Stockton.
Wander Guante has three pitches, but he’s a lower-slot guy without a true out pitch who could really use a bit of a velo bump and an opportunity to unleash a lot of sliders. The Midland bullpen feels like the right place for him next spring.
I think you’ve gotta look at Jose Dicochea as well, since he’s a free agent after next year and the org has to try to get him moving. He’s got the four-pitch arsenal to start, but the command hasn’t been consistent enough. I said on the midseason list that he’s basically where Stevie Emanuels was mid-2022 and could have a similar rise through the system in a relief role, and I still see that possibility.
Jacob Watters had some nice moments over the summer where he started to put some stuff together, and he had finally added a cutter right before getting hurt a few weeks ago. Maybe that’s enough to keep him starting next April (assuming he’s healthy), but time is running short there. The A’s have to push him to Midland, and I suspect he could have a similar general season as Cusick has this year (hopefully without the injuries).
Yunior Tur is a reliever-turned starter in Stockton who’s had solid results and probably should continue to start in Lansing–he was a 2023 signee from Cuba, so the A’s have the luxury of time here–but he’ll head back to the bullpen eventually if he can’t come up with a solid breaking ball to complement his big fastball-Vulcan change combo.
Other hard throwers who could potentially translate well to the bullpen would be Felix Castro (who was great as a DSL closer in 2023 before starting in Arizona this year), and Jefferson Jean (sits 94-97 but hasn’t come up with good offspeeds or pitchability yet).
Beyond that, you’re really waiting to see who struggles, as Cusick did. Sometimes, it’s surprising what more finesse-y guys can do in the ‘pen even if they don’t seem like obvious fits for the role–look how much better Reliever Jack Cushing is in Vegas than Starter Jack Cushing was, or how former A’s farmhand Osvaldo Berrios (now touching 96 after sitting 89-92 as an A’s org starter and 92-94 as a late-2022 reliever) is carving as a Cardinals org reliever now. Blaze Pontes, whose stuff is eerily similar to starter-era Berrios’, is the obvious current name in the finesse category (especially given his success as a Stockton reliever last year), but others could emerge later. Tzu-Chen Sha, maybe? Gotta get some velo going there, maybe the deception would play up in relief. Tom Reisinger III throwing even more curveballs than he already does would be interesting.
Okay, let’s talk about Max Muncy. First, no, I’m not really worried about the errors–maybe at third that could be an issue, but we don’t really know, since he’s had no time to adjust to that position yet. The guy fielded .962 last year, and left-side infielders tend to cut down dramatically on miscues in their early-to-mid-20s. It’s probably a blip, and he likely doesn’t even end up at shortstop anyway given that Wilson’s around (though I think he can handle it and haven’t seen many dissenting opinions on that in recent years, after he faced a lot of defensive questions circa 2021-22). If he has protracted issues adjusting to third, that would be worrisome, but tools-wise he should be plus there. We’ll have to see.
As for his timeline to the majors, he’s not Rule 5 eligible and there are plenty of guys who are (as discussed earlier), so there’s no reason to rush. Remember, as of May 2023 he was struggling massively in Lansing. He’s only had about 100 games in the upper minors total. If he beats his Rule 5 clock and makes it to the bigs next year, that’s a huge success. I think he probably will, assuming there are no further health setbacks. The exact timetable will probably depend somewhat on how the Wilson/Gelof/Hernaiz/Allen quartet fares (perhaps Brett Harris, too), but mid-June feels about right, plus or minus six weeks or so.
I do think it’s an astute point about the fluctuations in the shape of Muncy’s performance, and it speaks to two things. First, he can do some of everything. He’s strong, has good bat speed, and can produce power to all fields with good plate coverage. Said plate coverage also allows him to spray the ball around and put together a strong batting average. He’s also shown a discerning eye and can take walks. It’s a pretty complete overall skillset.
But, secondly, none of those tools are truly massive unless Muncy really leans into them, and when he leans into one, it tends to compromise the others. And he’s tried it all. Muncy’s a real tinkerer up there in the box. I don’t watch as much of the Aviators as the other A’s farm teams (just because there’s Statcast data already and it’s the more valuable use of my time to watch/chart the other teams to get good datasets on them too), so I don’t know how much this has persisted, but previously, he’d change his batting stance sometimes three or four times in a week, often mid-game. Now he’s closed, now he’s straight-up, now he’s open. Now the hands start up, now they start down. He got himself in that huge early-2023 slump in Lansing because he was leaning into more of a power identity and swinging max-effort at everything, cratering his contact rate: in June, he relaxed into more of a gap approach and saw his in-zone contact rise from sub-60% to the 80s. Vegas, environmentally, doesn’t really punish that sort of identity chameleoning, so I imagine it’s continued there to some extent–the way his performance has oscillated certainly points to that sort of thing, as you say.
The tinkering might sound like a bad trait, and it certainly has its drawbacks, but everyone I’ve ever heard talk about Muncy raves about his work ethic and dedication. I think the tinkering is a side effect of that. The positive side is the work ethic no doubt aids him in escaping treacherous territory like that scary early-’23 form and puts him on the brink of big league success a little over a year later. I suspect there’ll be some frustrating adjustment periods in his first year-plus in the bigs, but I expect he’ll ultimately find a more consistent identity once there are no more levels to climb and be a productive, starting-caliber player.
Which identity will it be? That I’m unsure of. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s more of a doubles guy in his pre-arb years and then starts clearing a lot more fences in his mid-to-late-20s, but because of the wide tool base and his willingness to experiment, a variety of performance shapes are indeed possible here.
Hmm…comps. The thing with comps is that they’re can mean really different things. There’s the sort of stylistic ones–Ryan Lasko has the all-out playing style of Eric Byrnes, Mason Barnett’s fastball/slider combination and abbreviated windup evokes that of former A’s prospect/current Rockies reliever Jeff Criswell, Denzel Clarke can inspire some Judge-ian wonder–but they don’t really capture the actual tier of prospect they are. Barnett is a better prospect than Criswell is, and Lasko and (obviously) Clarke would be fortunate to fully live up to Byrnes and Judge. I’ve compared Gunnar Hoglund to Aaron Nola multiple times in these pages, same thing, or saying Jacob Wilson’s hitting style has Ichiro-y qualities.
Then there are shape-of-performance comps, where you basically project the big league statline of a prospect, then try to find a player with about that statline. J.T. Ginn is Brady Singer. Euribiel Ángeles is Hanser Alberto. Shane McGuire is Josh Thole. Colby Thomas is Nick Castellanos with better defense. Daniel Susac is Yan Gomes. Luis Morales is Reynaldo López. Steven Echavarria is Jon Gray. Mileage varies on how much I think those are perfect fits for how those guys go about their business, but they provide decent approximations of what their production might look like.
Hopefully some of those satiate the desire for comps, in either form.
Thanks to everyone for submitting questions this month!
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