
ESPN MLB Insider Kiley McDaniel spoke to media earlier today about his Top 100 MLB Prospects series for ESPN.com. The series includes the top 100 prospects, team-by-team prospect rankings, predictions for the upcoming season, and more.
Kiley, just curious, just general impressions of the Tigers’ farm system which seems to be trending the right way.
KILEY MCDANIEL: Yeah, they’ve done a good job. One of the things I feel like I talk about a lot when I do radio interviews or things like that is does the team have a point of view. And that might sound like an amorphous thing, like how do you prove that, but the general idea is if there is a thing you’re good at — so like the Guardians are really good at college pitchers after the fourth round, Seattle is really good at high school position players in the first three rounds, Tampa Bay tends to win most of their trades — there’s little areas where each team that’s very successful or very efficient tend to be really good.
And that’s why Andrew Friedman was plucked from Tampa Bay, went to the Dodgers; obviously David Stearns started with Milwaukee, who’s very efficient, went to the Mets who now have big payrolls. These are the things that get GMs promoted. These are the things that make teams successful. This is why teams like Minnesota, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Tampa can succeed on smaller budgets.
Detroit, obviously, recently didn’t really have a thing they were good at. They’d have some high picks, some good prospects, young players, some veterans, but not really a cohesive idea of, oh, we’re good at this thing, we’re going to throw all the resources we have toward this thing.
And now I think their scouting in the draft on high school position players, I think, with Max Clark and Kevin McGonigle. I think they’ve done a good job in that area, maybe a little better than the average team. I think turning whatever you’d call like a mid-tier pitcher into like a useful big leaguer or useful prospect of some sort.
Brant Hurter, good example of that. Obviously a couple others. Getting Jackson Jobe from what looked like he might be a bust with a back issue to now being the top pitching prospect in baseball. Then we’ve got a couple straight good drafts with some guys they found in the later rounds in addition to not whiffing on the early picks.
I think they now are establishing an identity, and to use economic terms, they are finding value in every little pocket around the league. They’re not paying retail value for free agents the way maybe Javier Baez was.
So generally speaking, they seem to have an idea of what they’re doing, not to say that other regimes didn’t know what they were doing, but they have an idea and they’re executing it and they have an edge and putting resources toward it, and you see what the plan is and where things are going.
When you talk about a farm system, it’s very easy to look at a team where they draft pretty well and trade the guys away and then the guys graduate, like Atlanta, where they don’t really have a good farm system, but they have a good organization. And I think with Detroit you can now see that it’s a good farm system, but it’s a farm system as a product of having a well-run organization with a plan and a process and competencies and all these things that, as I’m saying them, probably sound silly. Like 20 teams in baseball you can’t really say that confidently about.
So again, speaking like sort of generally, they’re doing a good job. And that’s why you’re seeing rankings of prospects and rankings of the system go up because that’s what kind of happens, generally speaking, without a bunch of bad luck or whatever when you’re doing a good.
And so I would say, without going into a bunch of detail about any one player, they’re just generally doing a good job, which, again, sounds very basic. It’s not basic. It is difficult.
You mentioned Jackson Jobe. Looks like he’s going to be a guy that makes the rotation this year, at least fights for a spot. What did you see from him last year?
KILEY MCDANIEL: Yeah, there were obviously some concerns that guys like him that have such good stuff — when I look over here, I’m checking all my sheets and data and stuff.
Their staff moves so much that they have trouble keeping it in the strike zone. That is obviously a good problem to have and the thing that scouts look for, is is the sort of baseline athleticism ability to repeat your delivery and having an intent and idea on throwing this pitch in this area, generally, my plan is to do this, are all those pieces in place to then project the command to be there, maybe the control was there, throwing it over the plate, not having a high walk rate, but the command of the precise locations may not be there. He has all those pieces.
So while he may always be a guy that runs average or a little above walk rates, it’s going to be because he’s getting so many strikeouts because, again, his point of view, I’m going to strike a lot of guys out because I have really good stuff.
So I think that’s the kind of guy he’s going to be. Now, is that going to happen this year or two or three years from now? That’s the part that I and nobody can really know. But all the pieces are there for him to be maybe a little bit streaky this season but to be a guy that gives you front-line flashes for five, ten starts at a time, and you just cross your fingers that’s he’s going to give you 150 to 200 innings and give you that good year-end ERA and all that. But without a doubt he will show you flashes this year, and the question is when will those flashes become sustained.
Again, that I don’t know, but all the pieces are there for him to be a front-line pitcher possibly as soon as the second half of the season.
Kiley, since this is a press conference or Zoom about what can you do for me personally, all my questions are Rangers related. You mentioned the word volatility in your summation of the organization. Can you expand a little bit on that and what you mean by volatility?
KILEY MCDANIEL: Yeah, so Detroit is a decent example where Max Clark and Kevin McGonigle are high floor, even though they are high school hitters in the low minors. Normally low minors you would think high upside, low floor, a lot of things can happen. Maybe pitchers that are injured, guys with big stuff that can’t throw strikes. There’s like a wide range of what I can think about them a year from now.
But they actually have between Trey Sweeney, Dillon Dingler, Brant Hurter, guys that are going to break with a big league team or have already been with a big league team, you kind of know what they are. They’re probably not going to be super-duper stars. You know where they land.
And then their low minors guys are pitchers that throw strikes with good — not great — stuff and hitters that can hit but aren’t going to hit 30 home runs. So they’re actually like a high floor, lower ceiling, lower volatility system. All these guys are going to be in roughly the same area or graduate.
When you look at Texas, you look at Sebastian Walcott, who’s 19th in the top 100. He could be 1st or 100th next year. Like for a guy that’s that high, he can still be a lot of things. Kumar Rocker could get hurt again and maybe not be on the list or could graduate and win Rookie of the Year. He could do almost anything.
Then as you go a bit lower, Alejandro Rosario I think was fifth-round pick two years ago. He recently had almost no value, and now is in the middle of the top 100. Winston Santos, another guy that I think floor-ceiling thing is a little bit closer, but he also wasn’t a big prospect a year ago.
Jack Leiter, we’ve seen his ups and downs already. Malcolm Moore is a guy that might be first base only without standout power, even though I think he’s going to be a good player. Teodo is probably a reliever. Cameron Cauley can’t really hit but can really play shortstop. And then there’s all of those generally international outfielders, five of them in the next six guys, that could kinda be anything and could also be nothing.
So having that wide range of variance on all of the top 12 guys, minus I would say maybe Leiter and Justin Foscue, I think are both probably decent big leaguers without a huge range. All the other guys like that, most of the other systems don’t have that percentage, whatever it is, 80 percent of the top 10 or 12 guys, all could be either nothing or really good as soon as a year from now.
So while I don’t think that’s their aim or what they’re trying to do, they tend to be going for bigger-money guys in Latin America, which tends to be higher variance, they can wash out in A-Ball or be superstars. They haven’t really gotten that superstar Walcott might be.
I think that’s just what you’re going to see with this group. It’s also a lot of pitchers toward the top, and pitchers tend to have more variance, generally speaking.
It’s something I noticed. I don’t think that’s an aim for them or something they’ve landed on. I think those are the kinds of players they’ve ended up while looking for a wealth of different guys and a portfolio approach and all that sort of stuff. They ended up with some higher variance guys among their top 10 or 12 prospects.
I guess a follow-up to that would be is that at all impacted, like the variation there, is that at all impacted by the fact that in their case over the last two years they’ve promoted Young, Langford, Carter all to the Major Leagues, so they’ve skimmed off kind of their top level of high draft picks and all matriculated to the Big Leagues?
KILEY MCDANIEL: Yeah, I think in some systems Carter and Langford might still be in the minors if they were really conservative and really wanted everyone to prove themselves at each level.
So, yeah, I think there are some — and obviously like Smith, Duran, there’s a lot of guys in their first couple years in the Big Leagues that if they would have gotten hurt in Triple-A at the wrong time, they might still be there.
So, yeah, there are a lot of higher floor guys that you know what they are that could have been in the system that aren’t anymore. And I thought Jonathan Ornelas would be one of those guys, and then he fell off the map. There are certainly examples of those guys being pulled out of the system as opposed to they don’t acquire those guys, which they obviously have. But we just name checked all of them, and I guess they all graduated.
The one thing for me is you look at the guys you’ve got in the top 100 from this organization, two of them are pitchers, I think you could go down the list, and this club would be a little bit pitcher heavy in their top 15, top 20. Is this organization more talented on the pitching side than the position player side than it’s been for a while?
KILEY MCDANIEL: I would say there’s probably more — certainly in the top 200. I have four of the five guys are pitchers. But when you go beyond those top five, that like six to 15 area, it’s almost entirely position players because that is where the big bonuses and the high draft picks are going. So that’s kind of where they’re investing. Beyond that, whatever that would be, 16 to 30 or so, it’s 75 percent pitchers it looks like.
So, again, I don’t know if that’s — because when you take those guys off the top that graduated, you have the guys that are close to the Big Leagues that I think might all lose eligibility this year, and then you have a bunch of big-dollar draft international signees. They end up in those buckets.
And to go to the sort of point of view thing, I think there are some undervalued guys that have created value on the pitcher end of things. There are some international signee outfielders that have shown progress, but none of them had the huge breakthrough yet. Even Walcott, who has been promoted so aggressively, it’s hard to tell if he’s making progress because he’s like three levels ahead of the domestic guys his age.
I think, like I said, a high variance system, it could be one of the top 10 in baseball, or it could be like bottom 5 to 7 in baseball, depending on how that group of 10, 12 guys do, if they either play well and all graduate or play terrible and all fall down. It could really go in all different directions. And I don’t think it’s by intent, that’s just sort of what they’ve ended up with.
I wanted to ask you about a couple of Rays guys that you ranked. Chandler Simpson specifically, how far away do you think he is, and what could that upside look like?
KILEY MCDANIEL: I’m sure you read the blurb. He’s one of the hardest guys to pin down because he’s a real throwback, doing the Luis Castillo, Juan Pierre version of baseball. And that’s hard to project because we don’t have the 10 guys before him that have been doing this thing and then how it went.
Like Billy Hamilton might be like a decent comp and that they’re both almost off-the-scale level runners that don’t really have a lot of power and don’t really try to lift the ball very much. But that’s like an N of 1, like him not being as good as people thought but still really interesting and a useful ballplayer. Doesn’t say a lot.
I think we’ve seen a lot of guys in the Xavier Edwards-Vidal Brujan area from Tampa specifically, where there’s not a ton of power and there’s some hope that they can be one of the exceptions, the Steven Kwans, the Luis UrĂas that can rise above that and turn into a good everyday player.
With those guys, it looks like that may not be the case, may or may not. And so because Simpson is at the bottom of the scale in power and he’s doing a really specific thing that almost nobody in baseball has tried in like the last decade, it’s really hard to come in with a comp and be like, well, if he can do blank, then he’ll do this.
With Jonny DeLuca projected in center field, I’m not positive that Simpson isn’t their best organization because this is not a guy doing a thing that needs to go prove that he can do it in Triple-A. What he’s doing kinda works everywhere, the same it worked at Georgia Tech, the way it’s going to work in the Big Leagues, because he doesn’t even really need to swing at strikes. He’s not trying to hit the ball very far. In a way, I can hit the ball 20 feet if I put the bat on it, and that’s all he really needs.
It’s really difficult to say what could he do, how close is he, is he ready, what can he contribute, what’s he going to do. I’m like you guys know as much as I do because there’s no — like the way that being a scout works is having a bunch of comps and then looking at those comps, deciding where this player fits in those comps. It’s like coming up with a price for real estate. And then kind of figure out where he is and adjust for the market, and you do all these little intricate adjustments that you learn over decades how to do it.
And then this guy is like, all right, we’re in the middle of nowhere, got a $9 million house if it was Manhattan, but now it’s in the middle of nowhere, so what are you going to do now. It’s like I don’t know. Your guess is as good as mine.
I can’t tell you, but I would say it’s not a I’m turned into something that will go up tomorrow. That is my bold predictions.
And I put something in there about how many bases I think Chandler Simpson is going to steal in the Big Leagues this year. Because it’s going to be really hard to say he needs to stay in the Minor Leagues and prove himself because I’m not sure that’s ever going to be true. He’s either going to be good or he’s not, which is probably this year.
And even if he is a defensive replacement pinch runner, he’s probably going to try to steal one base every game that he’s. So he could play a third of a season and steal 50 bases, which I think is, again, a really interesting, fun thing for baseball because nobody has tried this in so long that I kind of want to see what that looks like. And Tampa seems like the kind of team that would try something like that. So I hope they do.
On a quick basis here, a guy with a little bit of a track record, what do you think of the upside of Junior Caminero even this year?
KILEY MCDANIEL: He’s another really interesting guy that obviously he’s already graduated from these lists and I think also has a really high variation of what he could be this season. I think long-term he’ll be fine. He’s going to hit a bunch of home runs. It’s a question of how much contact is he going to make and what position is he going to play.
I would probably just sort of go right at whatever the expectation — whatever Steamer says on FanGraphs, I would go with that because I’m a little worried there might need to be some swing adjustments and some chase adjustments to really get to what he’s going to be. And sometimes when that kind of player isn’t quite dialed in, the whole thing can fall apart.
And then sometimes like we’ve seen with Acuña and Tatis that come up, there’s a weakness, for a month they’re getting exposed, and then they just go off and you never think about it again. I don’t know which one of those two guys he is, if he’s the guy that figures it out once he gets a month of regular playing time and then goes off, or is he going to need a year or two to dial it in. I would have said Jackson Holliday was that first group, and seems like he’s going to need a little bit of time. I don’t know what group he falls into long-term. I think he’s fine. Short-term I don’t really know what’s going to happen.
Carson Williams strikeouts, how big a problem is that?
KILEY MCDANIEL: It’s going to be a question. I would bet he’s going to spend most of the season in Triple-A trying to dial that in. I don’t think Tampa wants him to lose prospect eligibility. I don’t know this, but given the way they do things, they don’t promote guys quickly. I think they want the option of making the opening day shortstop next year and get a draft pick, potentially one Rookie of the Year.
I think the comp to Trevor Story at the low to middle end and then like — it’s not Bobby Witt Jr., but he does some of the same stuff. Bobby Witt Jr. had some swing-and-miss concerns before he put it all together last year. He’s somewhere on that spectrum. We don’t know where he’s going to fall. And I think this year hitting against Triple-A pitching the whole season, I think we’ll get a little better idea.
He’s been making slight improvements. Are those improvements keeping up with the level that the competition is going up, or is he actually going to lower his strikeout rate when he gets up there. To me it’s more of a choice for him as opposed to he can’t do this.
Kiley, I’ve got a couple Brewers-centric and then a couple more broad-centric. When it comes to the Jesus Made projections, being 17 and being in a consensus top 100 is pretty wild to think about. What makes it so special for a kid that, again, is 17, hasn’t played stateside, is wowing everybody at this point?
KILEY MCDANIEL: It doesn’t happen a lot that — I think he had just under a million dollars. He was one of the top 20, 30 bonuses in the class. The top five to ten bonuses in the class typically skip the DSL, go domestic, and if you play for the Padres, you skip the domestic complex and go straight to low A, which is what De Vries did, who was in that same class.
So because we’re seeing him at this age at the DSL, we don’t get to compare him to the best guys in the signing class who then went domestic or, in De Vries’ case, went to low A.
But when we look at that, the amount of polish he showed as a hitter in all of the advance metrics of pitch selection, lifting the ball, exit velos, all those various things we didn’t really have, you could eyeball it and get an idea, it wouldn’t have been appreciated the same way seven or eight years ago when we didn’t have all these metrics in the DSL to really compare them.
He has an amazing amount of polish, but he is not a 6’4″, 180, he’s going to put on 40 pounds of muscle, is going to continue growing. What these metrics sort of assume is that what he’s doing at this level in terms of the polish and what he’s showing is that we’ll continue at this rate, he will improve as fast or faster than the level of competition increases, his power will increase linearly as he goes, which it will not because he doesn’t have amazing physical projection.
So he is precocious in that way. The question is how much is he going to improve. Is that all sort of a now ability that’s an amazing performance for a 17-year-old, will it be an amazing performance in Double-A as a 19-year-old? I don’t think it will be. I think he’s definitely a good everyday player.
The issue is a lot of times, which I mentioned in the blurb, is if you’re looking at a guy that you know — let’s say you’re watching a guy in rookie ball that you know will be a Big League superstar, like Mookie Betts, you would assume him to completely dominate that level to a point where he almost looks bored, which is what Made did.
That doesn’t mean he will then be that guy. I’ve been click-baited a few times when somebody on here asked me how good was Mike Trout when he was 19? It’s like, well, he was the sixth highest high school draftee in this class.
Oh, well, Jasson Dominguez got the highest bonus in his class. He was ahead of Mike Trout at the same spot in his career.
I’m like, yeah, but that’s assuming these two guys just move like this right next to each other for the rest of time. That’s not how baseball players or people sort of matriculate through life.
Made started at the very top at 17. He probably will not be the best player of all time. That’s currently what he’s tracking as, but he’s probably going to move down a few notches over time as the 6’3″, 180 gangly draft guys get bigger and stronger and turn to other stuff.
To me, that’s the interesting part for him, is what is he going to look as he goes up each level? Because it’s starting at such an otherworldly place that you don’t really know what to do with that. The same way that Chandler Simpson is hard to make comp for because it’s like who’s done this before.
When it comes to Cooper Pratt, it’s been very publicized how everyone was shocked that the Brewers were able to get him in the sixth round as opposed to what his projections were to be to go to school. Where has that development continued to blossom in the Minor Leagues?
KILEY MCDANIEL: Yeah, he was a tricky one because I think everybody thought he wanted late first money and was a second-round prospect, roughly speaking. And then the reason that that price wasn’t going to be met is that there was, was he shortstop or is he more sort of shortstop/third base?
The swing was a little wonky for some scouts. Is this going to work at the higher levels the way it’s worked against high school competition, and then is there any power potential?
I think he’s a shortstop, but he’s not a fantastic plus-shortstop. That question still exists even though he’s answered it in an affirmative way. I don’t think he has giant power potential. I think it’s like 15 to 18 homers. That still is proven to be a correct concern.
And then I think the swing maybe being wonky maybe being a problem, that’s the thing that everyone was kind of wrong about; that if everyone knew he would perform the way he’s performed in pro ball, I think everybody would have lined up to pay him $3 million, what everyone thought his price was going to be in that late first area. That’s what’s been a little surprising. And I think similar to Made, he has shown a level of polish that people weren’t expecting on top of the questions on the tools being answered in the affirmative.
So I don’t think he’s a superstar. I think the fact that he went from, whatever that was, late second-round money to top 100 prospect, that doesn’t happen a lot. When it does, it’s usually Jackson Merrill, James Wood, guys where it’s like, holy crap, we totally messed up on this. In his case it was a little more mild. It was, oh, man, we were wrong. No one is getting fired over this.
But that’s a nice transaction, a nice sort of trick that Milwaukee turned that they have done versions of this in the past, and he may be the most recent example of it.
On a broader note, Keith Law kind of publicly wrote in “The Athletic”: The Minor Leagues are the worst they’ve been in a long time. I don’t know if you feel the same way as far as maybe the jump between high and Double-A is different than it’s ever been before or the jump even just from Complex League to A-Ball, where do you see the state of the game right now as far as developing players, the depth of the systems across the board, and where things can improve or get better for all teams?
KILEY MCDANIEL: It’s difficult to look at that and have like an objective answer. I have noticed, I know Eric Longenhagen at FanGraphs has noticed the same thing, that the amount of prospects that are normally at each tier seems a little lighter. Normally I cut off the 50 Future Value at 120, and this year — I didn’t write it publicly. I think it was 108 where I cut it off.
Each tier seemed a little bit lighter, but that’s also me eyeballing it. There’s no way to prove this guy belongs there or doesn’t belong there. I think some of the automatic strike calling stuff or some of the walk rates will get boosted in some areas. We lost the short season level, so those guys are all getting released to pushed to Low-A, so Low-A is getting diminished a bit. I think we’re pushing more young players to the Big Leagues. So those guys aren’t in the minors. You’re getting Triple-A. That means more 27, 28-year-old lifers. In Double-A it means guys that are not quite as good, whether they’re older or younger.
So there’s a bunch of different things happening at the same time. I think it’s more of a down-cycle as opposed to a long-term thing with the amount of prospects at each tier. But I do think there are more guys getting promoted, when you just mentioned like Langford and Evan Carter. There’s some guys like that that kind of get moved quickly and so they don’t get to stay on these lists and so you don’t see them on there. That doesn’t mean baseball is worse or something, they’re just not on the list.
I’m not worried or think we’re going in the wrong direction or something nefarious or bad is happening. It’s a bunch of little things that we’re shaking out in the same way that the transfer portal, NIL stuff, we’re sort of realizing what that means for development of players in different sports, including baseball, and what that then means for the minors and then for the Big Leagues and then for the draft and budgets and trading for players.
All these things are getting affected by little stuff happening downstream. Now the loss of one level of the minors and the way teams are treating young players and developing them, we also have a much better idea how good someone is ahead of when they’re going to be in the Big Leagues. We get those indicators quicker than we did 10, 15 years ago because they didn’t exist.
All that stuff is going on, and we still haven’t put our finger on exactly what’s happening. And it’s probably not like a huge negative, it’s just things are changing, which the older you are, the more you realize that’s just how things are.
You are the most optimistic of the publications regarding the Chicago White Sox farm system —
KILEY MCDANIEL: You’re welcome.
Well, be careful with that.
In your opinion, what areas of the system have you seen the most growth and an increase from their rankings or to generate that increase in the rankings even two years ago?
KILEY MCDANIEL: Good question. I’m looking at the list now. Obviously there’s the Crochet trade where you’re just trading big league value for Minor League value, and a large amount of it, so that’s one thing.
I think you’ve had some guys that are expected to be good. Colson Montgomery and Noah Schultz I think have been, like, top 100 guys for a couple years now that have not — they were not at the stages where they could have gone to the Big Leagues. Montgomery maybe if he had a great last season, maybe he would have graduated, but those guys are timing their rise through the minors to be they are still in the minors when the Crochet trade happens.
Obviously a bunch of other trades happened, too, so you’re not subtracting from the system, you’re adding to it, and then you’re also getting — if you’re drafting high school players, they stay in the system for three, four years, so then you can backfill with more Hagen Smiths and those kinds of guys.
So you then just have like sort of the lucky part of our prospect value is staying in the farm system for longer, so there’s obviously some of that.
Hagen Smith I’m guessing will graduate. Schultz might. Montgomery I’m guessing will. Teel and Quero might. So that’s your top five guys all in the top 54 might all graduate, so I would argue that the ranking right now, White Sox fans, if you want to have the top farm system in baseball, cross your fingers that they are still at this level and haven’t graduated too many guys that Roki Sasaki graduates because then they will move below the White Sox. But the White Sox may have graduated a bunch of other guys by then.
So that’s a delicate dance of timing that just perfectly, and then I guess me also publishing something. Maybe just an article; we’ll see.
I wouldn’t say that it’s — it’s been the years-long accumulation of players along with the normal international and draft stuff, and then some guys that I think have been at that upper level of the system for a while haven’t graduated.
It is not one of these things I’ve been talking about before where it’s like, oh, they’ve figured out a thing that in the draft they just take five guys like this and three of them go to the top 100, like a handful of teams have figured out.
I don’t think the White Sox have figured that out. I think they’ve just been accumulating enough guys that have been timed at just the right time that the exercise I’m doing reflects well on them.
Obviously the Big League record not fantastic last year. I think it’ll be better this year. I don’t think it’s going to be because Colson Montgomery is going to come up with a 6-4 season and save the day. I think it’s just a lot of, I would say, mildly good things going, and maybe this year will turn into, like, a spicy good things as opposed to just a number of mild good things.
But yes, things are going the right direction. They are doing a good job. I would love to be able to upgrade this to a great job, and I think they’ll have the opportunity to prove that this year.
We learn at the Winter Meetings from White Sox general Chris Getz that the White Sox are going to give Colson Montgomery every opportunity to win the starting shortstop job during Spring Training. Is that a good idea for both Colson Montgomery’s development and the Chicago White Sox if he is the opening day starting shortstop?
KILEY MCDANIEL: That’s a very good question. I would like to reserve judgment on that until I can see what he looks like in Spring Training. I would imagine if — I don’t think if he’s ready, they probably won’t just hand him the starting spot.
I think he needs at least a month in Triple-A to sort of establish that he is what we think he’s going to be and he’s ready to go, he’s not going to come up and embarrass himself, get sent down and possibly go into a spiral, which we see sometimes with prospects.
That’s how I would approach it. Even if he goes in and has like a 200 OPS plus in Spring Training, I would still send him down. But I can see the allure to be like, well, we’re going to get a draft pick because he’s going to win Rookie of the Year. Look at this, this is our guy; let’s get some people excited. I know there’s an allure to do that.
I don’t think there’s a lot of logic to say that you should do that, even if he goes nuts, but it could be as few as 25 games is all you really need to feel better about it.
Also, I think he’s a fine defensive shortstop in that he catches and throws the ball. I don’t think he’s giving you a lot of range. I think with some young pitchers that may not be what you want to do.
But then I know Brian Ramos also plays third base, so that’s not, like, a super easy — it’s a smaller issue. It’s not that big of a deal. But I think opening day shortstop is probably not a good idea, but ask me again toward the end of March and maybe I’ll feel a little bit differently about it.
Finally, we all have high school pitchers or high school pitchers are taken by the teams that we cover that are part of their farm system. Noah Schultz is one of the highest ranking ones. If he had gone to Vanderbilt, he’d be the junior Friday night starter for Vanderbilt. Has the industry developed a consensus in what is the best development path for pitchers? Again, there’s not such thing as a pitching prospect still exists, but at the same time he’s not ready to throw 100 innings in the majors.
KILEY MCDANIEL: Yeah, that’s another tricky one where I guess Pittsburgh with Paul Skenes kind of showed, oh, take it really easy an inning or two at a time for the first month or two, then ramp him up and let him go. If he’s pitching well enough in Triple-A, let him go to the Big Leagues. I think that’s the way most teams approach that.
You could obviously do it the other way and then shut him down at the end if you don’t think you’re going to be in the playoffs because who cares about September. There’s a couple different ways to do it.
It is difficult to look at some of these prospects and be like, this guy looks really good; he’s been going three innings at a time. Then I’m looking like, all right, I’m going to move him up, does he go in the top 100, and then I’m like, he threw 60 innings last year, career high, and you’re like, okay, this is going to take at least three years to actually be in a rotation for a full season in the Big Leagues. It’s like, is the guy going to stay healthy for three years? What are we doing?
I would say generally speaking, doing it in a professional environment where they are looking out for your future the most because they want all six plus years of that future to be with them, whereas in college, we’ve seen a number of guys that get basically kicked off their college team because they can’t throw strikes turn into real Big Leaguers. Like Brandon Woodruff, if I’m not mistaken, couldn’t get on the mound with Mississippi State and has made a lot of money.
So there are certain kinds of guys that should not go to college and will lose value because if they can’t throw a trustworthy amount of strikes, they don’t get to get any better because they don’t get to get on the mound.
So that’s like a huge example where you don’t want that guy going to college because there’s a real chance if you don’t put it all together immediately that you lose a ton of value.
But there also is some thought that they’ll throw more innings in college, and in pro ball they debut you and have you throw 30 innings your first full season, where you could be throwing 80 innings and then going to the Cape, and maybe that’s better for you. It kind of depends on the guy, obviously.
Generally speaking, I would say trust the pro path with one of the 10 to 15 sort of teams with a track record of doing well with these sorts of guys, but just to say blanket, oh, everyone should go to pro ball is obviously not true, but it’s hard to know ahead of time for which guys that is.
I was wondering out of the guys on your list for Mets prospects, which one do you see making an impact with a team this year?
KILEY MCDANIEL: Good question. They have a lot of guys in the upper minors that have the potential to show up and do something. So I would say obviously Acuña seems like he’ll probably break with the team or be an option throughout the season. I think Mauricio will be in that conversation. Drew Gilbert will open in Triple-A and probably play in the Big Leagues.
I think between Nolan McLean and Brandon Sproat, at least one of those, maybe both, will be in the Big Leagues at some point. Ryan Clifford will open in the upper minors. If he has huge season, second half maybe gets called up, but I wouldn’t think so.
That I think is the collection of guys that really have a shot to make an impact.
Jett Williams also had a bit of an injury-marred last season. I think if he puts it all together, but then when I’m now looking at all those infielders I just named, between Acuña and Mauricio and Jett Williams, probably not going to be room for all three of those guys, so I would say Jett Williams with a big season I think probably jumps over Drew Gilbert as the potential impact guy. Gilbert will be maybe in the first half the guy that is the most ready, and in the infield I would say Mauricio and Acuña would be those two guys. Then Sproat and McLean would be the two guys on the pitching side that if they have really big seasons can maybe take that spot Christian Scott left open when he got injured.
I would also say keep an eye on Jonah Tong. He ended last season in Double-A, was sort of an anonymous guy, and has been striking out guys at a level that I can’t totally explain. If he keeps doing this, he’ll probably get a chance at the end of the season. I wouldn’t expect that to continue but I also wouldn’t have guessed what he did last season was going to happen. So he, I would say, would be a wild card that might open the season in Double-A, and if he’s striking out 14 guys per nine as a starter, at some point you’ve got to promote the guy.
Who knows what the needs will be. I guess that’s one of the big variables I sometimes forget when I’m doing these project who’s going to have the most war amongst prospects or who’s going to get to play in the Big Leagues. It’s like, if three guys ahead of you get hurt, your odds go up dramatically, and you don’t know whether that’s going to happen.
I wanted to ask you a few questions about the Boston Red Sox. Starting off with Marcelo Mayer, I saw you ranked him No. 4 in your top 100 and especially with the last few seasons kind of being injury riddled with him. I also saw you compared him to Willy Adames if he puts it all together. I was just curious in terms of if you could shed some light on not only the ranking but also the comparison for Mayer.
KILEY MCDANIEL: It was a little tricky for Mayer. I’ve actually noticed this when I have to come up with — the way that I format the top 100 is to come up with a comp, and I’ve noticed the last few years it’s been difficult. I had the problem with Jackson Holliday. Coming up with left-handed hitting shortstops, there’s like really not that many in the Big Leagues, and obviously Corey Seager is like a very specific kind of guy, like the 6’4″ shortstop that doesn’t look like he can play shortstop but he can and he’s got power. That’s one kind of guy.
That’s not really what Jackson Holliday is or even what Mayer is. I’ve noticed I had the problem a couple years ago, I’m forgetting who it was, but I think a couple years ago when there was a guy like this, I tried to compare him to Steven Drew, who had retired 10 years before, which is maybe not the most relevant comp but one that I remembered a little bit. So yeah, I would say the comp itself is actually surprisingly difficult. Go look for, like, a perennially above-average left-handed hitting shortstops. Not a lot of them.
So when looking at Mayer, as I pointed out in the blurb, he was a better runner with more raw power but wasn’t lifting the ball a ton, but looks like he can play shortstop, but he’s not a fantastic runner, doesn’t have a ton of range. If I didn’t look at the Big Leagues for a guy 25, 30 homers, not a ton of range but a good defensive shortstop, you end up on Adames again. Not that many guys that are like above average shortstops that you can then look at and make a comp for.
So obviously the body is different, lefty/righty is different, but I think the sort of outcome, the stat line could look like that because while Mayer hasn’t been putting — almost all of these prospects, I’d say, oh, this guy could hit 20 homers, and you go look it up and he hit five last year. That’s just kinda how prospect stuff works. That always comes late.
The power is there to hit 25, and we’ve seen a lot of guys not lift the ball a lot get to the Big Leagues and figure out, hey, I want to lift the ball a lot, and they kinda figure it out. A lot of fastballs at the top of the zone. They make it easy for you if you can do it.
So while it may seem a little silly, being an average defensive shortstop that’s a below average runner with plus power, that to me is Willy Adames, even though, again, the body and the handedness don’t seem like the same guy, I think the stat line might look like that.
Also in terms of Christian Campbell, we saw some publications rank him in the top 5. I saw that you had him at 26. I was just curious why you had him ranked there. And also he’s kind of a utility player who can play the infield and outfield. Curious where you could see him playing in the majors.
KILEY MCDANIEL: I think second base. I think Mayer looks like a shortstop. I think he looks like second base, and then obviously Devers is at third, maybe not forever but certainly for now.
Campbell’s issue is he’s a plus runner, not a great thrower and not really a great defender like anywhere in particular. He’s, like, passable at a lot of places. You can kind of stick him wherever you want. So I think second base and center field are probably the most natural for him, but I don’t think he even played center field until he got into pro ball, so he’s not the most natural there. He played short and second all the way back to high school and played mostly second his draft year at Georgia Tech, so that to me feels like the most natural spot, especially with shortstop already taken and third base for now already taken.
I talked about it a little bit in the blurb, but the thing going on with Campbell, because there was a lot of last season when he was doing all the things he was doing and posting exit velos and all this stuff and everyone is kind of realizing, oh, this might be a guy, a bunch of teams were telling me, oh, we don’t believe it, the swing is weird. Without going into details, that was the thing they would say.
Eventually I sat and looked at his swing, and I was like, oh, that is weird, I didn’t notice that when I was watching him at Georgia Tech because everyone watched him and said, oh, that’s a swing rework. You’ve got to start over. This guy is a fourth- or fifth-round pick or whatever he was.
So you don’t look at it closely. You’re just like, oh, it’s a problem, and then he’s going bananas and just, like, massacring the upper minors, and you’re like, all right, let’s dial in; what’s going on here.
So there’s a couple different points where you could look at what he’s doing. I find the most useful way to look at it is when his hands start moving forward, when his foot has already been planted, what is the bat doing, and there are handful of guys, Vance Honeycutt, this was part of the issue in the draft last year, a bunch of scouts talking about, we don’t like his swing, we don’t think he’s going to hit but they never said what it was, that’s what they’re talking about.
Typically you want a bat, if you’re looking at the center field angle at like the typical broadcast angle, is when your foot plants and your hands are about to start moving forward but they haven’t yet, you’re fully launched, ready to go, is your bat sticking straight up? That’s a huge problem. There’s almost no Big Leaguers that succeed doing that. You wanted it somewhere between like a 45- to 55-degree angle thinking this angle right here, and he’s at like 80 to 85 depending on the swing.
I don’t know of a ton of guys that have corrected that without doing a full rework, and for a guy that just massacred Triple-A that’s about to be in the Big Leagues, you’re probably not going to do that; that doesn’t make any sense.
From talking to people that understand this stuff, they were like, the reason you don’t want to do that is because then that puts you in a spot where then the path is a little bit longer, there’s a little bit of a move you have to do here, and you tend to be coming from higher down.
So there’s a couple little moves that are all in a split second. Your move from right here, like that whole move is very difficult, and it’s sort of engrained in you.
Campbell is really good at essentially correcting the flaw and getting to the ball, but if you go talk to a bunch of Big League teams, like hey, do you want to bet essentially $100 million on he’s going to be able to do this thing you’ve never seen anyone do before that also you thought this guy was worth essentially nothing two years ago, teams don’t like betting on that kind of stuff.
I think he might be good enough at doing this that he’ll just slightly underperform his tools and be a really good player that’s above average at almost everything.
But that’s not the seventh or eighth prospect in baseball. But if you just look at what his performance is and what his tools are, that’s where you should rank him.
I know there are teams that have him in the top 5 prospects in baseball that could trade for him, but I don’t think Boston wants to trade him.
Then I hedged a bit where I think I put him one spot behind Travis Bazzana, who just went No. 1 overall, which seems like, hey, the Red Sox turned a fourth-round pick into the No. 1 overall pick in one year, and I got nothing but hate on the internet about this, who also has an outlier swing that nobody has.
So of course fans don’t take that well. I was called a troll and other things I won’t repeat. But nobody seemed to engage with the stuff about hitting mechanics, which, shocking.
So that’s how I’ve landed there, and him going bananas in Triple-A is not really going to change it because that’s sort of baked into what the opinion was from a bunch of other people and myself, and him going bananas for a month in the Big Leagues probably won’t change it, either. It’s really one of these things that the question is can this mechanical thing that doesn’t have a lot of precedent, can it work; is he the exception to the rule. As a scout or an evaluator, you don’t make a living betting on every guy you see that does something kind of funny being an exception. That’s kind of the question here.
I think there’s versions of this going back to the question about Jesus Made and some other guys, Chandler Simpson, like, oh, these guys are completely unique; what’s going to happen. I don’t know that they’re completely unique.
So these are the guys that I have some trouble with that I think I tend to go a little lower than some because it’s really easy to just look at the tool grades and look at the stats and be like, well, this will continue forever, and I’m like, okay.
Sometimes it’s Juan Soto and I’m wrong and I’m late, and a lot of other times it’s guys you probably never heard of that I said were a little overrated and it didn’t work out, so I will be anxious to see which one of these Christian Campbell is.
With the Red Sox’ current farm system, it’s pretty top-heavy in terms of position players, and with Breslow being hired as the CBO for the team, trying to revolutionize the pitching infrastructure within the organization, I’m curious from year one now to year two for Craig Breslow, how have you kind of seen their pitching infrastructure in the Minor Leagues kind of evolve compared to with Chaim Bloom a few years ago?
KILEY MCDANIEL: Yes, but I don’t think I’ve seen enough to know if the little things I’m picking up on are actually changes in strategy and if they are actually underlying this is how we draft players. They’re not going to tell me that stuff.
Payton Tolle, I think he was, what, a second- or third-round pick? I have found that a lot of teams that are very sharp on pitching tend to take guys that are outliers, whether it’s arm slot, shapes, sequences, things like that. He has one of the best combinations of velocity and movement and a sinker from a left-hander, so a pretty specific subset. But a lot of times you’ll hear wide receivers say, oh, I’m not used to seeing the ball thrown from a lefty quarterback because there’s not that many left quarterbacks, and you’ll sometimes hear hitters say things like, you don’t see a lot of sinkers from lefties or you don’t see this kind of slider, or Hagen Smith in the draft last year overperforms what the TrackMan would say his stuff should do to a point where it’s like, all right, I guess this will just keep happening; I don’t know why.
Tolle is one of those guys that does some unique stuff, and I think that is one of the things they are looking at. I think David Sandlin, the guy they acquired for Schreiber, is another guy with just the knee buckling breaking ball that also hits 100 in bullpens, might be a reliever, might be a starter. I think Juan Valera, another guy that is kinda my breakout pick for the system, another guy that might be a starter, might be a reliever, still pretty early, is a teenager. But really throws a good breaking ball, good fastball, some unique shapes in there.
I think I’m seeing signs that they’re doing stuff differently, not that under Chaim Bloom they weren’t doing that, but there wasn’t like sort of a fingerprint to like, oh, that kinda guy; the Red Sox take that kinda guy. I’m starting to see, okay, maybe it’s some outlier shapes and things like that are the things they’re looking at, which also tends to be the people that are obsessed with pitching tend to get obsessed with that kind of stuff, and those teams tend to be good at that.
But trading for Garrett Crochet, another guy sorta like that, so I think there’s a direction they’re going that makes some sense to me, but I haven’t heard that explained, and I think after two or three years total, so maybe another year or two, you’ll be able to know a little bit better, like, oh, they haven’t spent real resources on anyone that is a normal-looking pitcher; they tend to get weirdos. After two or three years, it’ll be pretty obvious that’s what they’re doing.
I’m not positive, but I think that’s what’s going on.
I have some Braves questions. One thing I did notice looking at your top 200 and looking at the Braves’ organizational rankings that you put out is you had Hurston Waldrep at the ninth best prospect in the system and not in your top 200. I don’t know if I necessarily disagree, but I’m curious as to any insights you have as to where you think his problems could come and what he would have to do to change your mind to maybe get ranked higher.
KILEY MCDANIEL: So the question with him coming out of college, the reason he got to the pick that he got to was is the fastball going to play in the zone to the level of velocity, is the breaking ball going to have the consistency, is he going to find one shape there. And then is the command going to be there, specifically of his whacky knuckle-splitter thing which is notoriously, for anybody, difficult to command.
The command is about what I expected it would be. I think the breaking ball has gotten better. I think he’s decided on the shape. I think it’s an above average pitch. I think he’s good there.
The fastball shape is the part where I got let down a little bit, where the command is coming along, the slider got better, and then because the shape of the fastball is making him want to nibble a little bit and then pitch backwards, and then if you can’t command your knockout splitter pitch because, again, almost nobody can, you can then see how the whole thing falls apart.
The problem with fastball shapes is either he can throw two to three ticks harder, which is hard to just conjure up out of nowhere, or he needs to get a slightly different shape, but he’s not a sinker guy, he is a riding four-seamer kind of guy, so then it is arm slot, delivery directions, extension, spot on the mound, like all those things. The geometry of the way you deliver the ball would be the other way to solve that, and that is difficult to project.
But the good news is when, like, the data comes after his first start in the Minor Leagues, it’ll be very easy to see, oh, his extension is up eight inches, and his arm slot is lower and now his fastball is playing above average, just, again, doing the math problem of that sort of thing, which fastball quality is sort of a math problem. There’s some room for art there, but it is largely science. The other pitchers are the ones where it’s mostly science and not art.
So solving that sort of geometry problem is the issue, and that has been the thing that has been a notch worse than I thought it would be, and the difference between an average fastball with a knockout off-speed pitch and good enough command in three pitches and a 45 fastball with 45 command is really different. Like it goes from this guy can turn over a lineup maybe the third time you try to get them out of there, to, oh, this guy can go one to two innings at a time and might get bombed every third time out. It’s a really big gap between career earnings between those two guys, and he’s still in that zone where he’s trying to solve which one of those two guys he is.
The answer is probably somewhere in the middle, and then we’ll try to figure out how to adjust to that on the fly.
But that is the math problem he’s trying to solve right now that ended up with him where he is.
Obviously this year’s international class wasn’t ever going to be on your top 100 because that would make writing a nightmare, and you’d probably be writing it in April, and probably the information wouldn’t be that great. But I was curious if you had any thoughts or heard anything about the Braves’ top two guys in Diego Tornes and the late pop-up guy in Raudy Reyes with that big arm of his. And if you eyeballed it, anyone from this international class, not just from the Braves, but just in general that you think might have been able to squeak in the top 100 if you were looking based purely on talent?
KILEY MCDANIEL: Yeah, I know there was one. I think there might have been two guys that got in toward the back of the 200, Josuar Gonzalez, shortstop with the Giants, I want to say was 170 something, and Elian Peña, who got the biggest bonus, was sort of seen as the best guy like two years ago, and I think Gonzalez kind of passed him right there at the end with the Mets. I want to say it was 190 something. He might have missed it, but I thought he was on there.
Those are the two guys that were there. It’s seen as a down class to say this guy maybe should be on the 100, maybe after Minor League Spring Training I could throw him on there. That guy wasn’t there. We’ve seen with Dominguez, De Vries, Salas, there’s been these guys in the past that have been like the dude from when they’re 14 to when they’re 16, and then they have a good sort of debut or some sort of early showing.
And that guy wasn’t really in this class. It sounds like those guys do exist in the next two classes. I think this was a random down cycle. And if Peña was perceived that way, the tools, how early he was, he had a chance to be that guy. Gonzalez came on a little bit later. Again, we’re talking about later is when they’re 15 and 16. It’s obviously extremely early. So those are the two guys that I think have a chance.
Going to Tornes, it’s corner profile, power over hit, that kind of guy. You can probably judge him a little bit by what the surface stats are. Like if he’s got a 30 percent strikeout rate in the DSL, you’ve got a problem. If it’s down closer to 20 and he hits five home runs, then you’re looking good. And then maybe send a DM to me, exit velo is good.
That would be pretty simple the first couple years. Reyes I also came on to later. Sorry, I have some notes over here I was looking for. See if I got anything. I do not. I also heard that he was coming — as you know, most of the high bonuses go to hitters. So the pitcher comes on late, you usually hear like, oh, pretty good body. Pretty good arm action. Threw pretty hard. That’s a million dollars still because if you get all the guys that are peers at 16 years old, it’s a bunch of guys with giant raw power or guys that have really good bat-to-ball, and then a punch of pitchers that throw 88 because nobody throws that hard at that age.
So if a guy can sit in the low 90s and throw some strikes and kind of spin a breaking ball, that’s as good as you’re going to see. So I usually don’t spend a ton of time on those guys until they come domestic and play a little bit or maybe if they have really good data in the DSL. Just because it’s kind of not fair to take them seriously at that age because you just can’t be big and strong enough to give you like a big league shape to a curveball. Like it’s just not a thing that really happens yet.
But, yeah, he’s certainly one of the better pitchers in the class.
Kiley, you had Carson 5, and then the next highest Ray was 63, but you had 13 guys on your full 200 list. Is that a good place to be from an organizational standpoint, to have one star and so much depth, or what does that tell you?
KILEY MCDANIEL: Yeah, it tells me that Tampa Bay is constantly accumulating more guys and very rarely giving them away because, as I’m looking at that list, let’s see, drafted, drafted, drafted, traded for, drafted, international, traded for, draft, traded for, draft, draft, draft. So, yeah, they didn’t trade for all of them, but they didn’t get rid of any of them and they brought in more.
Smith on there (indiscernible) list kind of thing. I was just curious.
KILEY MCDANIEL: Brody Hopkins is another guy where because he’s pitched so little, there’s still some scouts holding out hope that in the next year or two he could turn into a legit front-line starter. But if this is a guy that’d been pitching since he was 15, everyone would say, oh, he is a reliever, he’s got good stuff. We’ll see what he turns into. But because it could all click, he’s like a 6’4″ NFL wide receiver that learned how to pitch a year ago.
Him throwing strikes, he has the components of a pretty good delivery and a good athlete that can repeat his delivery, it just seems like he won’t. This year is huge for him. If he can give you a walk rate below 3 per 9, he might be one of the top five pitching prospects in the entire sport, but I wouldn’t count on that happening. Not a lot of guys are like, oh, he’s a good athlete, but he can’t throw strikes now, like they usually don’t figure it out.
But what I would say about the system in general is that a lot of these guys, especially the ones I’m looking at from 101 to 200, these are guys that I project to be a role five, a good everyday player, a nice to have, which is the lifeblood of the Rays. They have told me in the past before like a rookie controllable for six years, role five, like a two-or guy, is worth more to us than anybody else in baseball because us paying that guy 5 million over 15 roster spots is like our entire payroll. But paying that guy the league minimum means we can save all that money and then go spend it on two guys, like Ha-Seong Kim or whoever it might be. And so their whole thing is based on that, and we’ve now seen it taken to the extreme of like once a guy hits arbitration, we just get rid of him because we have a guy in Triple-A that’s that same guy for the minimum for three years.
So them having, whatever it is, a dozen guys in the top 200 that all look like generally upper minors guys that will be good, everyday players, that’s what the whole thing is based on. They have to have that. And if they don’t have that, if they have six or seven, they better have a bunch of dudes on long-term deals, like a team full of Evan Longorias and whatnot, to make everything work, or else they just have to outsmart the free agent market and the trade market every year multiple times, which is they might be as qualified as anyone to do that, but nobody can do that. We saw in San Francisco they got RodĂłn and Gausman and free agents, and then they all leave after a year, and you have to do it every season. Nobody can do that every season. You get three or four tries at it. You can’t do it every year.
So this is the thing they can control is keep all their prospects, add a couple extra, trade guys when they get to arbitration, get some guys in Double-A and Triple-A, and they’ve been doing that forever, so yeah, it seems like they’re kind of running on all cylinders, whatever that phrase is. You can edit that if you need to.
You called it “balling on a budget” in your summary there.
KILEY MCDANIEL: There you go. Yeah, I don’t remember where I first heard that. I don’t know if the hip-hop song or Chris Archer sang it first, but I’ve definitely heard that for a while now.
Did you say rule 5 or role 5?
KILEY MCDANIEL: A role 5, so meaning a 4 is a backup or middle reliever, and a 5 is like a setup man closer or an everyday player or 3, 4 starter, and then a 6 would be like a 3-war player, mid-rotation guy, above average everyday guy.
So you have a lot of guys that I think will be good — like Cooper Kinney seems like the absolute, right in the middle of the Rays where he’s first, second, third, left-handed part of a platoon. He’s like a left-handed Curtis Mead. They just always have those guys around. They might not even be good or end up being what I’m describing them as, but having six of those guys, whether it’s Aranda or Yandy Diaz ends up being a really good version of that guy, they just have to have all those guys around to cover for the ones that end up not being very good or get hurt or something like that.
Our beat reporter texted me when I was asking you questions earlier: Kiley has Jacob Gonzales rated 139. Why? That’s what he texted me.
KILEY MCDANIEL: Similar to all that Rays stuff, if you can play an average shortstop and put the ball in play and hit 12 homers, that is a role 5 player that will put up 1.6 to 2 or whatever it is —
He’s the best player on the White Sox, okay.
KILEY MCDANIEL: Yeah, I still think he — I would say my journey with Jacob McDowell has went from high school, like, yeah, might be a guy; then freshman year at Ole Miss, you’re like, oh, okay, this might be good; and then by the draft, I’m like, I’m not really sure; and then early in his pro career, I was like, oh, those exit velos don’t look great. Then they got a little bit better, and I’m like, okay. Like I’ve just been going right around the middle for him the whole time.
I think, yeah, I have him at whatever, 45 plus, which means it’s basically a coin flip; is he a good utility guy that you can play every now and then, or is he a low-end starter, and I think he’s right in the middle of that. He’s close to the Big Leagues. He was drafted high, has some tools, has some performance. But yeah, I’m not doing a backflip over him.
If you want exciting, go find a guy in the DSL I have 101 to 200; those guys will be much more exciting.