Yesterday in The Athletic, the great one-time beat writer and now irreproachable national writer, Ken Rosenthal, published a piece on why so many top hitting prospects are struggling with the transition to the major leagues. Rosenthal catalogued the extreme faceplants that we’ve been seeing from the finest hitting prospects in the game — Jackson Holliday and Jackson Chourio and Colt Keith, Wyatt Langford and Jackson Merrill, nearly all of the hitting prospects considered elite by the industry have performed like some of the very worst big leaguers in 2024. The best of them will come through it (as Gunnar Henderson did last year after a half season of struggles), but it’s becoming more and more of a truism around baseball that the step up from Triple-A is harder than ever.
Rosenthal offers a host of possible changes that have helped cause this new reality — and I highly recommend reading his piece if you’re a subscriber — but the primary ingredient is clearly the lack of velocity and spin in Triple A. Rosenthal opens by quoting slugger, JD Martinez, getting tuned up in the minors after a late signing, saying he’s feeling good, “but I haven’t seen any velocity yet.” By Stuff+ standards, Triple-A is in free fall this year, with the average Triple-A pitch registering at just 86 (100 is the major league average pitch in Stuff+ models), down from 95 last year.
If you want a less analytical and more anecdotal version of that stat, just doing a little spot checking on the Sacramento hitters, I can find home runs hit off fastballs thrown at 87, 88, 89, 89, 89, 90, 90… Fine swings all, to be sure — and to be clear, hardly comprehensive (Heliot Ramos belted 97 mph heat out just the other night), but, still, they don’t throw that many 87 mph fastballs in the majors, and that matters in this context!
Going from Triple-A to the majors right now is something similar to what we’re seeing Jung Hoo Lee attempt, going from the KBO to the majors — a major stress test where every fastball has an extra 3-7 ticks, and every breaking ball is both harder and sharper. I was thinking this at one game in Richmond in the Squirrels’ last home stand, as I watched a parade of hitters (on both sides) swing through fastballs at 92 and 93 mph. “If you can’t hit this,” I thought, “how are you expecting to hit that?” It’s a huge challenge — and one that seems to be getting harder all the time.
HITTER of the NIGHT: Derwin Laya (ACLG), 4 for 5, 2 R, 1 RBI
PITCHER of the NIGHT: Dylan Cumming (Eug), 4.2 IP, 3 H, 0 R, 2 BB, 8 K
But this is no time to get rattled by the competition, we have some Minor Lines to explore…
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