There R Giants #1: Marco Luciano
Photo Credit: Michelle Valenzuela | San Jose Giants
We have reached the finish line of the There R Giants Top 50! Over the winter months, I’ve written a post on each of the fifty players in my rankings, leading us back to the much-needed spring. Our list of previously covered players is getting a little long, so from here on out I’m moving the links for the full list down the bottom of the post.
There is only so much force that a young body can generate, so much power. There is a human limit to how hard a teenaged body can hit a ball. And it’s probably this — this right here:
It seems really unlikely to me that an 18-year-old could possibly generate more force than the 119 mph exit velocity with which Marco Luciano whistled that ball out during the 2020 Instructional League. And, while we know that maximum exit velocity isn’t, by itself, the end all and be all of statistics (something closer to 80-90 percentile EV gives us more insight into a hitter’s quality), it’s still undecidedly true that hard contact has a direct connection to offensive success.
I said “teenaged body” above in reference to Luciano’s outsized performance, but it’s worth considering that almost nobody — of any age — can hit a ball harder than that. Last year in the major leagues, only four balls were struck at 119 mph or more. Only one reached 120. Luciano began his development journey producing contact that was already at the upper limit of what the best in the game could do — performing at Stantonesque or Judgian levels in terms of raw force. And there is good reason to hope that his ability to propel a baseball as hard as any human can will, in the not too distant future, be leading to Stantonesque or Judgina levels of production as well.
It won’t be long now…
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