Five Compelling Numbers For Five AL East Prospects
"A clear path to being a mid rotation starter"
I took last week off from the newsletter because of Thanksgiving, but now I’m back with our regularly scheduled programming.
Now that we’ve got the American League East Top 10s live on the site I’m digging into five numbers for five AL East prospects, just like I did for the NL East, NL Central and NL West.
No long preamble today, let’s get right into it.
Luis Perales, RHP, Red Sox — 118
The Red Sox might have the best farm system in baseball on the back of a great core of a hitting prospects, but Perales is a player of tremendous excitement as well. He posted a 39.7% strikeout rate in High-A and then a 35.7% strikeout rate in Double-A before a UCL injury led to a Tommy John surgery that ended his season.
His normalized stuff+ score of 118 was the best mark of any pitcher among AL Top 10 prospects, with excellent marks across the entire arsenal. He averaged more than 97 mph with a fastball that has an extremal flat approach angle and generated a 15% or better swinging strike rate with all of his pitches. Here’s to a quick recovery.
Josh Kasevich, SS, Blue Jays — 5.4%
My assumption with this division of prospects was that Rays slash-and-dasher Chandler Simpson would blow the field out of the water when it came to contact rate. It’s true that he was the only player of this group with an overall contact rate above 90%, but Kasevich actually led all hitters in terms of in-zone contact, with just a 5.4% in-zone miss rate.
That narrowly clears Simpson’s 5.9% mark and gives us a shortstop profile with elite bat-to-ball skills, strong swing decisions and solid shortstop defense. While he doesn’t have the sort of speed or power that might lead to an impact everyday profile, he is one of the prospects I’m intrigued with in a Blue Jays system that feels pretty weak at this stage. He’s coming off a 2024 season where he hit .296/.348/.385 with six home runs and 28 doubles between Double-A and Triple-A.
Santiago Suarez, RHP, Rays — 72.2%
Suarez is one of the most exciting pitching prospects in the lower minors. He threw more innings than any teenager in the minors this year and has an excellent command profile that has been consistent going back to his age-17 season in the Dominican Summer League with the Marlins. He owns a career 4.6% walk rate over three seasons and in 2024 threw his fastball for strikes at a 72.2% rate.
JJ put a 70 on his future control and he’s not just a pitchability soft-tosser either, with the second-best normalized stuff+ score (113) of this group of AL prospects and a mid-90s fastball with great carry that misses bats.
Chayce McDermott, RHP, Orioles — -4.36
McCermott made one big league start in 2024 and got hit around a bit, but he was solid over 100 innings in Triple-A and has an interesting pitch mix, led by a fastball that had the second-flattest vertical approach angle of this AL Top 10 pitching group: a -4.36 VAA behind only the previously mentioned Perales.
He sits around 92-93 and touches 96 with good carry and also misses bats with a plus slider in the mid 80s with plenty of spin as well as a split-change he improved this year and could give him a third better-than-average pitch. All he needs to do is put the ball over the plate more frequently, though perhaps that’s easier said than done.
Spencer Jones, OF, Yankees — 42%
These are five compelling numbers, though not all of them are encouraging. Jones saw his stock slip in 2024 when he made the jump to Triple-A, saw his strikeout rate jump 10 points to 36.8% and became the first Yankees minor leaguer to ever record 200 strikeouts in a single season. Josh Norris noted that Jones was susceptible to well-placed fastballs. I checked his performance against 94+ mph fastballs this season and found he had a 44.4% overall miss rate against that pitch type and even more concerning a 42% in-zone miss rate against those fastballs.
Among the 889 minor leaguers with at least 50 plate appearances of data vs. 94+ mph fastballs, that overall miss rate is good for 8th-highest and the in-zone miss rate is good for 5th-highest. Those are scary marks, and could prevent him from finding success at the majors without significant improvement.
I’ve been working on a few longer term projects related to the draft and scouting I’m excited about and will come to the site in coming weeks, but the immediate focus of my writing has remained the 2024 Prospect Handbook.
On Friday we released the Guardians Top 10 prospects list that I took a crack at for the first time this year. On the same day we had an engaging chat about the system. It’s incredibly deep and I view this Cleveland org as one of the more talented in the game at the moment. I’ve got the Braves Top 30 tucked away and now I need to finish Cleveland’s Top 30—I’m guessing there are going to be a handful of players who don’t quite make it that cause some pain to leave off.
On the podcasting front, I’ve recored multiple shows on the Future Projection feed and the Baseball America draft feed since the last newsletter:
Future Projection Episode 105: 2025 International Prospects, Grady Emerson & Listener Questions
Future Projection Episode 106: AL East Organization Overviews
We’re also putting some clips of the Future Projection show on our YouTube channel if you have any interest in that medium:
We’ve got the draft lottery coming up this Tuesday which will be a lot of fun, and we’ll have all sorts of coverage of that (including a full first round mock draft I’m in the process of writing) as well as the Rule 5 draft that JJ and Geoff will be on the ground for at the Winter Meetings.
There’s plenty of Rule 5 prospect coverage live on the site right now if that’s your thing.
That’s all for today. Thanks for reading and hope you all have a great weekend!