Call-Up-Palooza: Three Top-Ranked Prospects Among Opening Day Debuts

Flipping through the slate of big league games over the past week has felt a bit like walking through the halls of my high school on the first day of a new school year, quietly taking stock of what and who had changed since I was last there. Who is suddenly wearing colors I’ve never seen them in before? Who’s hanging with a new crowd, or won’t shut up about their camp friends? Who spent time in summer school, and was that stint enough for them to keep up with the rest of their class? And of course: Who’s the new kid?

Last week, the Royals’ Bobby Witt Jr., the Mariners’ Julio Rodríguez, and the Tigers’ Spencer Torkelson, all of whom rank within the top five of our preseason Top 100 Prospects list, made much-anticipated major league debuts, with each player surrounded by their own specific brand of pre-show buzz. And while it would be foolish to draw sweeping conclusions from a player’s performance in any one game or series, a big league debut seems as good a time as any to take a snapshot.

When Witt stepped up to the plate in the bottom of the eighth inning of the Royals’ home opener to face the Guardians’ Triston McKenzie, he’d yet to record a hit in the game, having flied out once and grounded out twice. He took McKenzie’s first offering – a 93 mph fastball, low and away – for a ball, then smashed the second pitch of the at-bat into left for a double, scoring Michael A. Taylor from second, a go-ahead run that would later become the game-winner:

The pitch Witt hit was a slider left above the strike zone. It’s a pitch that McKenzie has executed well in the past, using the breaking ball to just barely nick the upper corner of the zone before the batter has a chance to adjust to it. Here’s what the slider looks like when he locates it:

The above video shows two pitches to Byron Buxton from two different at-bats in the same September game from last season; McKenzie froze Buxton with one, and missed his bat with the other. Looking at those two well-placed sliders, their components are similar, each with 30-plus inches of vertical drop and 3-5 inches of horizontal movement. In contrast, the one he offered to Witt last Thursday was much flatter (just 23 inches of vertical movement), and had less spin and velocity. But more important was Witt’s ability to capitalize on McKenzie’s miscue and smash the hanging breaker despite it sitting well above the strike zone — an appropriately opportunistic approach, so long as it doesn’t portend a more swing-happy one. In Triple-A last season, Witt had three hits (a single, a double, and a homer) on similar pitches, all up at the very top of the zone, if not completely out of it:

Though all three of those hits came on low-90s fastballs, the flatness of McKenzie’s slider allowed Witt to utilize a similar swing adjustment when he drove home the game-winner in his big league debut, straightening out his midsection and flattening his swing to leverage its upper-zone location without eliminating the lift in his follow-through. The next step, of course, will be maintaining this ability to adjust as he becomes more accustomed to big league pitchers (and vice versa).

Rodríguez and Torkelson each made their debuts the next day, though neither was as attention grabbing as Witt’s performance. In fact, on paper, their debuts were virtually identical: 0-for-4 with two strikeouts. But of course, no two players’ performances are truly the same, and the ways in which they differed reveal how each prospect is being handled by their respective opponents.

Rodríguez faced three Twins pitchers over the course of his debut – Joe Ryan, Jhoan Duran (who was making his own debut in the majors), and Danny Coulombe – none of whom served up anything in the top half of the zone. The only four-seamer he saw was from Ryan and was out of the zone. The only other pitches he saw that topped 90 mph were Duran’s so-called splinker; the rest of the pitches he saw sat around the 80 mph mark. It’s a tall order for any prospect to contend with such junk in their first big league outing, let alone the youngest position player to debut on Opening Day for the Mariners since Alex Rodriguez in 1996.

Rodríguez didn’t get much of a chance to show off his outfield defense, but he did flash his sprint speed on a slow dribbler in his first at-bat, and produced an exit velocity over 98 mph in his last one:

In contrast, Torkelson was challenged throughout the zone with various offerings from the four White Sox hurlers he faced, ranging from Lucas Giolito’s low-80s changeup to Liam Hendriks’ high-90s heater. He fell victim to a somewhat generous strike zone, but ultimately was unable to find his timing, popping out in the two at-bats in which he didn’t strike out. But unlike Rodríguez, whose defense was limited to making routine plays, Torkelson’s first big league game afforded him the opportunity to showcase his defense at first base. He made two impressive picks on difficult throws in the dirt from the left side of the infield — one a short hop, the other an awkward ‘tweener bounce. But the real showstopper was his diving snag on a liner that came off Leury García’s bat at 101.8 mph:

Not bad for a debut.

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The first day of school comparison is, of course, strictly vibes-based. You might even say it’s flimsy in terms of its accuracy as a metaphor. For one thing, unlike the beginning of a new school year, the start of a major league season rarely ushers in a large crop of new faces. Not every player starts the year at the same time. Rookies, instead, tend to trickle in over the course of a season, based on their developmental readiness, teams’ positional needs, and of course, the various less-than-savory practices that have historically stood in the way of prospects being promoted.

This year, however, is a bit different. Whether it’s because of the recent changes to the CBA geared toward preventing service time manipulation, or simply a coincidental confluence of this particular crop of elite prospects’ big league readiness, three of our five top-ranked players made their major league debuts on Opening Day. (It might have been four, were it not for Adley Rutschman’s injury.) In the past six years of us publishing our Top 100 Prospects list here at FanGraphs, we haven’t seen this many prospects within our top five debut on Opening Day in the same year that they achieved that top ranking. In fact, between 2017-21, only one player made an Opening Day debut after having made that year’s top five (Fernando Tatis Jr. in 2019), with the majority being held back for call-ups later in the season. Even expanding that criteria to include the top 10 prospects on each year’s list only adds a few more Opening Day debuts, and still never more than two in a given season. Moreover, the slew of call-ups that began the 2022 season included several additional prospects within our Top 100. Jeremy Peña (No. 30), Bryson Stott (No. 34), and Steven Kwan (No. 57) all made their team’s Opening Day roster. Hunter Greene (No. 31) averaged just under 100 mph with his fastball in his first big league start. C.J. Abrams (No. 15) and Heliot Ramos (No. 90) also debuted during their team’s opening series, making for a total of eight of our Top 100 getting call-ups during the first series of play in 2022, more than any previous year.

Of course, we shouldn’t assume a linear progression for any prospect, and the nature of these types of ordinal rankings is such that a prospect’s placement on the list isn’t solely based on their likelihood of making an imminent debut at the major league level (though that big-league proximity does factor into the equation, particularly when it comes to our assessment of a guy’s ability to make it to the big leagues at all). Whatever the cause, this year offered the rare opportunity to watch several high-profile major league debuts within a couple of days, and with that opportunity came the chance to speculate about what those early efforts might tell us about the debutants’ futures in the game.