Finding the Next Maikel Garcia and/or Geraldo Perdomo

“OK, but what if you could steal first base?” is surely a thought that’s occurred to just about every baseball fan. We’ve all seen players come up who look like absolute studs, except for one thing: They can’t hit. It’s only one skill, but it’s the most important skill for a position player.

I remember having a simply overpowering version of this thought in the press box at Camden Yards during the 2024 ALDS. Maikel Garcia’s tools sizzled and crackled with potential. He’s stolen 37 bases in 39 regular-season attempts. His defense at third base was very good, good enough to play shortstop on a team that had not been built around the best shortstop on the planet. Garcia played 157 regular-season games for the Royals in 2024, and he was about as good a player as you can be with a single-digit home run total and a .281 OBP.

Those two headline numbers do limit one’s potential, unfortunately.

In October, Garcia poked enough grounders through the infield to eke out a .318 batting average in Kansas City’s six playoff games, teasing us with the hope of what could have been if he just learned how to hit.

Well, in 2025, he learned how to hit. Davy Andrews wrote about Garcia’s explosive campaign in August. Over the winter, Garcia had focused on staying back on the ball. Without changing his stance much at all, he was hitting the ball harder and more in the air. The result was a career-high 16 home runs: 15 to the pull side of dead center, with one opposite-field foul pole-tickler the only exception. Overall, he hit .286/.351/.449. Combined with some gains on the defensive side of the ball, Garcia went from a Punch-and-Judy fifth infielder who was overexposed as a starting third baseman to an All-Star, a five-win player, and a downballot MVP vote-getter.

At the same time, Geraldo Perdomo was doing something similar. Likewise a glove-first infielder who started as an offensive liability, Perdomo found a power stroke in 2025, turning from an average shortstop to a top-five MVP finisher. By WAR, Shohei Ohtani was the only player in the National League who was more valuable this past year.

Backup infielders who can’t hit grow on trees. Shortstops (or shortstop-ish infielders) who can hit in the middle of the lineup go for $300 million on the open market. The utility of turning the former into the latter should be obvious.

So who’s next?

Well, finding the next Garcia or Perdomo is a little more complicated than just rattling off a list of young Latin American infielders with a wRC+ in the 70s. These two guys had something else in common: Even when they were hitting like Rey Ordonez, both Perdomo and Garcia were exhibiting plus-or-better control of the strike zone and bat-to-ball ability.

In 2024, when he had a wRC+ of 71, Garcia was in the 92nd percentile in both chase rate and whiff rate, according to Baseball Savant. Garcia turned into a star overnight, but the process was more gradual for Perdomo. The Diamondbacks shortstop spent two seasons (2023 and 2024) as about a league-average hitter overall, but with a specific shape to his production: decent average, lots of walks, zero power.

That’s instructive in and of itself, but even in 2022, when he hit .195/.285/.262 in 500 plate appearances as a rookie, Perdomo was in the 89th percentile for chase rate and the 84th for whiff rate.

In other words, both of these guys knew how to hit before they broke out. It just took a minute for the quality of contact to catch up to the approach.

When I wrote about Perdomo back in May, I noted that he had this particular combination of contact ability and control of the strike zone. But a look at other hitters with those qualities demonstrated that there’s more to hitting than just not chasing and not whiffing. The Perdomo profile describes Alex Bregman, for instance, but it also describes Luis Urías.

Hitters like Perdomo and Garcia, even in their larval stages, don’t give away strikes. That’s great, but it allows the pitcher to issue an implicit challenge: If I do throw a strike, what are you going to do about it?

One way to make lots of contact is to sacrifice bat speed. This isn’t a bad thing in and of itself; Luis Arraez had no bat speed, even when he was hitting .350. Steven Kwan, latter-day Mookie Betts, even guys like Ichiro and Tony Gwynn could punish pitchers without swinging from their heels.

But for hitters just below that level of hand-eye coordination, the answer to that challenge from pitchers can be: “Not much.” If a batter has an ISO of .100 or lower (or .067, in the case of my muse, Chase Meidroth, who keeps showing up when I’m studying Perdomo), the pitcher is gonna pound the zone and take his chances.

Getting from that point to 30-homer power is tough. But remember, that’s not where Garcia and Perdomo started; there’s a reason Garcia made me wish you could steal first base.

These are guys who already provide a lot of value on defense, who can steal a few dozen bases per year. They already walk a lot and don’t strike out much. This goes back to the thing I kept writing about Pete Crow-Armstrong when he was coming up — players who produce defensively and on the bases can be quite valuable without doing much on offense. And hitters who already control the zone and don’t whiff much don’t have to hit the ball that hard to be productive offensive players overall.

Garcia and Perdomo, then, were starting from a position of massive advantage. (And if you want to go back to a time before bat tracking data, José Ramírez also had basically this skill set and career path.)

Neither Garcia nor Perdomo hit for that much power in 2025. Perdomo had a .173 ISO and seventh-percentile average bat speed. Garcia looked like Gary Sheffield by comparison, with bat speed all the way up in the 46th percentile.

Here’s another Davy Andrews joint from September, describing how Perdomo wasn’t generating elite bat speed overall, and he was still taking a lot of half-speed swings. But he’d traded medium-speed swings for grip-it-and-rip-it cuts, and that was driving the power surge. (As an aside, when I get fixated on a player, it’s nice when Davy writes about him too. It’s validating to know the player in question is actually interesting, and I’m not a total weirdo.)

This demonstrates what seems to me like a pretty easy way to identify who could be the next Garcia or Perdomo. Now, I don’t know how much overlap there is with guys who will be the next Garcia or Perdomo; every hitter is a snowflake who’d need to do different things to unlock that extra notch of power. I’m just looking at who has the raw material.

This past season, 275 major league hitters took 500 or more competitive swings, according to Baseball Savant. Six of them met the following criteria: average bat speed under 73 mph, hard swing rate of 18% or less, whiff rate under 20%, chase rate under 25%, in-zone contact rate of 87.5% or better, and hard-hit rate of 30% or less:

One of those six hitters was Kwan, who’s already an established offensive weapon, and a corner outfielder to boot. One of the others is Santiago Espinal, who at 31 is a bit older than the profile of player I’m looking for.

So is Bryson Stott, who just turned 28 and has been a major league starter for basically four full seasons. But stylistically, he’s quite a bit like Perdomo and Garcia: an excellent defensive second baseman and terrific basestealer whose plate discipline and contact skills occasionally make him a really difficult out. The rest of the time, watching him makes me throw silverware at my TV and scream, “WHY AREN’T YOU A BETTER HITTER?”

But Stott is like Garcia and Perdomo in another way: He did make a big change to his approach, dropping his hands and trying not to be so passive. You can read more from Matt Gelb at The Athletic and Timothy Jackson at Baseball Prospectus. Ultimately, Stott made much better contact after dropping his hands, and producing more hard swings:

That leaves Durbin, Hicks, and Edwards, three short (all 5-foot-9 or under) hitters with languid swings who generate a lot of line drives but little hard contact.

In terms of where and how Durbin hits the ball, he’s making some of the best contact in all of baseball. The bat tracking metrics have him in the 95th percentile in squared-up rate, with a 20.4% in-air pull rate. He’s not a huge fly ball guy, but he’s not just beating the ball into the ground either. Durbin, who was acquired from the Yankees in the Devin Williams trade last winter, was an average hitter in 2025. His combination of plate discipline, contact skills, and R2-D2 body shape had made him a hipster prospect favorite (much like Meidroth), and he was a solid average hitter for the Brewers as a rookie. But that’s a team that could surely use some extra gas in its lineup.

So too the Marlins, who employ both Edwards and Hicks. Both the Brewers and Marlins have had some major league hitting development success stories of late — Isaac Collins, Jakob Marsee, Kyle Stowers — so maybe they know something that’ll help Durbin, Hicks, and/or Edwards unlock that extra grade of power.

Because you can see the lack of bat speed in all three of these guys. Here’s an example, a line drive single from Edwards:

The swing is languid. He’s clearly not ripping the bat through the zone as hard as he can. That probably has to do with his outlier contact hitting ability, but the inability to put a charge into the ball is holding him back.

Maybe it can’t be done. But with the underlying skills these players have, the difference between an average part-time player and a star isn’t as big as it looks.