Called Up: Jorge Soler
I should be doing many more of these with September call-ups coming soon, but I’ll try to keep from sidetracking myself from org prospect rankings (Rockies list coming this week) by writing about every prospect that comes up. A 50 Future Value is a good cut-off for who gets a post, but I might do some interesting 45 FV guys as well. Take a look at the Rangers list to get an idea of what 45 and 50 FV means. The 50 FV cut-off is generally around the 150th best prospect in the game.
Hit: 50/60, Game Power: 55/65, Raw Power: 65/65, Run: 50/45, Field: 45/45+, Throw: 55/55
Note: From now on, when I list scouting grades for a player in an article, they will appear on his player page in real time, so pop over to Soler’s page and marvel at technology.
Jorge Soler is just a fun player to watch. He’s an explosive quick-twitch power hitter with easy plus bat speed and raw power along with just enough huge cuts and erratic stuff to his game that you never know what you might see. Some scouts rate the power a 70, but since there were some real concerns about contact/approach and makeup coming into this season, I tried to stay conservative, despite Soler’s big numbers this year. One scout compared him to Yasiel Puig, calling Soler a better hitter but not as fast as Puig.
When I was doing my top 100 list last year, I had Soler easily in the top 50 even after seeing more erratic stuff than huge performance in the Arizona Fall League. Multiple evaluators told me to move him out of the top 50 — I eventually ranked him 52nd — as they had these concerns for years and it was now seen as starting to impact his ability to hit his substantial upside. To clarify, these concerns weren’t about his character, but mostly focus and maturity type stuff; something many players grow out of (Soler is still 22) but snowball for others. Those concerns haven’t evaporated, but it’s amazing what raking can do for one’s reputation.
Soler is a good athlete for a a 6’3/225 power hitter, turning in average run times and sometimes a bit better, but I’d expect him to lose a step by his peak and he’s never been a huge hustle guy on the bases. It’s a right field profile and he should have enough speed/defense to be around average in those areas and not be a value suck on a potential impact bat.
EDIT: Using the process from the org prospect list format, the triple slash line upside for Soler would be .285/.360/.485. This is taking the projected tools above, converting them into stats (i.e. 60 bat converts to .280s batting average), then rounding up a bit (how much for each tool depends on the player) to account for “upside” rather than “projected output.”
Kiley McDaniel has worked as an executive and scout, most recently for the Atlanta Braves, also for the New York Yankees, Baltimore Orioles and Pittsburgh Pirates. He's written for ESPN, Fox Sports and Baseball Prospectus. Follow him on twitter.
So, Soler’s realistic ceiling is pretty much Jay Bruce
Bruce is 27 this season — do we even know what HIS ceiling is yet?
Do you know what ceiling means?
Where does it say that?
The author lists Soler’s projected upside as .285/.360/.485. And his “ceiling” would presumably be something better than his projected upside.
Meanwhile, Bruce is a career .253/.326/.470 hitter.
Upside and ceiling are the same thing for me. Everyone’s upside is best player in baseball, so I try to find something a notch or two above what I’m expecting to happen to represent a reasonable ceiling. Fans, of course, will find “reasonable” to be a couple notches higher than me.
Jay Bruce? Do you look at numbers, or just say things that make no sense on a regular basis?
I could go into a long drawn out explanation as to why you’re wrong, but suffice it to say, you’re very wrong. Jay Bruce’s MiLB #s were inflated by massive BABIPs, Soler doesn’t have that. He also shows much better plate discipline. If he hits .285 as Kiley suggests, his average, OBP and slugging are all better, significantly than Jay Bruce’s. His floor might be Jay Bruce.
His ceiling is high, notice ‘explosive hitter’ part, so something better than .285/.360/.485 with big boy power, as in 30+ HR annually.
Soler over Baez right?
Probably. I would bet that he’s peaked.
Let’s set up a Soler Panel and have a vote.
“Some scouts rate the power a 70, but since there were some real concerns about contact/approach and makeup coming into this season, I tried to stay conservative, despite Soler’s big numbers this year.”
Does the scouts’ “power” rating indicate what they think he’ll do in terms of extra base hits, or how hard he hits the ball?
Raw power is how far he can hit the ball, game power is how many HRs your can project given his game swing and hitting approach. Often they two future power tool grades are the same, but a sub-50 hit tool normally means you don’t get to all your raw power in games due to contact issues, pitchers throwing off-speed stuff you flail at, etc.. Sometimes game power is higher than raw power if you have a 60+ hit tool.
I can’t say I entirely understand the concerns about his approach. He’ll K a decent amount with his contact%, but nothing about him indicates he has poor strike zone judgement or a bad approach, that I can see.
You can’t scout a stat line. This is why we have scouts. When we’re predicting stuff like what AAA hitters will do in the short-to-medium term in the big leagues, scouts are way more accurate than numbers alone, especially in small samples when “changes” appear to have occurred but that can’t have stabilized yet.
Scouts’ tool grades are more predictive of long-term success than numbers alone (but there are obviously exceptions, like Pedroia, etc.). If this wasn’t true, I wouldn’t be writing about this sort of thing and scouts wouldn’t exist, given that teams would’ve figured out scouting is a fraud by now.
It just seems to me like strike zone judgement and plate approach were flagged as a potential concerns when he was first signed as this mysterious tool shed coming out of Cuba, and the initial grades just sort of stuck. The prospecting world as a whole has been oddly down on him. Baseball Prospectus had (at least) six Cubs prospects ranked ahead of him on their midseason update. Six! As good as the Cubs system is, it still strikes me as absurd that anyone would rate this guy as merely their seventh best prospect, and to me that reeks of a player who’s being overlooked for some reason.
Hopefully it goes without saying that I really appreciate the content you’re bringing to FanGraphs, but I’ll say it anyway. I especially appreciate you jumping into the comments.
The rest of this is going to sound a lot more aggressive than I mean to be, I think. So please don’t take it as more than questions from a very interested commenter.
Scouts telling people (probably especially FanGraphs readers) not to scout the stat line can sound perilously close to an appeal to authority argument, which often isn’t well-regarded.
So when you have Soler who seems to strikeout less than just about every other premium power prospect out there, and walks almost as much as any power prospect out there, I feel like the burden is on the scout to offer more explanation than what seems like a “because I said so” when it comes to criticism of contact and approach.
I know I’d really like hear more specific reasoning here. For instance, does Soler look much worse against premium fastballs and/or premium offspeed stuff than most top prospects? Off the top of my head, that’s about the only way these criticisms sound fair as specific Soler criticisms as compared to general caution about any prospect.
The other big thing about Soler in particular is that reports from the AFL ought to be taken with a grain of salt because the Cubs front office specifically told him not to push things too hard there in the interest of Soler’s health. And I admit I’m suspicious of any report that doesn’t mention that fact.
(On a totally separate note, the addition of grades to the player pages is fantastic. I think it’d be even better if there was an obvious explanation or link to an explanation of the grades for those who have no idea what they are.)
They could have just seen something in his swing that won’t translate to MLB pitching. Maybe he’s hitting mistakes, or feasting on the below average fastballs that abound in AA and AAA.
Those are the kinds of things we just can’t see by looking at a stat line.
He’s Cuban, of course he’ll have poor strike zone judgment.
Present/Future
Anyway we could get a mookie betts scouting report before he loses prospect eligibility
He will be the best Cubs prospect out of their bunch. Quote me.
good call on his bad strike zone command.. :rolleyes