Let’s Scout More Top Shortstop Prospects’ Defense: Franklin Arias, George Lombard Jr., JJ Wetherholt, Edwin Arroyo

This is the second post in a series I’m working on in which I not only do a deep dive analyzing shortstop prospects’ defense, but also cut together a video package so that you can too. The first installment can be found in the navigation widget above. Today, I’m tackling Red Sox prospect Franklin Arias, Yankees prospect George Lombard Jr., Cardinals prospect JJ Wetherholt, and Reds prospect Edwin Arroyo. Let’s get started.

Franklin Arias, Boston Red Sox

Arias is an incredibly polished defender for his age. He’ll turn 20 in November, and aside from struggling to handle hotshots, he’s already a rather complete shortstop. At the 0:30 mark we get our first example (and perhaps the most impressive) of Arias’ excellence coming in toward the infield grass. It requires a great deal of coordination to bend, collect the baseball, and make quick and accurate throws on plays like this, and Arias is silky smooth on basically every trial of this variety. Starting at the 1:25 mark, you can see how comfortable he is altering his arm angle depending on the angle of attack he needs to take on the baseball while making plays like this. He never appears rushed or out of control unless the play requires urgency. Note throughout the video how many times Arias is delivering the baseball with exactly one step of the runner to spare. This is indicative of his poise and internal clock.

At the 2:15 mark, the camera angle at Bowling Green gives us a peek at how Arias moves laterally — notice how his head and eyes stay trained on the ball even as his hips pivot and his feet chop toward the baseball. From that point on, we get a few good looks at him making backhand plays to his right, at which he also excels. The best example of this comes at the 3:00 mark, where you can see Arias deep in his lower half as he changes direction back toward first base so he can make as strong a throw as possible. He doesn’t have huge peak arm strength, but he has plus arm utility because of the way he sets himself up to throw with his footwork.

This is impressive enough for me to have rounded my future 55 grade on Arias’ defense up to a true 60. Though he’s more of a graceful, balletic athlete than an explosive one, this is a future impact defender at a premium position.

George Lombard Jr., New York Yankees

Stylistically, Lombard is Arias’ opposite. This is a powerful, explosive, tightly wound athlete who requires more visible effort to make a lot of these plays, though he’s talented enough to do so in fairly spectacular fashion. Note that Lombard’s arm stroke is frequently longer and sometimes a little messier than most shortstops, and there are a couple of instances where his throws nearly pull the first baseman off of the bag. But for the most part, Lombard’s arm is strong and accurate from a number of different platforms. You can see him shorten his stroke when he needs to, and he clearly has the arm strength to make throws from deep in the hole. Some of these plays to his right are sensational, capped by the very last play in this clip collection, a downright Jeteresque jump throw from Hillsborough Township.

The throw he makes at the 1:20 mark is also impressive, both in terms of Lombard’s pure arm strength and his feel for accuracy from that slinger’s arm slot. We get a few plays of this ilk during the next 20 seconds of the video. He has explosive range in both directions and is keen to lay out to try to make an incredible play, which we see several times during the last third of this collection. Again, here we have a future plus shortstop defender even though Lombard doesn’t play with the sort of grace and effortlessness that a lot of other plus shortstop defenders do.

JJ Wetherholt, St. Louis Cardinals

Wetherholt isn’t a hard “no” for me at shortstop, but I’d consider him something like replacement level there due to his mixed arm accuracy and fringe athleticism for the position. The other shortstops we’ve covered so far in this series have been better able to position their bodies to make a strong throw after corralling the baseball at the extreme ends of their range, and Wetherholt isn’t as adept at this. Instead, he’s making his best plays here thanks to guile and quickness, getting rid of the ball as quickly as possible even if the way he does so isn’t fundamentally sound or under control. The play he makes at the 2:28 mark is nifty, but it’s not something most good shortstops would need to go to the ground to complete; that’s a pretty standard hip-flipping play for most big leaguers.

Wetherholt is a heady player who can perform when there’s chaos around him (the play at 2:57, when Sebastian Walcott’s bat and the third baseman are both converging on him, is the best example here), and that’s going to be most useful operating around the bag as a second baseman. The presence of Masyn Winn makes it likely Wetherholt plays every day at a non-shortstop position anyway. The Cardinals have experimented with Wetherholt at third base, but some of his issues with throwing accuracy have followed him over there. It’s an experiment that deserves more time to unfold, but it’s not like Wetherholt has taken to third base so naturally that he demands to be promoted while Nolan Arenado is injured. I have him projected as an average second baseman.

Edwin Arroyo, Cincinnati Reds

Arroyo’s case is complicated. He clearly has the range, athleticism, hands, and max-effort arm strength to play a quality shortstop, but his arm accuracy has been a mess for the last couple of months. He seems hellbent on using a low arm slot for basically every throw, and the further away from first base you get, the less I find that practical. I was taught that we want to see shortstops getting more on top of the baseball on those deeper throws, so the ball is less likely to either sail or tail on them and force the first baseman off the bag. Here we see exactly that happening again and again, though on some of these, a better first baseman would just scoop the throw.

That said, the physical tools to play a good shortstop are here. There are several examples where we see the outskirts of Arroyo’s range. We also see what it looks like when he makes a clinical backhand play at the 2:03 mark, and from the 2:30 mark on, we can see him make several plays in on the grass (his footwork is a mixed bag on these). This season is Arroyo’s 40-man platform year; he’ll be exposed to the Rule 5 Draft this winter if the Reds don’t roster him. They’ve given him about a dozen reps at second base this year, the first time he’s played the keystone at all in an actual game since 2021. This guy’s athletic enough to play all over the place, and it might make sense for the Reds to move him around even more during the last few weeks of the Triple-A season (and maybe send Arroyo back to the Arizona Fall League) to see if he can play a superutility role. His throwing accuracy definitely needs to improve if a big league manager is going to run him out there at shortstop every day. Arroyo just turned 22 and still projects as a future average shortstop, but if you’d have asked me a year ago, I’d have told you that Arroyo would already be one.