Ronald Torreyes Continues to Exceed Expectations
Unless you’ve been following the Yankees this year, there’s a decent chance you have no idea who Ronald Torreyes is. That’s understandable. I’ve been monitoring him for a while, but that’s only because I spend an inordinate amount of time parsing through minor-league data to identify players like him: players who are way, way off the prospect radar, but who project to be impact big leaguers.
Torreyes is off to a torrid start this year. In limited action with the Yankees, the 23-year-old infielder is hitting .667/.667/1.000. That’s a 401 wRC+. In nine trips to the plate, he has two singles, a double, a triple and only one strikeout. I know: small sample, blah, blah, BABIP, blah, blah. But Torreyes’ first nine plate appearances have been about as good as it gets.
Torreyes has never been thought of as much of a prospect. He originally signed with the Reds out of Venezuela back in 2010, and he’s moved around quite a bit since then. Here’s an excerpt from his Baseball Reference page:
All that and he’s still just 23. Whenever I come across a prospect who’s changed teams multiple times, two conflicting thoughts run through my mind: on the one hand, I think multiple teams decided they didn’t really want him. However, multiple teams decided they did want him.
Given the nature of Torreyes’ transactions, it’s hard to make a case that anyone has ever truly wanted him. His first team included him as the third piece in a trade for a reliever. His second team sold him to his third team. His third team sold him to his fourth team. His fourth team sold him to his fifth team, who traded him with another player for a 27-year-old minor leaguer. His sixth team — the Yankees — gave him away on waivers to his seventh team. He was back on waivers just weeks later, and wound up with the Yankees again.
Three times this guy was traded for cash. His team literally just sold him to another organization without receiving another player in return. Even the Yankees didn’t seem particularly interested in holding on to him, seeing how they DFA’d him last winter to clear room for the unremarkable Lane Adams. Torreyes has always been treated like an afterthought, rather than a prospect.
If you’ve ever seen Torreyes, it isn’t hard to see why. Although he’s listed at 5-foot-9, he looks much shorter than that. Erstwhile lead prospect analyst Kiley McDaniel speculated last winter he’s actually more like 5-foot-7. As if that weren’t enough, he’s also rail thin. He looks more like a horse jockey than a baseball player.
Statistically, though, Torreyes looks like a pretty interesting prospect. It’s a bit hard to make out by looking at his player page since he bounced around quite a bit, but Torreyes hit fairly well last year: .263/.321/.403 overall, with most of that coming at Double-A. This included a solid .296/.348/.408 showing after he joined the Dodgers organization in June.
He was even better in 2014, when he actually stayed with one organization — the Astros — for a full season. He slashed .298/.345/.376 with 12 steals as a 22-year-old shortstop in Triple-A. Most impressive of all was his minuscule 5% strikeout rate. Dude’s a contact machine.
KATOH loves Torreyes. It pegged him for 5.2 WAR over the next six years headed into the season, which landed him at #52 on KATOH’s top 100. To put some faces to Torreyes’ unusual statistical profile, let’s go ahead and generate some statistical comps for the undersized infielder. I calculated a weighted Mahalanobis Distance between Torreyes’ 2015 season and every Double-A and Triple-A season since 1990 in which a middle infielder recorded at least 400 plate appearances. In the table below, you’ll find the 10 most similar seasons, ranked from most to least similar.
| Rank | Name | Proj. WAR | Actual WAR |
| 1 | Liu Rodriguez | 3.6 | 0.0 |
| 2 | Jorge Velandia | 4.3 | 0.0 |
| 3 | Luis Rodriguez | 4.7 | 1.3 |
| 4 | Aaron Hill | 6.1 | 13.1 |
| 5 | Neifi Perez | 4.9 | 2.0 |
| 6 | Jason Bates | 3.6 | 0.0 |
| 7 | Rey Sanchez | 2.6 | 3.6 |
| 8 | Chuck Knoblauch | 7.0 | 33.6 |
| 9 | Tomas de la Rosa | 3.2 | 0.0 |
| 10 | Wes Weger | 4.0 | 0.0 |
His Mahalanobis comps are a bit of a mixed bag, but there are some interesting players in there, including Aaron Hill, Rey Sanchez and Chuck Knoblauch. Those guys may not feel like great comps for Torreyes, but they had somewhat similar minor-league numbers and had success in the big leagues. Take that for what it’s worth. Luis Rodriguez feels a bit more like Torreyes, and put up solid numbers as a part-time player in his rookie season.
Torreyes is perhaps the most pronounced example of my math vehemently disagreeing with the scouting consensus. I’ll concede that Torreyes feels like the type of prospect who might break KATOH due to his lack of physicality relative to his performance. But even if he falls short of his KATOH forecast, I still believe he can be a useful player — even if only as a utility infielder. It blows my mind that so many teams let him go for approximately nothing.
Not only did Torreyes hold his own in Triple-A at a young age, but he did so while making loads of contact, especially on pitches in the zone. Hitters like that tend to have relatively smooth transitions to the big leagues. There’s only one way to find out if Torreyes’ unusual profile will work at the highest level, and the Yankees are willing to run that experiment. We’re still looking at a teeny tiny sample, but thus far, the Bombers been rewarded handsomely.
Chris works in economic development by day, but spends most of his nights thinking about baseball. He writes for Pinstripe Pundits, FanGraphs and The Hardball Times. He's also on the twitter machine: @_chris_mitchell None of the views expressed in his articles reflect those of his daytime employer.
Love that AAA Z-Contact article. Looking at the leaderboard you posted, the Yankees had another leader in that category: Pirela. I’d like to see SD give him a chance.
Pirela’s an interesting guy. I believe his bat can play in the majors, particularly against LH’d pitching, but he doesn’t offer a clear defensive position. 2B is probably the best option.
Got to see him play once in Oklahoma City in 2014, on that crazy Astros AAA squad with Singleton, Springer, Santana, Stassi, Hernandez, and Villar. One game, and all that, but he definitely looked like he belonged.
I was pretty bummed to see LAD let him go. I liked his defense and his contact/on base skills.
I think some of your numbers are off. It looks like Torreyes’ 2015 line was .261/.308/.347, and most of his time was in AA, not AAA
I was also including his time with LA and not just his minor league numbers. But most of his time was definitely in AA rather than AAA.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Torreyes is similar to Yangervis Solarte, a talented player who was living on the fringes that the Yankees targeted a few years back to serve the same role Torreyes does now.
I don’t believe the Yankees DFA’ing Torreyes was an indication of indifference. Their actions suggest just the opposite. It was a bit of winter rostering gamesmanship that almost backfired. They traded with the Dodgers to get Torreyes in January, but then they tried removing him the 40-man roster during a time when those spaces are at a premium and teams are always looking to upgrade on the margins. They claimed Lane Adams, figuring there was a high likelihood they’d end up with both players in the organization. The Angels then snagged Torreyes, which isn’t that surprising. Billy Eppler is the GM of the Angels and had just arrived from the Yankees two months earlier. He not only knew the Yankees like Torreyes, he either helped shaped their opinion on Torreyes, or was influenced by the Yankees scouts. After the Angels claimed Torreyes, they waited for what they hoped would inevitably happen: The Angels would also try removing Torreyes from their 40-man roster, and when they did, the Yankees once again claimed Torreyes, DF’ing — guess who? — Lane Adams to open up a spot for Torreyes. That says all along they wanted Torreyes and not Lane Adams. In the end, Adams cleared and was assigned to the Yankees minor leagues, so the Yankees ended up with both players, which was their intention all along, but they almost lost the player the really wanted, Torreyes, in the process.
KATOH could be overly optimistic on Torreyes, but I suspect like Solarte, he’ll be in the majors to stay now for a few years now.
Solarte feels like a lazy comp, but he’s actually a pretty good comp. Both are undersized, undertooled infielders with excellent bat-to-ball skills. Prospects like that usually handle the transition to the majors pretty well offensively. Add in their defense, and guys like this can really sneak up on everyone.
Like Altuve who was signed at age 16 and is also from Venezuela, Torreyes has many years of experience hitting baseballs in the MLB academies in Venezuela since age 13-14 instead of going to high school. Then signed at age 16 or 17. Same thing with Starlin Castro who was signed at 16.
They spend their teenage years doing nothing but being trained to hit baseballs with professional level pitchers in the year-round MLB established and supported academies in their countries. By the time they are 20-21 years old, many have been living and training with MLB professionals for 4-5 years and are ready to sign as free agents in the major leagues.
American teens play against their own age peers at every level and do not face near-MLB pitching until they are in AAA in their early to mid-twenties.
American boys are not allowed to quit school and sign at 16. They also don’t have the benefit of the baseball academies where they can be trained by MLB professionals from the age of 14.
The Cubs didn’t necessarily sell him for cash. They sold him for IFA bonus slots. So all that money went into signing the Gleyber Torres/Eloy Jimenez class. The extra slots helped lower the taxes and one of the players signed (Jeferson Mejia) was traded for Miguel Montero.
Ronald Torreyes = Spanish for “David Eckstein”
Pretty much!