You Hang ‘Em, Jakob Marsee Will Bang ‘Em

I thought the Astros made a nifty pickup at the deadline by sneaking Jesús Sánchez through the door while everyone was paying attention to the Carlos Correa trade. Sánchez is by no means a transformative player, but he fixes a platoon imbalance in Houston’s outfield and he can theoretically play center field. At least he can stand out there for nine innings without maiming himself.

But apparently the Marlins are the real winners in that deal. Sánchez has had a slow start in Houston, but I have faith that he’ll come around eventually. Either way, that’s not especially relevant. By moving this perfectly fine outfielder out of the way, Miami has made room for 24-year-old Jakob Marsee. Never heard of him? I don’t blame you. But since the deadline, he’s been the best position player in baseball.

It’s pretty wild; in Marsee’s first 18 games in the majors, he’s hit .375/.455/.768. Getting 21 hits and nine walks in 18 games is impressive enough, but 13 of those hits have gone for extra bases, including four home runs. He’s also stolen six bases in seven attempts while playing mostly in center field.

In early July, Marsee was only 27th on the Marlins’ top prospects list, with a 40 FV and a lot of 40s on his individual tool grades as well. I’ll quote here from Eric Longenhagen’s writeup:

Marsee is similar to Diamondbacks outfielder Jake McCarthy. He has catalytic qualities on offense, but his short-finishing swing doesn’t generate big power, and while he’s fast, he’s a cleaner fit in a corner than in center. If there’s daylight between Marsee and McCarthy, it’s that Marsee’s swing has enough loft that he should be able to ambush the occasional pull-side homer.

Marsee is a kind of prospect I really like. And by “really like,” I don’t mean “expect to succeed.” I’m talking purely normatively here. He was a college performer who got into the pros and just kept performing.

The Padres took Marsee in the sixth round in 2022 following a breakout junior year at Central Michigan. That year, Marsee hit .345/.467/.550 with 18 stolen bases, 60 runs scored, and 66 RBI in 62 games. Now, I’ve been burned by so many guys who put up big numbers in the MAC that I basically don’t get my hopes up anymore. Eric Lauer and Keegan Akin are about as good as it gets. But I do love it when a guy just keeps leveling up at exactly the rate at which he gets promoted. Marsee had a 150 wRC+ in his final year of college, and he beat up on younger competition in about a month’s worth of minor league playing time in his draft year. But in 2023, across High- and Double-A, Marsee hit .274/.413/.428 (a 142 wRC+) with 46 steals.

In 2024, his power took a big step back in the high minors, and he moved from the Padres’ system to the Marlins’ as a secondary piece in the Luis Arraez trade. But even in a down year overall, Marsee still posted a .345 OBP and a 103 wRC+, and stole 51 more bases.

In 98 games at Triple-A this year, he’s improved offensively, to a .246/.379/.438 slash line and 14 homers (plus 47 more steals) in 98 games. Out of the 293 players with at least 250 plate appearances in Triple-A, Marsee is 62nd in xwOBA, 226th in hard-hit rate, and 78th in Barrels/BBE%.

That’s fine. I wouldn’t have put his promotion in the news crawl or anything. (The guys who are no. 1 and no. 2 in xwOBA and Barrels/BBE%, Roman Anthony and Samuel Basallo, did receive that distinction.) But for a third-place team that’s en route to a mid-70s win total, with a hole to fill in the outfield? Sure, call the kid up. Let’s see what he’s got.

He’s got quite a bit, it seems. A word of warning here: Through Tuesday, Marsee had played in just 19 big league games, and over 70 career plate appearances, he’d seen 242 pitches and put 47 of those in play. I would not dream of presuming to even consider drawing specific conclusions about his future in the majors based on such a small sample. Even stats like xwOBA and swing rate must be treated as descriptive rather than predictive.

With that caveat, though, it’s hard to find fault with Marsee’s first three weeks in the majors:

Marsee is an incredibly discerning swinger. He chases very rarely. When he swings at pitches in the zone, he makes contact, and when he makes contact, he hits the ball hard (not in the sense of bonkos exit velo, but in the sense of consistent 95-plus mph contact) and in the air. He’s checked every box so far.

The most impressive thing to me — and this could end up being the most important thing for Marsee in the long-term — is his ability to drive pitches in on his hands. None of his four home runs so far have been cheap, but three of them were right down the right field line off pitches that were either at or past the inside edge of the strike zone:

At the same time, when he gets a pitch up and over the outside corner, he can keep his hands inside it and drive it the other way:

One thing I noticed while going through Marsee’s brief major league record is that a lot of the pitches he has done the most damage on have come under one of two conditions. Either they were off spot starters and low-leverage relievers, or (in the case of that dinger off Williams) bad mistakes by good pitchers. There’s probably a better way to do this, but I separated the pitchers Marsee has faced into three groups: Those with a FIP- under 90, those with a FIP- between 90 and 110, and those with a FIP- of 110 or above. And I checked to see how Marsee did against each group.

In short: Is he hitting like he did in Triple-A because he’s facing the same quality of pitching?

So yeah, Marsee is absolutely crushing bad pitchers. But he’s also teed off against guys who are having good seasons as well. Quality of competition is probably having a significant effect on Marsee’s white-hot start to his major league career, but it’s not the whole story.

The whole story, actually, is not too dissimilar to Isaac Collins’. This is a guy with great plate discipline and just enough power to get by, but who’s kind of a tweener defensively. A corner outfielder who posts a .350 OBP with home run totals in the teens is a good player, but nobody gets excited about a guy who does that in Triple-A.

Nevertheless, like Collins, Marsee advanced steadily through the minors until there was an open big league job in front of him. And he’s made quite a first impression.

I’ll end, if you’ll indulge me for a moment, by presenting a hypothesis: Major league baseball has trended toward the disposable, max-effort pitcher. And by shortening the draft and contracting the minors, clubs are fishing for such pitchers with a slightly smaller net and preparing them in a slightly less well-equipped kitchen.

Given those conditions, let’s assume that the absolute quality of replacement-level pitchers is going to decline. I’m not saying Paul Skenes and Tarik Skubal are worse at their peak than Max Scherzer and David Price, or anything like that. I’m saying the eighth guy out of the bullpen or the four-inning spot starter might not be as good as he would be with a 40-round draft or a thicker portfolio of minor league roster spots.

In that case, I would expect to see a rash of guys like Collins and (assuming he continues to look like a competent hitter) Marsee breaking out over the next few years. Guys who can control the strike zone and direct their hard contact to where it can do the most damage. Ironically, just the kind of hitter a lot of us old cranks have been crying out for in the grip-it-and-rip-it era. When the pitching is Quad-A quality, a Quad-A hitter can do quite well for himself.

It’s only a theory, and would require more evidence than 19 games of Marsee producing more bangers than peak Gloria Estefan. But it’s something to consider.