PHOENIX -- Eloy Jiménez played at the ACL game I attended Thursday night, and it was good that he did. Back during his days as White Sox scouting director, Nick Hostetler would talk about the benefit of watching major league games as a way to refresh his eyes from a long stretch of watching college and high school baseball. And all it takes is nine innings of chaos ball on the backfields to feel like you're watching a different sport.
Even in the narrow world of professional baseball, major leaguers are unicorns, with physical tools and skill sets that greatly distance them from the rest of the population. MLB teams will not watch the College World Series this weekend and pick the most successful player in the tournament, they are trying to perceive who is suited to play the bigger, stronger, faster version of the sport that their teams play.
As an already large and lumbering player in the major league game, Jiménez taking it easy on the basepaths in his first rehab appearance since a hamstring strain is not the perfect barometer. But he was my barometer in watching a rumble between the ACL White Sox and ACL Guardians. In a game played heavily by 18 and 19-year-olds, there are very few traditional major league bodies. There are a lot of proto-versions of them--tall, broad but youthfully skinny or short and stocky are the most common variations--but for all of them the presence of a Jiménez was a good reminder of scale.
For example, this was the only home run of the evening.
That informed what I previously might have thought was a tough look on a first inning double to center for Abraham Núñez Jr., son of the former Royals and Marlins outfielder and one of the highest-dollar signings ($700K) of the 2023 White Sox international class. Núñez didn't look super comfortable tracking a ball that fell in over his head to deep center, but the rest of the night brought the play into perspective. The ACL Guardians lineup didn't put a ball over anyone's head for the rest of the evening, and a run environment where containing the constant traffic on the basepaths is a bigger priority than fearing anyone's power, bears itself out over nine innings.
Postgame, Núñez explained that center field is his favorite position, explicitly for the high level of responsibility it carries. He went 1-for-4 with a strikeout, and seemed over-eager in his first couple of at-bats for someone who distinguished himself with his plate discipline in the DSL. But the 18-year-old explained that he's in the middle of a pretty involved change in his setup.
"In the DR I had better pitch selection than now," Núñez said, with no need for an interpreter. "I was kind of off with my mechanics and I'm working on that."
Núñez is still getting on base through 100 plate appearances in the ACL (.250/.340/.352), but has changed his stance from closed to open. Previously he was so closed that his eyes were almost more pointed toward third base than the pitcher, with his hands coiled up near his head. Now his hands are lowered and closer to where his load begins, and he's opened his stance up to give himself a straight view to the pitcher. As much as he looked in between in his first three at-bats, everything looked more twitchy and quick when he stayed back on an off-speed pitch and smacked a low liner through the right side in his finale.
At six-foot-two, Núñez has a lean and broad-shouldered frame easier to imagine on a big league diamond than most, even if it will probably look more like a traditional corner outfielder when he's done filling out.
As a decidedly out of shape writer, I don't want to dedicate a huge chunk of time to how hot it was. But it was easily 102 degrees at first pitch and still in an ample amount of sunlight. It got better as night fell, but from a pure temperature standpoint, it might be a reach to say it got cooler. It's tempting to say "you get used to it," but that could always be your body shifting into emergency resource conservation mode, or nerve endings dying. Or you dying.
So beyond everything, catching prospect Angelo Hernández deserves all of our deepest sympathies after catching all nine innings of a 6-2 win. Starter Jeremy Gonzalez entered the night with a 13.86 ERA, and whatever Hernández did to guide him past two first inning walks and a wild pitch to complete his best four innings of the season, might make Martín Maldonado eat his heart out. After receiving a half-million bonus out of Venezuela in January 2023, Hernández is hitting .296/.377/.556 with four home runs in 17 games. He's tall strong and sturdy with a swing that seems like he's looking to loft the ball, so it doesn't take much wondering how he's pulling it off, even if all I saw him do is go 0-for-3 with a walk while probably losing 10 pounds in sweat.
Behind the plate, he was under siege all night. Hernández worked frequently off a one-knee stance to present low strikes, but was paired with a starter prone to missing high and arm side alongside a large supply of spiked breaking balls. There were seven wild pitches and a passed ball, and Hernández seemed to accept as the night wore on that his backhand attempts were no match for the constant waves of pitches that needed blocking, and ramped us his efforts to move his base and get his body in front of balls.
One rosy interpretation is that if Hernández keeps hitting, his bat will carry him away from such grueling work. Another is that Hernández was born after the last save Dustin Hermanson recorded in his career, and that he has plenty of time to refine throwing and blocking provided he has the will. And if he can catch nine wild innings the heat of Phoenix in June, he has more resolve than most.
Around age 14, Luis Reyes' career path was more or less set. Taking your teenage years to figure yourself out is not a luxury afforded to those trying to get signed to play for an MLB organization out of the Dominican Republic. Reyes was first spotted by Marco Paddy and the White Sox international scouting department when he moved to Miami to pitch in the Perfect Game circuit as a 15-year-old, and credits facing American high schoolers for exposing him to how to sequence for the type of plate approaches he sees frequently in the US.
But the sequences Reyes gravitates to also reflect that a much earlier age, he was modeling his game after the later Yordano Ventura, who frequently spent his offseasons throwing at the same place as a very young Reyes.
"Always looking for the strikeout," Reyes said of his competitive mentality through an interpreter. "Trying to strike out every person that comes to the dish."
In signing for $700,000, Reyes was not only one of the biggest commitments of that White Sox class, but received the largest bonus of any Dominican pitcher on 2023 signing day. He has a 6.00 ERA in 21 innings this year with related control problems (13 walks), but the bat-missing stands out, with Reyes offering a 27.6 percent strikeout rate.
Reyes is becoming practiced at watching video to refine his slider and changeup, with the latter slightly bringing up the rear in terms of confidence at this point. But there's a definitive Ventura influence to his most trusted secondary.
"The thing [I] learned from Yordano is to really throw it aggressively," Reyes said of his slider, via interpreter. "It's a harder slider, so something [I] take pride in is being able to throw it in any count. It is a harder slider compared to others."
ACL baseball is engineered in a lab to make you fall in love with hyper-aggressive undersized infielders. The sloppiness of the defense makes any runner busting it around the basepaths look potentially unstoppable. The lack of developed power means even larger players would be challenged to show the kind of pop that a generously listed five-foot-eight Javier Mogollón can generate via hugely defined forearms and a big, honking leg lift.
That said, Mogollón--who was born three weeks after Jim Thome was traded for Aaron Rowand--was the most entertaining player on the field Thursday evening. And it's only after a few texts, a half hour drive back from the complex and deeper reflection that I've accepted that this does not mean he will be the 2029 AL MVP.
Generally, an enticing prospect at this level would have the tools or skill present to do things easily. Where as in contrast, Mogollón--signed out of Venezuela for just $75,000--asks with his game what can be made possible with merely maniacal effort.
Playing shortstop on this night (he largely is projected to end up at second), Mogollón unleashed a throw from behind the bag that had his teammates exclaiming "that was a f***ing missile." It was created not with some effortless motion revealing plus arm strength, but by Mogollón loading in his back leg and then snapping his upper body toward first like a mouse trap. He runs out popups in a dead sprint because why not against defense that can be pressured into mistakes, and he circles and charges infield choppers at dead sprints because cutting the throwing distance is valuable to him. I'm sure his 11-for-11 mark on stolen bases has a similar look.
I saw Mogollón reach base four times including a double off the left field wall, but it looks like his larger issue so far is striking out a lot (39 whiffs in 90 trips to the plate), even if he's placing a .216/.363/.500 line around it thanks to five home runs. With the level of changes players are undergoing--often the first meaningful and intentional mechanical alterations of their lives--there's a question of how much more seriously we can regard complex league stats from spring training numbers.
The most recent Baseball America writeup describes Mogollón as "He gets low in the box with a wide stance and uses a simple, compact swing with no stride," and I'm no scout but that doesn't seem like what he's doing anymore. Mogollón tamps down his effort to generate all the separation in the world with two strikes, but still lifts his front foot significantly to get his engine moving in his current swing. And either that modification is new and/or the whole change in load is new enough to merit some grace in the feel for contact that results, as he continues to generate pop (11 extra-base hits in 21 games).
At higher levels, Mogollón's forearms won't stand out as much, if at all. The gusto he brings to counter his lack of size on defense will be competing against players who simply have ideal size, and it will be harder to separate himself from the field with effort. If you've watched a Guardians game in the last three years, you've seen at least a version of Mogollón's game played with a larger body. But complex ball is where you see an 18-year-old play like he can chase down the whole world, and for that, it's not a bad way to spend a night.
