Adjustment Helps Padres’ Jakob Marsee Get His Legs Into Swing
Jakob Marsee knows a thing or two about finishing strong.
The goal as he begins his second full pro season is to sustain the momentum that carried him from a hot August at High-A Fort Wayne to Double-A San Antonio to Arizona Fall League MVP honors to perhaps cusp of his MLB debut.
The Padres ultimately chose Jackson Merrill as their center fielder and awarded a bench spot to Graham Pauley, two fellow prospects who finished 2023 alongside Marsee in San Antonio.
But the 22-year-old Marsee remains firmly in the Padres’ plans after competing for the center field job deep into spring training.
“Marsee had a really good camp,” Padres manager Mike Shildt said. “You don’t know how guys are going to react until they actually get here in this environment . . .
“You can’t replicate a major league game or a major league season or how guys are going to respond when the bullets start to fly for real, figuratively speaking—but he showed up and didn’t make the camp bigger than it was.”
The wave that Marsee is riding into the 2024 season is undeniable.
A fourth-round pick out of Central Michigan in 2022, Marsee hit .274/.413/.428 with 16 home runs and 46 stolen bases in 129 games last season, most of them at High-A. After the season he led the AFL with 18 extra-base hits and a 1.215 OPS.
Marsee attributed his uptick in production to getting into his legs more in his swing and staying on time. While the organization had placed an emphasis on finding opportunities to pick out pitches to damage, Marsee sees that as more of an evolution of getting acclimated to pro ball and a swing adjustment.
“I was always swinging at the right pitches, and I don’t think they necessarily wanted me to change my approach,” Marsee said. “Maybe just in certain counts, take a better swing.
“At the end of the day, I think I was just able to fix my mechanics and be able to actually hit those pitches hard.”
FATHER FIGURES
— Jackson Merrill was just the third player since 1965 to start on Opening Day in center field before his 21st birthday. The others were Ken Griffey Jr. and Andruw Jones. Other Padres who made their MLB debuts in the two-game series against the Dodgers in Seoul, South Korea, were Graham Pauley, Rule 5 pick Stephen Kolek and Japanese reliever Yuki Matsui. Meantime, Korean reliever Woo-Suk Go was optioned to the minors to continue getting ready for the season.
