Three Fascinating MiLB Hitting Prospects And Why They’re Unique

Image credit: Emmanuel Rodriguez (Andrew Woolley/Four Seam Images)

We recently updated our Top 100 Prospects list and have brand new Top 30 Prospect lists for all teams coming out later this week in advance of this month’s MLB trade deadline.

In preparing that update, a trio of unique positional prospects resurfaced. Here’s a quick look at their truly fascinating offensive profiles.

1. Jacob Wilson, A’s, Shortstop

Fascinating Trait: He makes an exceptional amount of contact.

Since Wilson returned to Triple-A after an IL stint for a knee injury, he’s played in nine games and swung at pitches 74 times. He’s fouled off a pitch 31 times and put a ball in play 40 times, which has led to 20 hits: 11 singles, five doubles and four home runs. He’s been retired on 11 ground ball outs, five fly ball outs, three popups and one line-drive out.

Over those nine games, he’s swung at the ball and missed only three times.

On the surface, Wilson stands out because he’s hitting above .400 in July. The 22-year-old missed a month with the knee injury, but he’s hitting .461/.494/.731 between Double-A Midland and Triple-A Las Vegas with a short rehab stint in the Arizona Complex League. Wilson has logged 180 plate appearances, meaning he’s roughly 55 appearances short of qualifying for the MiLB batting lead. Even if he went 0-for-the-next-55, he’d still be hitting .327. If he goes 0-for-11 over the next few games, he’ll still be hitting over .400.

A lengthy hitless streak from Wilson seems unlikely. In 40 games with at least one at-bat, he’s gone hitless only four times. He has seven four-hit games over that stretch and 23 multi-hit games.

But that’s not the only thing that makes Wilson fascinating. What’s exceptional has been his ability to hit for power while never swinging and missing.

Wilson has a swing-and-miss rate just under 8% this year, which is best in the minors among hitters with 150 or more plate appearances. The median MiLB hitter swings and misses 28.8% of the time.

Wilson is willing to take a strike if it’s a borderline pitch, but if he decides to swing, he almost always makes contact. Here’s a look at the entirety of Wilson’s swings and misses in Double-A and Triple-A this season:

Wilson will infrequently get beaten by a fastball in the strike zone (red on the chart), and he’ll sometimes swing over a changeup (blue) below the zone. His swings and misses at a breaking ball are exceptionally rare.

Normally this type of profile comes at the expense of power. But in Wilson’s case, he’s produced 31 extra-base hits in just 46 games. Midland and Las Vegas are excellent offensive parks in solid leagues for hitters, but producing 31 extra-base hits and just 13 strikeouts is truly exceptional.

2. Emmanuel Rodriguez, OF, Twins

Fascinating Trait: He rarely swings the bat.

We’ve noted Rodriguez’s exceptional combination of passivity and power before, but it remains one of the most outlier characteristics we’ve seen from a top prospect.

Rodriguez swings at just under 32% of the pitches he sees. That’s the lowest swing rate in the full-season minors. The median MiLB hitter swings 45.3% of the time, and there are hitters who swing twice as often as Rodriguez.

Rodriguez is willing to trade getting into pitcher’s counts and even the occasional called strike three to ensure he only swings at pitches he can drive. Of his 47 strikeouts, 21 have come on a called strike three, compared to 26 where he swung and missed on strike three.

That may seem like taking patience at the plate too far, and if you look at the pitches Rodriguez has taken, it would appear that keeps the bat on his shoulder with no rhyme or reason. He takes a ton of pitches outside the strike zone, but he also looks at pitches in the zone.

According to Synergy’s data, Rodriguez has taken 473 pitches this year. Of those, 65.5% are on balls out of the strike zone, 11.4% are pitches just on the edge of the strike zone in the shadow zone and 13.5% have come on pitches in the strike zone.

But Rodriguez does have a plan. He doesn’t swing unless he can do damage, and he knows he can’t do damage when he swings on pitches outside of the strike zone. Here’s a chart of his swings this year:

Rodriguez is hitting .359/.359/.748 when he swings the bat. Those numbers drop to .125/.125/.125 when he swings at a pitch outside of the strike zone, but he has only 21 such swings in 38 games. On 17 pitches swung at on the shadow of the strike zone, he’s hitting .200/.200/.300, while he’s slashing .400/.400/.859 on 175 swings at pitches inside the strike zone.

So how can pitchers attack Rodriguez? It’s a tough quandary. He won’t chase outside of the strike zone, but if a pitcher tries to throw a fastball in the zone, he hits .315/.327/.648 against them, .273/.273/.576 against breaking balls in the strike zone and .615/.615/1.462 against off-speed pitches in the zone.

Rodriguez is especially deadly when a pitcher tries to elevate in the zone. In the top third of the strike zone, he’s hitting .364/.391/1.000. As you would expect, he’s even better in the middle third of the strike zone (.457/.457/.913), although a pitcher who can hit spots in the bottom third of the zone can have success (.156/.156/.281).

Rodriguez can be pitched to, but a pitcher who nibbles will likely find himself behind in the count. A pitcher who tries to win in the zone is facing a hitter with the power to make them pay.

3. Chandler Simpson, OF, Rays

Fascinating Trait: His success is based on hitting ground balls.

Simpson, like Wilson, is an extreme contact hitter. But Simpson is more the normal archetype of such a bat-to-ball specialist.

Also like Wilson, pitchers rarely beat Simpson in the strike zone, as he rarely swings and misses (just a 9% miss rate).

For most hitters, ground balls are not the most productive way to hit. But for Simpson, it’s where his batting average thrives, as he’s hitting .398 when he hits a ground ball. Like pretty much every hitter, his greatest success comes when he hits a line drive (.638).

For most hitters, fly balls are where doubles, triples and home runs are found. You trade batting average for slugging percentage. For Simpson, it’s much more likely to result in an outfielder taking a few steps and making an easy catch, as he hits just .125/.120/.188 on fly balls.

So Simpson has an approach that seems right out of the 1910s. He is a master of getting the barrel of the bat on top of the baseball. He will slap or drive the ball into gaps in the infield, and he has a special knack for hitting a hard grounder the other way past a third baseman creeping in to be ready to handle a bunt.

When Simpson gets the barrel on top of the pitch and smashes it into the ground just in front of home plate, he doesn’t need to find a gap to nab a hit, either.

Per Synergy Sports data, almost half of the logged 44 ground ball hits for Simpson never left the infield. Seventeen of those were singles where infielders fielded the ball cleanly, meaning Simpson just beat the throw or the fielder held the ball realizing he had no hope of making a play. Another two were on balls where the fielder failed to field the ball cleanly because he was rushing to try to make an almost impossible play because of Simpson’s speed. Another was a swinging bunt where the third baseman quickly gave up any hope of trying to make a play.

In comparison, Synergy has logged six hits (highlighted by one double and a triple) and two sacrifice flies all year for Simpson where he hit a fly ball. If Simpson gets the barrel of the bat under the ball, he’s likely out. If he hits it square or the top of the baseball, that’s where he finds hits.

Simpson also has seven bunt hits in 15 attempts, which means he has 27 hits this year that haven’t left the infield.

Simpson had been leading the minors in batting for most of the season. He currently ranks second, with his .353 average just one point behind fellow Rays prospect Tre’ Morgan.

None of this is a new development for Simpson, who led Division I in hitting at Georgia Tech in 2022. If he wins the MiLB batting title this year, he will become the first player in 40 years to be both an NCAA D-I batting champ and an MiLB batting champ. Only Buster Posey managed to pull off a similar (and even tougher) feat by becoming both a D-I and MLB batting champ.

And that’s what makes Simpson so odd. While he’s battling for the MiLB batting title, he has a .043 isolated power. Almost no one hits .300 in the majors with a sub-.075 isolated power.

With help from Baseball Reference’s Stathead, here’s a look at the 11 seasons since 2000 in which an MLB player hit .300 in a season with a sub-.075 isolated power:

Rank	Player	Season	ISO	BA
1	Luis Castillo	2009	.043	.302
2	Ryan Theriot	2008	.052	.307
3	Luis Castillo	2000	.054	.334
4	Ben Revere	2014	.055	.306
5	Luis Castillo	2002	.056	.305
6	Luis Castillo	2007	.058	.301
7	Juan Pierre	2003	.067	.305
8	Dee Strange-Gordon	2017	.067	.308
9	Ben Revere	2015	.071	.306
10	Jason Kendall	2004	.071	.319
11	Luis Castillo	2005	.073	.301

Luis Castillo had six seasons where he hit .300 with no power. The rest of baseball has five. While Castillo is an infielder, he’s the best-case example of Simpson’s potential MLB profile as a hitter.

But does Simpson’s lack of power hinder his offensive contributions if he does manage to prove he can hit for average at the big league level? Well, in the minors, it hasn’t.

Simpson has an inside-the-park home run, one triple and seven doubles this year among his 97 hits. More often, his version of an extra-base hit is to reach first base and then steal second. Simpson has reached first base with second base open on 77 occasions this year. He’s ended up standing on second (or third) in 47 of those 77 opportunities. He’s been thrown out seven times.

Here’s the math after watching every pickoff attempt and stolen base attempt of Simpson’s season: He has been picked off once, but he’s also advanced on four errors on pickoffs at first base. Twice he went first to third on those errors and twice he went first to second.

So far, that’s six extra bases at the cost of one out.

He’s attempted to steal second in 49 of the remaining 72 opportunities. He’s successfully swiped second 43 out of those 49 attempts, and on two of them, he advanced to third on throwing errors on the attempts to throw him out.

That’s 45 additional bases in exchange for six additional outs. He’s also been part of double steals three times when he was on first base. He successfully stole second twice and was thrown out twice. On one of those occasions, he then advanced to third and the leading runner scored on a throwing error attempting to throw Simpson out.

That’s a total of eight total outs (one pickoff and seven times caught stealing at second) in exchange for 54 total extra bases (six on errant pickoffs, 45 on steals and three on extra bases from throwing errors).

He’s also attempted 15 steals while standing on second and one when standing on third. He stole home once as part of a double steal. One extra base. No outs.

From second base, he was thrown out three times, stole third on 12 occasions and then scored on throwing errors on attempts to throw him out twice. So that’s three more outs and 14 additional bases.

So altogether, Simpson picked up an additional 69 bases on the basepaths and was responsible for 11 outs. All of a sudden, Simson’s offensive contributions seem much more in line with a more “normal” hitter.

And this is where the oddness of Simpson’s game becomes apparent. There are better ways to do this with a lot of complex math, but for simplicity’s sake, let’s count those 11 outs as if Simpson hadn’t reached base on those occasions. So instead of hitting .353, he’s now a .313 hitter, and his on-base percentage dips from .406 to .370. Those are still solid numbers.

But let’s also add those extra bases. That means, instead of 109 total bases, Simpson now has 178. It’s not completely accurate to ascribe that to slugging percentage because the denominator of at-bats isn’t really accurate, but if you did give all those extra bases to total bases, he would have a .647 slugging percentage. In a better and more simplistic term, you could note that he’s ended up standing on second on 45 occasions where he reached first and ended up standing on third four times. For Simpson, a single or a walk is often equivalent to two bases after he gets done stealing second.

There’s no guarantee that Simpson’s approach will work the same against the better defenses of MLB teams. But it does explain why he’s not a prospect to write off at the plate and why he’s one of the most productive players in the minors this year.