Jesus Castillo and seeing prospects differently
Jesus Castillo and seeing prospects differently
How a different site made me look at a prospect differently.
I love watching baseball, especially on the prospect side, because everyone can watch the same game but see it differently.
That’s especially true regarding watching and evaluating prospects. Multiple people can watch the same player and all walk away thinking something different.
Maybe there was something he did that reminded you of someone who didn’t work out, making you a little bit more cautious (Eric Longenhagen seeing a lot of Keston Hiura and Carter Kieboom in Nick Gonzales), or on the flip side, you saw a prospect do something that reminded you of a player that eventually made the majors.
Another person watching the same prospect may not have had the same experience as you, so they don’t see it, or one values a specific skillset more than another evaluator.
Every prospect list differs, as we see and value prospects differently. Sure, at the core, it’s all the same - who do we feel will make the best major league player?
This leads me to something I saw the other day, as Prospect’s Live released their Top 30 prospects for the Pittsburgh Pirates.
The Top 10 were free, including the scouting reports of the first five. There wasn’t much out of the ordinary, with Paul Skenes at the top of the list, followed by Termarr Johnson and Bubba Chandler.
Maybe the first curveball was having Thomas Harrington fourth, but if you’ve read the site here long enough, that may not be the biggest surprise. In one of the mailbags, I mentioned I believed he is closer to the bigger arms in the system than he gets credit for, and Prospect Live had him higher than Jared Jones and Anthony Solometo.
Before I go further, I wanted to post this quick question. If you had to pick one of these two players based on these handpicked statistics, who would you rank higher as a prospect?
What if I were to tell you Player A was a 21-year-old former college draft pick playing in Single-A, and the other spent almost half the season as a teenager at the same level?
Would that change what you initially said?
Player A was Mitch Jebb, a second-round pick for the Pirates in 2023, who finished the season with the Marauders. The other, Jesus Castillo, was among the best contact hitters in the system, not falling far behind Jebb in many categories.
Jebb is consistently put among the best prospects in the system, while Castillo is mostly an afterthought.
Now, there are several apparent reasons for that, Jebb batted .297 in Bradenton, Castillo .209. Jebb was a second-round pick and was highly regarded through the draft process.
Really, in the end, both showed a fantastic approach at the plate for the Marauders and shared a very similar profile as a prospect - speedy, contact-over-power hitters that are most effective putting the ball in play on the ground.
So, if that’s the case, then why not Castillo?
The biggest surprise to come out of the Top 10 was Castillo finishing ninth in the entire system.
Then again, maybe it wasn’t that much of a surprise after really looking at it.
There were four teenagers to draw 100 walks last year in the minors - Jackson Holliday, Termarr Johnson, Jett Williams, and Castillo.
The first three were first-round picks and Top 100 prospects. That’s pretty good company to keep.
Castillo may not be the next breakout prospect in the system. He has some traits that could help him move through the minors, and he is still very young.
At the very least, he’s a prospect that I’m looking at differently because of what another person saw in him and wrote about, which I was talking about at the beginning that I loved so much about the game.
Here’s another Player A vs B vs C
Stat A B C
rWAR 79.4 75.1 48.6
AB 9512 7658 7425
HR 267 389 299
BA .283 .267 .276
Who would you take first?
(I think that’s an easy one)
And who is second?
In your Player A vs Player B situation, I’d take Player A b/c he had the only true outlier stat (swinging strike rate)