After a couple days off we pick up again with our 30 part series on reviewing Baseball America’s 2019 Top 30 Mets Prospects with #28, Junior Santos. What we do here is look at what BA said about the player prior to to 2018 and then we check in with how the player actually performed.
Junior Santos was signed by the Mets when he was 16. BA wrote that the Mets “viewed Santos as the steal of the 2017 international signing class” and paid the right hander 275k. When the Mets signed him he was already 6′ 6″ and was still growing. Before 2019 they wrote a lot about how he is a work in progress. He throws between 93-95, can get to 97 but as the game goes on he drops down to 91-93. He is still working on control and needs to work on “keeping his fingers on top of the ball as he delivers it” for his breaking stuff.
He pitched 11 games, 10 starts in 45.0 innings in the DOSL in 2018 posting a 2.80 ERA and 0.911 WHIP. Because of his stats, his frame and his work ethic, BA concluded by saying he is “one of the most intriguing pitching prospects at the lower levels of the system”.
2019 saw him make the jump to Kingsport where he he was a whopping 3.7 years younger than the average player. He struggled, making 14 starts with 40.2 innings of work posting a 5.09 ERA and a 1.746 WHIP. Control for him was an issue, he had a 5.5 BB/9. He’s also playing in a fairly advanced league for his age too.
You can’t teach height and he has good stuff. He just needs to work on controlling it, which makes sense. Santos will probably play in Brooklyn next year, maybe Kingsport again (I’ll be surprised if he gets bumped up to a full-season league at the onset). I also expect that by the end of next season, a lot more of us will be talking about him.
