Thursday, February 1, 2018

DrB's 2018 Giants Top 50 Prospects: #27 Jonah Arenado

Jonah Arenado, 3B/1B.  DOB:  2/3/1995.  B-R, T-R.  6'4", 230 lbs.  Drafted 2013 Round 16.

A+:  .268/.308/.439, 36 2B, 4 3B, 13 HR, 5.0 BB%, 19.9 K%, GO/AO= 0.75, 488 AB.

Jonah Arenado is a big kid who hits the ball hard.  He's also the brother of a pretty good MLB 3B you may have heard of.  The line for his age 22 season in San Jose is pretty good.  He kept racking up XBH's in bundles.  The problem for Arenado is this was his second full season with San Jose and the numbers are almost identical to his first full season there.  So, where does he go from here?  Seems like the Giants have to either push him up to Richmond and see what happens or essentially give up on him, which they absolutely should not do on a kid with his power potential.  The red flag in his stat line is the very low walk rate.  For some of those doubles to turn into dingers, he needs to be more selective at the plate.  One other issue:  He wants to play 3B.  I saw him play late in the season and to my eye, he's just too big and to stiff in his actions to play 3B at higher levels.  This means 1b is likely his only option which puts even more pressure on the bat.  So, kind of a mixed bag here.  Tremendous power potential combined with a large bust potential.

1 comment:

  1. The good news is that he was able to raise his BABIP up some, but yeah, almost identical stats, even number of homeruns! And his strikeout rate did not improve much either, though still doable, and he did increase his walk rate by around 50%. Very mixed bag indeed. He's probably repeating San Jose again, that batting line is not all that good, but I can see the Giants promoting him the moment he's whacking the ball all over in SJ (if he does, if he is still under 800 OPS with a third year at San Jose, prognosis not good, I think...).

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