2 The Bigs

By Chris Corso:

This is my first prospect profile for 2TheBig.com and I couldn’t be more excited to break down one of my favorite overall prospects, outfielder Spencer Jones. I don’t just say that he’s one of my favorite prospects because he was drafted by my hometown team, the New York Yankees with the 25^th overall pick in the 2022 MLB Draft.

I say it because I had the privilege of calling play-by-play games for the best college baseball summer league in the country, (The Cape Cod League) during the pandemic in 2019 while I worked remotely from my former full-time job with the Minnesota Vikings.

I waited till I saw all ten teams until I decided who my favorite prospect in the entire league was and it wasn’t a hard choice. But there was no better player on Cape Cod that summer than Spencer Jones of the Brewster Whitecaps. I noticed the 6-foot-6 left-hander (batter and thrower) who looked closer to seven feet playing my former position of CF and batting in the three-hole for his squad. In 25 games he hit .312, smashed three home runs, and drove in 18 runs, while winning the championship as the most valuable player.

The success and promise I saw in Brewster translated into a stronger senior year at his college of Vanderbilt where he hit .370, had 12 homers and 60 runs batted in.

Jones soared through the lower levels of the Yankee’s minor league system in his first year and now sits in Double-A Somerset not too far from my home in Tinton Falls, New Jersey. He hit .267 at the plate with 16 homers and 66 runs batted in in 2023 and look for him to be in Triple-A early next season when his numbers continue to improve. And there definitely are areas of improvement before he moves his way up to the top of the organization. Jones had a 29% K rate and a 9% Walk Rate. The K rate is the 10th highest amongst top 150 prospects and the Strikeout-to-Walk Ratio is above average by 18% amongst those same prospects. His OPS was also low (.786), specifically at 83th amongst top 100 prospects and .082 points below the average.

Jones in my book projects as a power-hitting corner outfielder who, with an improvement to his strikeout rate, can also hit for average and be a perfect bat in the Bronx Bomber’s righty-heavy lineup. His 1st Bowman comps are high. Wouldn’t you believe it? A power hitting Lefty in the most famous system in baseball. Prospectors can already picture him in pinstripes, hitting balls over that short porch in right. Even with the high price ($170 base raw auto), the upside is most definitely there. His Jones was one of the 2022 draft pick holdouts by Topps, who finds his 1st auto in 2023 Bowman Baseball.