Missing a year of development hurt, but we’re still believers
We continue our countdown of top prospects here at The Good Phight, counting backwards from 20 to our top prospect.
Yhoswar Garcia, R/R, 20 years old
Scouting report, via Fangraphs:
Originally slated to sign in 2019, Garcia instead had to wait a year due to age misrepresentation and put pen to paper in March of ’20. He then had to wait another year to get into games since he couldn’t come to the US for any baseball activity due to travel restrictions, keeping him from instructs. Garcia struggled in 2021, which is perhaps unsurprising for a young hitter who had endured such a long layoff; he slashed a concerning .229/.299/.271 with Low-A Clearwater. Garcia can really fly, and his swing is fairly short back to the ball, but he lacks any real strength and has to round mechanical corners to get the bat around with any sort of authority. He is sinewy and cut and has a very promising athletic foundation on which to build strength, but he desperately needs to build it or else we’re talking about a fifth outfielder at best, and only then if Garcia develops into a defensive vacuum. Given the context of the look — fraud perpetrated by adults in his orbit and a prolonged global pandemic cost him multiple seasons — we’re not ready to pull all the way off Garcia, though he’s not the sort of prospect a team would be interested in acquiring right now. He remains a developmental prospect of extreme variance.
Jay: 16, Ethan: 17, Alex: 12
Being fast is really cool, so that must make Garcia really, really cool. You can see in this video that Garcia is really fast, stealing four bases in a game where it wasn’t particularly close in any of them. That’s his calling card right now, his speed. Here’s another video that showcases that speed pretty well.
What we can also see is that that speed, by all accounts, helps him as a plus defender in center field too. Both of these tools are special, but they’re going to have to be augmented by a hit tool that needs to get better. He probably won’t hit for much power (dude is liiiiight) since the team might be wary of his putting on too much weight as to affect his speed, but if he can develop even an average hit tool and enough power to keep teams from being able to knock the bat out of his hands, the Phillies will have a weapon on their hands in the mold of Roman Quinn. Of course we all know what happened with Quinn and the injuries, so that’s another thing to keep an eye on.
This could be another big year for a Phillies prospect. Garcia is going to have show the team real advances with the bat to show he’s a prospect for the majors. Otherwise, the search for a regular center fielder will continue.