Minor League & Prospects Thread

The AFL All-Star box score. Caleb Durbin doubles, singles, walks once, drives in 2 , scores a run and steals a base in 4 PA's. He also took a call third strike on a low pitch. I was watching the game. Garrett Martin goes 1-2. Carlos Lagrange gets the win by pitching 0.1 of an inning while getting a K and hitting a batter. That's Lagrange in a nut shell.

www.mlb.com/gameday/al-fall-stars-vs-nl-fall-stars/2024/11/09/787606/live

Is that "big, big role" going to be starting at 2b? Or being a super sub?

So if you're bringing back Soto, Judge is still playing CF in 2025.  Dominquez will be in LF.  

Appreciating AFL standout Caleb Durbin
How an overall Arizona Fall League check-in naturally turned into a Caleb Durbin appreciation post.
www.pinstripealley.com/2024/11/11/24293545/yankees-prospects-caleb-durbin-afl-arizona-fall-league-all-star-player-development-prospect-utility

Celeb Durbin proceeded to have one of the most impressive campaigns of any Yankees farmhand on a per-game basis. The infielder slashed .287/.396/.471 across 375 plate appearances including 10 homers and 29 stolen bases. Impressively, he also walked 10 more times than striking out, and his 37 punchouts meant he went down less than 10 percent of the time.

You’ll notice, however, that those 375 plate appearances in Triple-A seems a little too low: that’s because it is. Earlier this year, Durbin broke his wrist on an errant pitch and missed a couple of months of action. So despite how well the 24-year-old played when healthy, the Yankees thought it was worthwhile for him to get extra work out in Arizona. Beyond slashing an amazing .323/.450/.581 over his last eight games in Arizona, Durbin has gotten work in the outfield to add to his defensive versatility, which already includes all infield positions aside from first base.

All in all, this is a pretty sweet return on investment for the Yanks, who acquired him from the Braves for lefty reliever Lucas Luetge, who was DFA’d by June of the following campaign. At the time, Durbin was viewed as a slap-hitting prospect who made loads of contact by chopping at the ball with a small and powerless stride.

Oh, yeah, and he was in the Arizona Fall League’s All-Star Game (the Fall Stars Game) over the weekend. The guy just hits.

Durbin’s weekend performance led me to do a deeper dive into the film and numbers, and my main takeaway is that he’s capable of covering the entire zone with his bat—there’s not a single quadrant in which he’s constantly beat. He’s so compact that it’s physically impossible for his swing to get long, akin to how Jose Altuve will never have a long swing because he’s so small. This is not me saying Durbin is Altuve—the Houston icon is much stronger within his frame at this time—but Durbin’s small stature means he can swing harder without it ever being too long.

Durbin’s ability to make contact north of 90 percent of the time in the zone creates a psychological dilemma, though, where he can chase at a higher rate outside the zone. He’s so confident that he can hit whatever you throw at him that he’ll occasionally swing at pitches he has no business messing around with. This issue became apparent when you look at his Triple-A chase rate of 30.1 percent. I want to preface that chase rates will vary by source depending on the provider’s interpretation of what’s inside the zone or not, but consider that the average MLB chase rate per Statcast sits around 28.1 percent. Thus, chasing outside the zone is the one area I can see pitches exploiting when he’s called up to the bigs.

More specifically, I could see Durbin struggling against changeups and splitters, which were the two pitch types in which he often chased outside and missed inside the zone. While he struggled against them at a fairly alarming rate, this is by no means a dealbreaker because he’s so good against every other pitch type.

The simple fact is that Durbin makes a sensational amount of contact and is capable of hitting balls hard at 15-degree launch angles. That’s not a perennial home run threat, but he’s an extra-base machine when you also consider his plus speed. The biggest question isn’t ability, but availability. He’s suffered through extensive injuries for two straight seasons, so he needs to show he can stay healthy — no matter how fluky the injuries might seem. He’s a lock to be protected on the 40-man roster this offseason and is likely to make his debut with the Bombers next season in a super utilityman capacity akin to Jon Berti in 2024.

Long term, it’s plausible that Durbin hits and plays well at enough positions to earn a starting gig. I have bumped my grade on Durbin from an OFP 45 to an OFP 50, and he is very likely to crack my top-10 offseason ranking.

NJ.com | Randy Miller: Some backstory on Brandon Leibrandt, the 32-year-old journeyman who the Yankees recently signed to a minor-league deal. The left-hander — who was a college friend of Luke Weaver — was recruited by Mark Leiter Jr. to join a two-team league in 2020 organized by the Yankees’ Double-A affiliate, the Somerset Patriots. The league, organized in response to the cancellation of that minor league season due to COVID, gave opportunities to players like Leibrandt, who stayed in Leiter’s spare bedroom in Toms River while pitching for the New Jersey Blaster. Leibrant performed well enough to parlay the audition into an opportunity with the Marlins, with whom he made his MLB as a 27-year-old that same year.

You can't keep him off the bases, either.