Yankees prospects: Revisiting Gleyber Torres’ minor league performance

With the extra year of team control cutoff date here, it seems likely that we will be seeing Gleyber Torres in pinstripes very soon. He might not be called up immediately, but with the way he’s started the season in Triple-A, odds are he’ll be with the Yankees sooner rather than later.

It’s not often that a team that a contending team — yes, the Yankees are contenders — can just bring up one of the best prospects in baseball. With Torres potentially arriving soon, it’s worth revisiting his professional career to date.

Torres is currently in his fifth season in the minor leagues, and is arguably putting up some of his best numbers so far. In 12 games with Scranton this year, he’s hitting .372/.408/.558. He also has a 161 wRC+. Of course that’s a small sample size, but those are all improvements from his pre-injury numbers with the RailRiders in 2017.

What’s the most impressive thing about Torres’ minor league career from just scanning his Baseball-Reference and FanGraphs pages? His numbers get better as he goes up in levels. Other than a seven-game stint with the High-A Myrtle Beach Pelicans in the Cubs’ system, he’s never had a bad hitting performance at one of his pit stops. He’s definitely putting up better numbers as he’s gone along, however.

If you look at his FanGraph’s page, his wRC+ numbers literally increase ever year or every new level since he was traded to the Yankees. His stats the past two years in Scranton are better than any other level except his seven games in Low-A in 2014.

Torres started this season going a combined 1 - 9 in his first two games. In the 10 games since, he’s gone 15 - 34 with four walks and five extra base hits. Other than an 0 - 4 on Opening Day, he’s only had two other games with no hits. One was a late pinch-hitting appearance, and the other was a couple days ago when he was taken out early for precautionary reasons. He’s been good, to put it mildly.

There is obviously no guarantee that Gleyber Torres is going to come up and immediately succeed. At least at time of writing, there’s not guarantee that’s he’s even going to be called up in the next couple days. The excitement for when he does, however, should be genuine. He has the top prospect pedigree, and he’s put up results to prove it.