Reese Kaplan -- When to Give Up on a Failed Prospect

One of the most frequent question with no clear answer is how long do you give a young player who delivered handily in the minor leagues but seems to have hit the wall with a promotion to the majors?  

Sometimes you have a player who is given season after season to establish himself both on the field and at the plate (if a hitter).  Or you have a pitcher who needs to be difficult to hit and show the health necessary to perform regularly without needing the Hubbel telescope to find the strike zone. 

An example of the former close to home would be Tomas Nido who has had 845 major league at bats, is now 30 years old and owns a career .212 batting average. 

Some could easily argue that his extended look from 2017 through 2024 was far more than enough.  When he was DFA’d this time he was hitting just .125.  It’s highly unlikely he would ever hit a magic switch and convert himself into a player who wouldn’t make you involuntarily cringe every time he stepped to the plate.

Also a quite familiar name to Mets fans would be the example of just farmed out Tylor Megill.  Now many might right to say that the move was done to help fortify the team during its 17 game stretch without a day off when the club is already without Edwin Diaz temporarily, Brooks Raley and now Drew Smith as well.  

However, dig a little deeper and you see that his 2024 performance does not reflect his mostly solid spring training, but more similar to the rest of his career.  

His current ERA is 5.08 which is actually worse than the 4.76 we’d come to expect, his WHIP is a cautionary 1.44 and the best thing you can say is that his strikeout numbers have increased to 11.5 per 9 IP.  Having already appeared in 66 major league games (60 as a starter) he has had the aggregate of about two full pitching years to show what he can do.  

Unless they figure to convert him into a short term hard throwing reliever, the now 28 year old’s prospect window has slammed shut as a member of the starting rotation. 

Now it’s not always like this with slow starters.  The Hall of Fame example, of course, is third baseman Mike Schmidt who started his career looking absolutely nothing like the hitter he would become.  During a 40 AB first look in 1972 he hit a sallow .206 without showing much.  During 1973 when he had a full rookie season his batting average dropped to .196 with over 33% of his ABs ending in strikeout.  

No one could foresee that the following year he would make the All Star team, his batting average would jump to .282 and the run production was terrific with 36 HRs and 116 RBIs.  He even threw in 23 SBs, too.  He hadn’t even yet earned the first of his total of 9 straight Gold Gloves plus an extra one later on. 

On the pitching side of the ledger, strikeout artist Randy Johnson is a great example as well.  He was a rookie in 1989 when he went 7-13 with a Megill-like ERA of 4.76.  It wasn’t until 1993 that he started to look like the Cooperstown bound pitcher he would become all well after the age of 30.  

That season he finished 2nd by one vote in the Cy Young Award voting by going 19-8 with a 3.24 ERA and leading the league with 308 strikeouts.  He would go on to win 5 Cy Young Awards, earn 303 wins and finish his career with 4875 strikeouts. 

So that brings us back to the original question.  How long do you wait and endure mediocrity in the hope that a hitter or pitcher will deliver what you foresaw for many years?  David Stearns is going to have to deal with this question on not just Megill, but also with David Peterson and others.  

The jury is still out on youngster Brett Baty, though it would appear that the strikeout and error prone Mark Vientos has shown enough with the bat to say he’s no longer a question mark.