As this season progresses, we are going to be paying a lot of attention to what is going down on the farm. The Nats most stacked minor league team is the Fredericksburg Nationals. While they are at the lowest level of the minors, the Fred Nats are stacked with highly regarded talent.
Eight of the Nats top 30 prospects play for the Fred Nats right now, and six of them are hitters. The lineup features the likes of Eli Willits, Ronny Cruz, Luke Dickerson, Coy James and more. That star-studded group absolutely
teed off on the Delmarva Shorebirds the other day in a 21-4 victory.
I wanted to talk a bit about that game and some of the prospects thriving in Fredericksburg. While Eli Willits was the number one overall pick, he has not been the guy carrying the offense. In fact, he is only hitting .182 with a .639 OPS. He is getting on base at a solid .321 clip, but he has not been off to the best start. It is only a matter of time before he gets going.
In my opinion, Ronny Cruz has been the Fred Nats most impressive player so far this season. He is hitting .300 with a crazy 1.115 OPS in 11 games. Of his 12 hits, 8 of them have gone for extra bases, including three homers. His strikeout rate has not been out of control either, though his whiff rate is higher than you would like to see. Cruz is the 25th ranked Nats prospect right now, but that will not be the case for long.
Ronny Cruz came over in the Michael Soroka trade and was seen as a raw boom or bust prospect. He has always had the tools, but his hitting ability has been a question mark. However, he has been getting rave reviews ever since Spring Training and has carried that play into the season. It looks like the Nats may have gotten a real steal with this 19 year old.
Cruz is far from the only player putting up impressive numbers in this lineup. Yeremy Cabrera and Luke Dickerson are two other prospects who have been excellent to start the season. Both are repeating Low-A, so they should be doing well, but both are raking. I could see Cabrera being promoted before too long.
One prospect who is not in the Nats top 30, but had a massive game the other day was the awesomely named Sir Jamison Jones. The 19 year old hit three home runs in the 21-4 thrashing. He is a big catcher at 6’2 225 pounds, and has huge power. Jones has a long way to go, but the power is real and he could be a good project for this new regime.
Jones is certainly raw, and that is why he was a 15th rounder coming out of high school. It is worth noting that he got a $500,000 bonus, so he is not your average 15th rounder. Right now, he is splitting time behind the plate, but if he continues to flash, he should be on the field more.
This Fred Nats squad is simply stacked. We still have not even talked about guys like Landon Harmon, Miguel Sime Jr. and Coy James. This whole generation of Nats talent will be fun to follow as they trek their way through the minor leagues. Some will move faster than others, but in a few years, a good number of these players will be making their mark in the big leagues.
Zooming out a bit, it is clear this new regime is all in on the young talent. We saw Paul Toboni at a Fred Nats game yesterday, which was cool. The new regime has also talked about how they want their minor league teams to win. Playing winning baseball throughout the organization is something that will be emphasized.
So far, we have seen winning baseball on the farm. It is a small sample, but Nats minor league teams are 28-17 before yesterday’s games. I want to follow these records throughout the season. In the rebuild era starting in 2021, Nats minor league teams have finished over .500 as a collective only once.
That should have been a bit of a red flag, considering the Nats were picking high in not only the first round, but the other rounds of the draft. They had access to more talent, but were unable to build organizational depth. Paul Toboni is looking to right that wrong, and the early returns are positive.
While the big league team may not be playoff bound this year, the Nats minor league teams should be doing a lot of winning. As the years go by, hopefully that winning goes up stream as players rise through the system. The Nats new front office is building things from the ground up, and we are seeing that foundation emerging in Fredericksburg.
