Becoming a major league baseball player is extremely difficult. I know, breaking news… It definitely helps if a major league team signs you to a professional contract and sends you to one of their minor
league affiliates, but even so, the odds are against you. With the recent excitement in Cardinals nation around the signing of top 10 international prospect, outfielder, Emanuel Luna, I wanted to dig into some data and see how often players, position players specifically, were able to make the trek all the way from the lowest rung of professional baseball, the Dominican Summer League (DSL), to a major league field. Going back to 2006, 7,655 players have gotten a plate appearance in the DSL. 226, or roughly 3%, of these young men have eventually made a major league debut. This 3% of players end up making a huge impact on major league rosters accounting for roughly 16% of total position player WAR produced over the last five seasons. Fortunately for the Cardinals, their last two international signing classes are off to terrific starts. Everyone has been following Rainiel Rodriguez and Yairo Padilla from the 2024 class, but the 2025 class has at least seven interesting names on the position player side of things too. Today I want to focus on these seven players and evaluate if they really only have a 3% chance each of making it to St. Louis.
Before we get to our prospect discussion, I want to provide a bit of historical context for the Cardinals DSL hitter production. All of the aforementioned players will be following in the illustrious footsteps of Cardinals legend Ildemaro Vargas as the next superstar to make the long journey from the DSL to St. Louis. Just kidding, but only barely.. The Cardinals have had a tough time getting any position player talent out of their DSL programs over the last several decades. Since 2006, Vargas ranks behind only Edmundo Sosa and Ivan Herrera as noteworthy alumni from the lowest level of the Cardinals system. Oscar Taveras would have likely changed the narrative drastically had his story not ended so sadly. Herrera along with fellow catchers Leonardo Bernal and Rainiel Rodriguez will try to break the trend, but there is no denying that the Cardinals have struggled in this department. If you total up the career WAR of all the DSL (and now defunct Venezuelan Summer League) players since 2006, the Cardinals rank 26th in baseball with a grand total of 8 WAR produced (inclusive of all career WAR, not just with the signing team). The top teams in this department have found multiple star-level players. Houston leads the way with 106 WAR with notable contributions from Jose Altuve, Yordan Alvarez, and Teoscar Hernandez. Boston is next led by Xander Bogaerts and Rafael Devers.
Alright, back to the Cardinals 2025 DSL standouts. A quick summary before we dive into some more macro data.
Sebastian Dos Santos signed for only $75K and as an unheralded member of the 2025 international class, but had the most impressive debut of the group. His 158 wRC+ was ninth in the DSL and third among players 17 or younger. He walked more than he struck out and led all first-year DSL players with a .258 isolated slugging percentage (fifth overall). Dos Santos is noted as having a great approach at the plate and feel for hitting. While he does not have monster exit velocity numbers yet, his 21 extra-base hits in 38 games are extremely encouraging. While his season strikeout percentage was solid at 17.5%, Dos Santos finished on an incredible run striking out only one time in his final 51 plate appearances.
Yeferson Portolatin signed for $450K and had an excellent DSL debut. His 145 wRC+ was driven in large part by a 29.3% walk rate. He played mostly second base with a few appearances at short and third.
Yaxson Lucena is the only player on this list repeating the DSL. He put up an 89 wRC+ across 130 plate appearances in his age 16 season in 2024, and then crushed the league in 2025 with a 1.5 BB/K ratio and 140 wRC+. Lucena is another player with a great plate approach and excellent contact skills, but it remains to be seen how much power he can get to. He has played exclusively corner outfield and DH thus far in his career.
Kenly Hunter received the third-largest bonus in the 2025 class at $700K. He had an excellent debut as well putting up a 131 wRC+ while stealing 25 bases as the center fielder for the DSL squad. While he showed minimal power, Hunter is starting to pop up on some Cardinals prospect lists because of his pedigree and solid first professional season.
Miguel Hernandez is one of the younger players in the 2025 class and had an excellent debut with a 124 wRC+. Despite being seen as a hit-over-power prospect, he popped 5 home runs in 36 games while serving as the team’s primary shortstop.
Juan Rujano is a bat first catcher that signed for $750K out of Panama. While his K rate was slightly elevated at 23%, he still managed a 121 wRC+ with solid walk and power numbers.
Royelny Strop was the most heralded member of the 2025 class signing for $1.4M. The son of former Cubs reliever Pedro, struggled with injuries and performance for most of the year. Strop turned it on over his last six games collecting seven extra-base hits (out of nine on the season) and hitting for the cycle in his final game. The late barrage brought his season wRC+ up to 89.
Now, back to the question: do all of these seemingly promising prospects really only have a 3% chance each of making it to St. Louis? How much do their (mostly) promising starts at such young ages change their odds moving forward. The first thing working to the whole group’s advantage is age. All seven of these prospects were in their age 17 season in 2025. Below are the updated odds based on age for all players that accrued at least 100 plate appearances in a given season.
Note that this is showing individual seasons, so a player that played both his age 17 and 18 season in the DSL would be counted twice. I also cut the data off after the 2019 season. The 2020 season was canceled due to COVID and the more recent seasons have not started to see a meaningful number of players make major league debuts. These numbers aren’t surprising as we would expect players good enough to get to 100 plate appearances at a younger age are more likely to succeed relative to their older counterparts. For me the big takeaway is that it is a big red flag if a prospect is held back after his age 17 season and not advanced to the next level.
With the obvious age filter out of the way, we can move to performance. It is tricky evaluating DSL statistics for a couple of reasons. First, the seasons are short. Most of the seasons in our dataset are in the 100-200 plate appearance range, which creates triple slash lines heavily influenced by batted-ball luck. Second, there has been significant change in the DSL environment over the years. The league-wide walk rate was 14.7% in 2025 after hovering closer to 10% prior to 2018. To mitigate the sample-size issue, I will look at BB%, K%, and isolated slugging. While not perfect, these metrics stabilize in far fewer plate appearances than batting average or on-base percentage. To try to account for the change in playing environment, I converted the rate stats to plus stats relative to the league average that year. For example, Kenley Hunter had a strikeout percentage of 11.6% compared to the league average of 20.4% which works out to a K%+ of 176.
Here is a look at how the three plus statistics relate to chance of a debut:
Strikeout rate and isolated slugging have a very obvious relationship to debut rate. Striking out at an above-average (in a bad way) rate doesn’t preclude a player from making a debut but it more than cuts his chances in half relative to the overall average. The walk rate relationship is all over the place. Players that walk at half the league average or less actually debut slightly more often than the entire pool. This validates a common theme you will hear in scouting reports that talented players tend to swing more because they can hit anything at the lower levels. Our own Yohel Pozo shows up on the list of low walk players after pulling off a 5% walk rate back in 2014 in the Rangers system. Despite Pozo’s presence, I am comfortable throwing out walk rate as overly predictive at this stage.
Here are how the aforementioned redbird farmhands stack up on these metrics:
The obvious question looking at these two tables is how does a player that excels in multiple categories see their likelihood of a debut change. Because all of the Cardinals prospects here played their age 17 season, I will look exclusively at that cohort while throwing out the BB+ metric as a factor (sorry Yeferson). The grid below maps K%+ against ISO+. Using Kenly Hunter as the example again, he would slot into the fourth row down (150-200 K%+) and the second column from the left (50-100 ISO+). This maps him to a group of players that have historically made it for at least one big-league at-bat 9% of the time.
This table of all the 17-year-old prospects to receive 100 plate appearances in a season between 2006 and 2019 includes 1,901 player seasons. The extreme performances have relatively low numbers of players, but looking at the ranges gives a good sense of how these players have historically performed. The only player in the 200-250 bucket for both K%+ and ISO+ is Andres Gimenez.
Where the Cardinals Prospects Fit In
Sebastian Dos Santos fits in a cohort that has made a big-league debut 57% of the time as 14 players have had K%+ between 100 and 150 with ISO+ rates between 200 and 250. This group is led by Rafael Devers and Julio Rodriguez and also includes former top prospect Noelvi Marte.
Yaxson Lucena falls in the 33% bucket with a couple of former top prospects in Oscar Taveras and Victor Robles, but no huge major league success. It is fair to knock Lucena back a notch because he is the only player repeating the DSL.
Yeferson Portalatin falls in the 9% bucket with both metrics between 100 and 150. 14 of his 151 comparables have debuted with Xander Bogaerts, Gregory Polanco, and Ivan Herrera leading the pack. I know we cannot get excited about walks in the DSL, but it will be fun to see how Portalatin’s patient approach translates and evolves as he moves up the ladder.
Miguel Hernandez just missed the 100-and-up strikeout rate club. Only 6 of the 112 players in his bucket made it big but there are some fun ones with Oneil Cruz and Marcell Ozuna.
Our metric gives Kenly Hunter a 9% chance of making the show with Jean Segura as the most prominent player to come out of the high contact, low-power group.
Both Royelny Strop and Juan Rujano fall in the 50-100 K%+ and 100 to 150 ISO+ group that has historically made it 5% of the time. Willson Contreras is by far the best of this 225 player pool, but he is joined by Cardinals legends Yairo Munoz and Elehuris Montero.
All of these players should be stateside this spring preparing to start in the Florida Complex League. Best case scenario, a couple of them break out and make it to low-A before the season’s end. While none of this group is threatening the Cardinals’ top 10 or even 20 prospect list yet, the path from the DSL to prospect prominence has been well worn over the last year. In 2024, current top 100 prospects Jesus Made, Luis Pena, Rainiel Rodriguez, Edward Florentino, and Emil Morales were all excelling in the DSL.
