The 2025 Minor League Baseball season is almost officially over. The Yankees’ Triple-A affiliate, the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre RailRiders, will take on the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp tonight in Florida for
a rubber match to decide the International League crown. The victor will face the Pacific Coast League champion Las Vegas Aviators on Saturday in the minor league finale: the Triple-A National Championship Game. All other affiliates have already reached their conclusions, and while the Arizona Fall League is on deck, that’s a matter for another day.
This means it’s time to award the Minor League Hitter and Pitcher of the Year awards to the players who had the most success in 2025 and further established themselves as core pieces of the Yankees’ future. This was a successful year across most levels in the organization and a lot of young players had breakout seasons, so there’s stiff competition for both of these awards. However, each of the winners impressed me enough to set themselves apart from the pack.
Minor League Hitter of the Year: Spencer Jones
The Yankees’ first-round draft pick from 2022 is the most divisive prospect in the organization and arguably all of baseball, but the success he had this year simply cannot be denied. Jones bounced back from a disappointing 2024 and revived his reputation with a season that wasn’t quite like anything we’ve seen before. He started the season with Double-A Somerset, repeating the level after spending all of last year with the Patriots, where he struck out far too much and wasn’t able to access his massive raw power as often as he should have. Back then, Jones hit 17 home runs in 544 PA with a .259/.336/.452 slash line and a 36.8-percent strikeout rate on his way to a 127 wRC+ in a season in which he turned 23 years old and still hadn’t reached the highest level of the minor leagues.
This year was a completely different story. Jones didn’t cut down on the strikeouts much at all; in fact, his Double-A contact rate actually dropped from 61 percent to 58 percent in the 49 games he played at the level, but the contact he did make was the loudest of his career. Jones clobbered 16 home runs with Somerset, just one below last year’s season total in 336 trips to the plate. His walk rate jumped from 9.9 percent to 15.4 percent, his ISO went from .193 to .320, and his wRC+ ballooned to 184.
On the surface, some of Jones’ numbers after he was promoted to Triple-A Scranton look a bit closer to his disappointing 2024 than his electric 2025. His walk-to-strikeout ratios and contact rate are nearly identical, and his wRC+ was just four points higher in Triple-A in 2025 than in Double-A in 2024. However, that doesn’t tell the whole story. Jones battled a back injury in late July and missed a few games before returning to the lineup, when all the gains he made at the plate went out the window over the last six weeks of the season. Optimistically, there’s reason to believe that the nagging injury played a role in a stretch that drastically hurt his season stats. Before his back started acting up, the hot streak Jones had been on was jaw-dropping. In his first 114 PA with the RailRiders, Jones was hitting .375/.439/.844 with 13 home runs, 10 steals, a 219 wRC+, and just a 24-percent strikeout rate. The difference before and after the injury was night and day.
Pessimistically, there are enough red flags in Jones’ track record that we can’t fully write off the cold streak as a back-induced anomaly and are forced to reckon with the fact that there are still major holes in his profile. Jones might never make enough contact to become a true superstar at the highest level, and in fact the strikeout issues have been so consistently extreme that it’s possible he may never stick in the big leagues at all. This high-risk/high-reward profile is why prospect analysts are so divided on Jones, and why he still ranks lower than would be expected for someone with such gaudy numbers at the plate. Jones’ upside is still unmatched in the system however, and he was able to tap into it for enough of the year to earn the season award. He hit 35 home runs in 2025 between the two levels—one short of the Minor League Baseball home run crown—and finished just one stolen base shy of a 30/30 season.
Barring a disaster, he should make his MLB debut sometime in 2026 — it’s just a matter of whether the Yankees hold onto him or not.
Others in consideration: Jose Rojas, T.J. Rumfield, Brendan Jones, George Lombard Jr., Dax Kilby
Minor League Pitcher of the Year: Elmer Rodriguez-Cruz
There was just as much competition for this award after a number of breakout seasons for pitching prospects in the Yankees organization, and in a literal sense the best pitcher to spend considerable time in the minor leagues was easily Cam Schlittler. He was so good that he earned a spot in the Bronx and proved himself to be a long-term member of the big-league rotation. So while Schlittler will get his flowers in other ways down the road, we’re going to honor someone who spent all year in the minors, no one succeeded quite as consistently across as many levels as Elmer Rodriguez-Cruz. The former Red Sox farmhand established himself as a Top 100 prospect with New York after a breakout 2025 which began in High-A Hudson Valley and ended with the 22-year-old making his Triple-A debut just last week.
Rodriguez-Cruz spent most of this season at High-A with the Hudson Valley Renegades, where he was part of a rotation that also included Carlos Lagrange and 2024 draft picks Ben Hess and Bryce Cunningham. These four dominated the first couple months of the season and all saw their prospect stock rise significantly in tandem with each other. The trio of Rodriguez-Cruz, Lagrange, and Hess all made their way up to Double-A Somerset by the end of the year, but the man who would soon be nicknamed “ERC” stood above the rest and earned another promotion to Triple-A Scranton at the conclusion of Somerset’s season.
Rodriguez-Cruz recorded a 2.26 ERA in 83 innings in High-A with a 29-percent strikeout rate, and was just as good in Double-A with a 2.64 ERA in 61 innings. He missed just as many bats in Somerset with a 30.3-percent strikeout rate, but he’s also seen his walk rate go from 10.9 percent to 8.2 percent. In total, Rodriguez-Cruz recorded a 2.58 ERA on the season in 150 innings (by far his career-high).
Rodriguez-Cruz was acquired in a trade with the Red Sox last offseason for catcher Carlos Narvaez. The trade made waves for both fanbases—as any Yankees-Red Sox trade that isn’t Kelly Johnson-for-Stephen Drew will—but especially paid dividends in the Bronx as Rodriguez-Cruz has skyrocketed to arguably being the top pitching prospect in the system. The 6-foot-3 righty commands a deep arsenal which includes a sinker, cutter, curveball, slider, and changeup, and has flummox hitters all season. There’s no clearer indication that the Yankees think the world of him than the aggressive late-season promotion to Triple-A, where he’ll almost certainly begin the 2026 campaign.
Like Jones, Rodriguez-Cruz is very likely to make his MLB debut sometime next year. And as Schlittler just demonstrated this year, that opportunity could come around sooner than you think.
Others in consideration: Cam Schlittler, Carlos Lagrange, Kyle Carr
