The newsbreakers have made us aware that top Guardians’ prospect, Angel Genao, will be promoted for tomorrow’s game.
Despite many wanting this to be because of a Gabriel Arias DFA, I am very confident it will be a Jose Ramirez IL stint. The team can backdate the IL stint to Monday and let Jose have another week from today to try to get his sore wrist feeling better following hamate surgery and longer if need be. Meanwhile, they can get a look at Genao at third base. Genao is on the 40-man and so no additional
move to get him on is needed. Also, his name is not spelled Genoa, even though your autocorrect will try to tell you it is.
As mentioned in a recent article, since 2017, there are only four shortstops who have been 22 years or younger at Triple-A and had a better wRC+ than Genao: J.J Weatherholt, Elly De La Cruz, Wander Franco and Gunnar Henderson. Good baseball players, all, with one awful human being included. Genao hit two homers in tonight’s Clippers game, inching his wRC+ there to around 130, he has a 16/14 K/BB% and an ISO around .170. His metrics look pretty good except for his launch angles… he hits too many groundballs, as Thomas Nestico’s graphic from Twitter below illustrates:
He could also use to be more aggressive in the zone, which is usually an easier problem to fix for someone with his bat to ball skills. He’s also 17 for 22 in stolen base attempts so can run a little bit.
He has made some errors this minor league season but looks smooth and has a good arm. He’s been playing a lot of third base lately, which was probably intended for the possibility of Jose needing some more IL time, I would assume. He has good splits against both RHP and LHP, but hits LHP better… by about .060 of OPS. It’s very hard to find a switch-hitter who has roughly even splits, so Genao is an exciting player by that standard alone. Genao has cracked everyone’s top 100 in MLB lists with FanGraphs and the Athletic giving him some pretty lofty top 20 rankings of late.
If Jose is out, as I fear, I’d guess a lineup vs. a RHP like Wednesday might be:
- Kwan LF
- Bazzana 2B
- DeLauter RF
- Lowe 1B
- Adell DH
- Genao 3B
- Rocchio SS
- Bailey C
- Halpin CF
It will be very sad to lose Jose, if only for a short time. It will be very exciting to see Genao debut. Ah, the duality of man.
