As much as some people seem to deny it, the Yankees’ player development has taken tremendous strides over the last several years and is generating value all throughout the 20 rounds that the team gets in each year’s MLB Draft.
Every year, there’s a new prospect that seemingly comes out of nowhere to shoot up the minor leagues or become interesting enough to become trade bait. We’ve seen Ben Rice rise from a 12th-round pick to a star, we’ve seen Cam Schlittler go from a seventh-rounder to a Cy Young
candidate, and we’ve seen Will Warren progress nicely from his origins as an eighth-round pick out of Southeast Louisiana.
Even guys like Dillon Lewis, Dylan Jasso, and Brendan Jones, three position players who massively overperformed their draft positions, combined to make up a trade package that got the Yankees a high-upside arm in Ryan Weathers. Regardless of whether these players ever play in pinstripes, they can produce value.
So who could be the next player to join this crop of players? Here are five candidates from all around the diamond:
Jackson Lovich
It’s not every day that you see a shortstop with considerable game power, but that is what the Yankees have in Lovich, who they selected in the 16th round under 11 months ago out of Missouri. If you want to see who could move through the minor leagues in the fashion that Rice did a few years ago, Lovich is the best bet.
The 6-foot-3 right-handed hitter made his professional debut last August, where he excelled in six games with Single-A Tampa over the course of 10 days, going a blistering 14-for-22 with six extra-base hits, four walks, and three stolen bases. He started 2026 on the injured list, but made his season debut just a week later.
He’s gone through the ebbs and flows of a minor leaguer in his first full season, opening the season on fire before enduring a prolonged slump at the end of April. He’s wrapping up a stellar May that’s seeing him slash .362/.438/.797 through Thursday night, including a three-homer game last Wednesday.
Lovich leads the Florida State League with 11 home runs and is third with a 162 wRC+. He posts well above-average barrel and hard-hit rates, while also displaying great speed and athleticism, with 11 stolen bases while splitting time at third base and shortstop. It’s more likely he mans the hot corner as he climbs the minor league ladder, but the longer he keeps getting reps at short, the better.
There are multiple areas that the 22-year-old can still improve upon. His game power in all fields is extremely impressive, but he’s got the James Wood disease of being unable to harness his raw power into launching fly balls to the pull side. His Pull Air% is just 6.5 percent.
Another area he’s lagging behind is his overall contact rates, as he is striking out 29 percent of the time with mediocre chase and whiff rates. There’s some vulnerability against non-fastballs, and his Z-Contact% is Spencer Jones-level bad, but has steadily improved as the season has continued. He’s still young, so his ability to cover up the in-zone hole in his swing will be the difference between being a Jones-level hitter or a Rice-level hitter.
Wilberson De Pena
Good organizations can take toolsy prospects from the Dominican Republic and make them into something. Every team dangles young players currently playing in the Dominican Summer League in trade conversations due to how far away they are from a big league impact and the low hit rate, but good orgs can make you pay. Just look at what the Dodgers are doing to Christian Zazueta, whom the Yankees sent them for… Caleb Ferguson.
The other team from LA swung a recent trade with the Yankees, which saw things go the opposite way. Out went the perennially underwhelming Oswald Peraza to Anaheim in exchange for Wilberson De Pena, an 18-year-old who was going through the motions in the DSL in his second pro season. At least initially, there wasn’t much to talk about with him.
Now there is. He came stateside to the Florida Complex League and has spent the first three weeks of the season absolutely raking. In 18 games, he’s slashing .392/.451/.743 with an FCL-leading six home runs, 27 RBI, 13 extra-base hits, and 11 stolen bases. His 184 wRC+ is eighth in the FCL. He’s already topped his full-season totals from 2025 in several categories. He already has more stolen bases and home runs and has tied his XBH total in 40 less plate appearances.
FanGraphs ranked him the No. 15 prospect in the organization entering the season, but he was unranked on MLB Pipeline. The big concern that FanGraphs had was his contact ability, but he seems to be improving in that regard, slashing his strikeout rate to under 18 percent. He’s reaching his game power potential while using his speed tremendously more. He’s split time across all three outfield positions in 2026, but he’ll almost certainly settle into a corner down the road.
De Pena doesn’t seem long for the FCL, and we’ll get a chance to see more with Statcast data when he gets promoted to Tampa, but the signs are there for him to rise the rankings.
Jace Avina
We showed you the profile of a player with great raw power who wasn’t able to optimize it due to an inability to pull it in the air. Now, what if you had a player like that who’s the same age, playing two levels higher, and has an innate ability to drive the ball in the air to the pull side.
That, my friends, is Jace Avina. Originally a 14th-round pick out of Spanish Springs High School in rural Nevada by the Brewers, he was traded to the Yankees along with Brian Sanchez after the 2023 season for Jake Bauers. Avina spent a year and a half with High-A Hudson Valley, steadily improving before earning a promotion to Double-A Somerset in July 2025, where he endured growing pains.
Now, as he nears his 23rd birthday, he’s figuring out yet another level. He’s been one of the best players in MiLB in May, slashing .313/.411/.615 with seven home runs and 19 RBI after a so-so April. On the season, he’s got an .895 OPS and a 135 wRC+.
Avina’s profile is pretty straightforward. He has tremendous pull-side power that he gets to quite easily. Since joining the Yankees’ organization, he’s pulled 54 percent of his batted balls and has never posted a ground ball rate north of 33 percent. He hits the ball in the air and pulls it, which doesn’t have quite the same impact as a right-handed hitter in this specific system, but is usually a successful formula for power bats.
Defensively, he’s considered to be decent enough in center field with a fair amount of athleticism, but being pushed to a corner is definitely possible in the future. So far this year, 20 of his 38 starts have came in center field.
The weaknesses are the same as guys like Jones and Lovich: his ability to consistently make contact. His strikeout rate has spiked from 24.4 percent in High-A last year to 31.6 percent this year. It doesn’t help that he’s also walking less. He’s also tremendously inconsistent, going from one of the best hitters in the system one month before ghosting the next.
Lovich and Avina are similar prospects in some ways, but completely different in others. Not only do they have completely different styles of displaying their raw power, but they also thrive on different pitches. Avina feasts on breaking balls, but struggles against fastballs. But still, with him just now turning 23 in early June in his fifth minor league season and a propensity to figure out a level in his second year there, he’s on a solid trajectory.
Tyler Boudreau
The Yankees certainly aren’t starved for high-end pitching prospects, but it doesn’t hurt to have more in your arsenal. You know the big names: guys like Ben Hess, Carlos Lagrange, Elmer Rodríguez, Bryce Cunningham, etc. Guys like Pico Kohn and Thatcher Hurd have more pedigree. Where’s the later round guy that could emerge as Warren and Schlittler did?
Let’s go way outside the box. Tyler Boudreau didn’t get drafted out of Texas Tech in the 2025 MLB Draft, but was scooped up by the Yanks shortly after as an undrafted free agent. He became a rare pitcher to toss pro innings in his draft year, striking out nine in five innings for Tampa in August of last year to set up his rotation spot this year.
Through eight starts, he’s pitching to a 2.94 ERA and 3.19 FIP in 33.2 innings with 42 strikeouts to just 12 walks. Posting a 22.2 K-BB% as a starter in Single-A is elite, and when you couple that with premier chase and whiff rates? That’ll play.
The Halifax, Canada, native is 23 in Single-A after spending four years in the Big 12, so the performance numbers themselves aren’t too impressive, but let’s look at the pitch data:
He leans heavily on a low-to-mid 90s fastball that has tremendous ride, frequently sitting with over 19 inches of induced vertical break (IVB). He couples it with a changeup that grades out pretty well, as well as a slider and curveball. At 6-foot-1, he’s not the stereotypical massive starter that the Yankees have thrived with of late, but figures to be able to fill out a bit more. With his age, we’ll know pretty soon how the Yankees feel about his long-term prospects.
Ben Grable
Lastly, let’s look for someone who can be a big-time relief prospect. The Yankees used their 2025 11th-round pick on a solid Big Ten reliever from Indiana in Ben Grable. Despite nothing jumping off the page in terms of his collegiate performance, the Yankees pushed the 24-year-old to High-A immediately, where he dominated with 17 strikeouts in 7.1 innings.
That earned him a quick promotion to Somerset, where he’s endured some growing pains in immediate high-leverage roles. Still, the fact that an organization that has multiple elite High-A relievers at a similar age seemingly stuck has pushed a guy like Grable after less than eight innings shows the belief they have in him. So far in his 18 career innings, he has a 35.0 K-BB%.
Baseball America has already shot him up to No. 14 in the system, thanks to his electric mid-to-upper 90s fastball that has up to 21 IVB. His three-pitch mix also includes a slider and splitter, but he hasn’t seemed to trust either of them as much as his complete outlier of a four-seamer.
The fact that his entire professional career has been contained in the two full-season levels without Statcast data makes it harder for more in-depth analysis, but it’s clear that he’s on the fast track to big league consideration. As of Friday, he is the only member of the 2025 draft class to be above A-ball, and he’s been aggressively promoted in a way that we haven’t seen from this organization with relievers. He’s absolutely someone to watch going forward if you’re looking for homegrown relief pitching.
