With the midway point of the season just passing last week I thought it would be a good idea to look at one of the guys who really turned around in the first half of the season along with one guy making his 2013 debuts in the last week. Junior Arias has been on fire over the last 6 weeks and outfielder Aristides Aquino who just began his 2013 season with the Arizona League Reds.
2012 was a disaster for Junior Arias. He hit .208/.255/.313 with 20 walks and 96 strikeouts in 388 plate appearances. He was playing third base and had an .877 fielding percentage due in large part to his inability to throw the ball with accuracy across the diamond. This season has been about as different as you can get. The Reds made the move to shift him to center field on the defensive side of things while at the plate he is hitting .288/.326/.494 with 11 walks and 66 strikeouts. He is still showing plate discipline problems, but when he is making contact he is doing much better than he has in his career.
Scouting Report
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At the plate Arias looks pretty similar to what he did last season. He still stands pretty much upright and has a bat waggle as the pitcher prepares for the pitch and his entire swing still reminds me a lot of Alfonso Soriano. There are two differences though in his swing from 2012 to 2013 and they are making a big difference. It all starts with his front foot. In 2012 he employed a toe-tap then step to load his power where he would simply lift his front foot slightly off the ground, tap his toe, then take a step forward to transfer his weight and swing with hardly any pause between the toe-tap and the stride forward. In the 2013 season Arias has changed that up and now uses an approach where he begins in the set up the same, but rather than tapping his toe, he actually steps backward with his front foot about 6 inches, waits about half of a second, then strides forward to transfer his weight and swing. While I can’t say for certain, it does lend the idea that it improves his timing, allowing him more power and fewer moving parts all at once. The second difference, and it is rather minimal but very important is what he is doing with his hands as he begins to swing. When he loads with his hands in 2013, his bat is angled less toward the pitcher and a bit more upright. What that does is get his bat into the zone a little bit quicker as he has lesser area to cover with his swing plane. Better timing and getting his bat through the zone quicker has been a good step forward for Arias. He will still need to work on his plate discipline as he moves up the ladder, but the first step in improving his hitting has been taken.
Defensively the move to center field has been a good one. At third base, as noted earlier, Arias had some real problems with his throwing accuracy. He has a plus arm, one of the stronger ones I have seen at the minor league level. That does get wasted a bit in center, but he can still use it well enough at the spot and it isn’t hurting him defensively there either. While there are still some moments where you can tell that he is new to the position, there are times when the move seems to be perfect. Arias has outstanding speed, even with some in the Reds organization comparing it to that of Billy Hamilton and Theo Bowe. I haven’t seen it quite to that extent yet, but he has plus speed at the very least even if he isn’t quite at the same level as those two guys. He has been able to show off really good range at times in tracking down balls in the outfield and errors haven’t been an issue to this point. While it will take time and experience, he shows all of the things defensively you want to see out of a guy who could be an above-average defender in center.
Last fall I began hearing about a real toolsy prospect from the Dominican League Reds named Aristides Aquino. His numbers were nothing to write home about, in fact, they were quite poor as he hit under .200 and slugged under .300 as both a seventeen and eighteen-year-old in the Dominican Summer League. Still, I kept hearing that the tools were loud ones and with teenagers especially, tools are more important than production. Recently I had a chance to see a little bit of high quality video of him at the plate (unfortunately I can’t share it or I would). The first thing that stood out was how wiry he was. He is listed at 6′ 4″ and 190 lbs, but he doesn’t even look to weigh that much. There is plenty of room for him to add muscle to his frame as he continues to age and remain athletic.
Watching Aquino swing, he certainly looks the part, so despite the numbers when you watch him hit the ball you can understand what scouts and coaches see in him. When he sets up, at first you see a little bit of Eric Davis with his hands at his waist and a little bit of a bat wiggle, but he quickly moves his bat over his shoulder and flattens it out, almost resting it on his shoulder. As he readies for the pitch he gets his bat into an upright position and lowers his hands while also bringing them back a bit. With so much movement before the pitch, I do wonder if this doesn’t cause some timing issues at times as there are a lot of movements before he even loads his hands to swing. His lower half is much simpler. To load he uses a simple toe-tap then short stride. He has good bat speed and he has outstanding leverage, which could lead to good power in the future. The tools are there for him at the plate to be a strong hitter and while the production isn’t there yet, it wouldn’t surprise me if a small adjustment in his swing led to things simply clicking and he turns into a very strong hitter in a short period of time.
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