Biggest Storyline from the First Half of the Minor League Season
- Aaron Lichstrahl
- 7 days ago
- 8 min read
It is crazy to think about, but the minor league season is halfway done. As the affiliates begin their journey towards a 2nd half title, this felt like a great time to reflect on the first two and a half months. There were ups, and there were downs, but most importantly, there were stories. I took a deep look and reflected on what I believe are the most notable stories from the first half and wrote about them. Here are the four that I found most compelling.
George Lombard Jr Isn’t Just the Top Yankees Prospect… He’s a Top 10 Overall Prosect
Entering the 2026 season, there was chatter about who the Yankees top prospect was.
While George Lombard Jr. was still heavily considered the top prospect in the system, a challenging season in AA saw his prospect ranking slide closer to the 40-50 range, whereas
an extremely impressive 18 games from 2025 1st round selection Dax Kilby saw him shoot near the top of the back half of top 100’s. Baseball Prospectus really shook up the discussion by ranking Kilby ahead of Lombard.
The first half of the 2026 season has ended that discussion. Kilby season has yet to truly get started. After nursing a hamstring injury, Kilby made 1 appearance for FCL before being shut down yet again. Meanwhile, Lombard answered just about every question asked of him. There was little doubt about his ability to defend at shortstop, but there were several questions swirling around his hit and power tools.
Starting with the hit tool, while Lombard still has lower zone contact rates limiting him to more of an average hit tool, he has been much better when he swings. Last year, we saw Lombard be overly passive, watching strikes go and not swinging until he was already in a 2-strike count. This led to a surge of strikeouts. Across both AA and AAA, we’ve seen Lombard make aggressive swings early in counts, especially on pitches in the lower quadrant of the zone, where he makes his best contact. This leads us to his power. Lombard has flashed good exit velocities in the past, but Lombard’s game power has started to flourish with the improvement of his pull air rates. While he is still very happy and capable of taking pitches on the outside to right field for doubles in the gap or home runs. In the 17 games from 5/29 to his injury on 6/16, Lombard was slugging .576, in big part thanks to his 100th percentile 26.2 pull air rate in that time.
Any Yankees fan will tell you that the future shortstop of the New York Yankees is not on the roster. While arguments about Jose Caballero and Anthony Volpe will persist, Lombard has made it clear that while he may not be the now, he is clearly the future. And even then, Lombard may be much more in play for the 2nd half of 2026 than we could’ve imagined at the start of the year. Many baseball writers have taken notice. As rankings have updated, Lombard has found himself right on the cusp of, if not inside, top 10 prospect lists. It has been an exciting time to watch the 21-year-old, and hopefully we will get to see him dominate more when he returns from his injury.
The Ups and Downs of the Starting Pitching
Last year was a banner year for Sam Briend and Yankees. One of the premier pitching development organizations saw two of their pitchers (Carlos Lagrange and Elmer Rodriguez) find themselves ranked as top 100 prospects. Ben Hess and Bryce Cunninham raised eyebrows when both were healthy, and underrated arms such as Griffin Herring and Josh Grosz performed well enough to be key trade chips. The biggest success story though was Cam Schlittler, who went from a potential back of rotation arm in spring 2025 to one of the best young pitchers in the game. It was always going to be tough to follow up last year’s performance. Still, with how good the pitching development has been, there was hope for a good season.
While I would not call this a bad season for farm arms, it has been a challenging campaign. The Yankees have a lot of arms who have flashed some excellent stuff, but the consistency has been a major issue. Focusing primarily on High-A Hudson Valley, this rotation features a trio of 21-year-olds with potential plus-plus changeups in Franyer Herrera, Sean Paul Linan, and Luis Serna. All three have flashed awesome swing and miss stuff, with each owning a K% over 25%, including Linan at 32.1%. However, iffy fastball command and lagging tertiary pitches have seen these 3 arms struggles with loud contact. While Serna still has a very respectable 3.54 FIP, both Linan and Herrera have a FIP over 5.
Elsewhere on the farm, Jack Cebert has perhaps been the biggest riser in the system. The 2025 15th round pick has exhibited and advanced feel for control and missing bats. While he has still shown this since his promotion to AA with great K and BB rates, when he does get hit, he is getting hit hard. This is best seen by his absurd 26.8 HR/FB ratio. Another one of my favorite prospects, Xavier Rivas, has seen similar issues at AA. While he has more control issues than Cebert, he has sported a superb 34.9 K%. However, his own 23.4 HR/FB ratio has seen the same big issue plague him.
The next tier is the arms returning from injuries. Bryce Cunningham, Mac Heuer, Chase Hampton, Thatcher Hurd, and Wyatt Parliament all got off to delayed starts in 2026 thanks to injuries, with the latter three returning from Tommy John. While each has come back with flashes of what makes them intriguing prospects, all have suffered through issues of shaky control, diminished velocity, or iffy pitch shapes that have led to tough seasons.
Even the top tier arms in the Yankees systems have been victims. Ben Hess was sidelined early on for ‘fatigue’ issues and has yet to surpass 3.1 innings since his first start of the season. Elmer Rodriguez has made his MLB debut but has had a difficult time in AAA due to shaky command of his large pitch mix. Lastly, while Carlos Lagrange has continued to show elite stuff, he was struggling as a starter. While his move to the bullpen is solely to help the 2026 Yankees, there will still be questions on whether he is able to make that transition back to the rotation.
It isn’t all negatives for Yankees arms. Tyler Boudreau, Kyle Carr, and Henry Lalane have all been fun to watch. And while many of the arms have had consistency issues, they’ve all flashed of brilliance, such as Luis Serna’s 10K/1 Hitter and Allen Facundo’s 6 no-hit innings with 12 K’s. Still, when compared to last year, it hasn’t been as up arrow of a season. Progression isn't linear, and we are truly witnessing why that saying exists this year.
Re-Emergence of Relief Pitchers
For as good as the Yankees have been with pitching development, we never seem to reap the benefit of this with relief arms. The organization has opted to find gems from other organizations rather than run with some of their top bullpen arms from past seasons. This year, that dry spell seems to be breaking.
Let’s start this conversation with the gem of the Yankees bullpen prospects, Ben Grable.
Selected in the 11th round of the 2025 draft, the Yankees opted to keep him in the bullpen rather than try stretching out as a starter. After dominating A+ with an absurd 58.6% K rate and .32 FIP, he has continued to flourish in the more advanced AA with a 33.8% K rate and 2.77 FIP. His fastball has been an impressive weapon, sitting 95-97 with over 20 inches of iVB. Joining him as a top weapon has been the reinvigorated Eric Reyzelman. After a down season in AAA with diminished stuff and velocity, due in part to an injury, Reyzelman looks much more like the prospect we though he was heading into the 2025 season. After dominating in AA, Reyzelman has returned to AAA, where he is having a much better 2nd go after a short injury break.
Elsewhere, Yovanny Cruz has been a popular name amongst the Yankees fanbase. Picked up as a free agent, Cruz’s 100 mph fastball and killer slider have made fans excited to see him more at the MLB level. While there are still some control issues, he looks clearly improved from his past stints in AAA with other organizations. AA has seen a plethora of relievers perform well, including Will Brian, Hayden Merda, Chris Veach, and Tony Rossi. Rossi in particular is a name to watch for.
The Yankees have shown they don’t emphasize spending on the bullpen. This strategy has led to some unsuccessful dart throws on relievers from other organizations. If the Yankees can more adequately use their internal pipeline, it will alleviate the pressure on finding guys from outside the organization and needing to trade other prospects to do so.
Emphasis on Pull-Side Power
The Yankees hitting development has lagged pitching development in recent years. While the plethora of hitters traded over the last 12 months has hurt the surface numbers of the organizations hitting stats, it is clear there is a major shift in the development of hitters within the system. In the 2nd year of Jarret DeHart as the Director of Hitting, there has been a clear emphasis on maximizing hitters power potential. As discussed somewhat under George Lombard Jr., I believe the biggest reason for this is the emphasis of pulling the ball in the air.
The biggest risers in game power this year have been Jace Avina and Garrett Martin. Both outfielders had shown some pop in prior seasons, but inconsistent game power capped their potential upside. Avina needed only 51 games to set a new season high home run total, while Martin needed just 41. To no surprise, both hitters are two of the very best when it comes to pull air rates. While they have been the most successful, the are not the only.
Core Jackson and Kyle West were struggling to different degrees in Hudson Valley through May. In June, both have OPS over .900, and to no coincidence, are well above average in pull air rate. The previous mentioned George Lombard really took off in AAA when he started pulling the ball more, seeing him hit for the best game power of his young career. While some of the more contact-oriented guys like Kaeden Kent, Enmanuel Tejeda, and Wilson Rodriguez haven’t hit for huge power, it isn’t a coincidence that their home runs have been to the pull side.
Whenever I talk about pulling in the air, I never suggest you try and pull every single ball. Being able to take the ball the other way when pitched outside is such a valuable tool. Nor is everyone’s swing geared to hit moonshots to the pull side. However, the correlation between slugging and pull air is obvious, especially for players without outlier power tools like Spencer Jones. The emphasis over the last year in the organization to make the bats more comfortable doing this has been noticed and is starting to reap the benefits. While the Yankees system isn’t very deep with bats now due to all the trades, the ones they do have are performing to an impressive level.
Every Prospect. Every Level. Every Day.
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