The Prospect Notebook 4/14-4/19

Aaron Lichstrahl
3 hours ago
10 min read

JoJo Jackson

Line: 22 PA, 5 H, 2 2B, 0 HR, 1 RBI, 5 BB, 2 K, 0 SB, .294/.455/.412

The 2024 draft had a lot of highlights in the later rounds. Most notably, Brendan Jones, Dillon Lewis, and Xavier Rivas have seen their stock rise significantly. One name who lagged behind was JoJo Jackson. The 17^th rounder out of Georgia State played in 6 games post-draft 2024, before missing almost the entire 2025 season, only returning for 6 FCL games. Jackson is back in 2026, and off to an interesting start, so I figured it would be nice to see what this late round pick was doing in Tampa.

The first thing that sticks out with Jackson is his plate discipline. It felt during his at-bats he really owns the strike zone. While he will expand for pitches around the edge, he mainly only did so during 2 strike counts There was no bad offering at any pitches up or way down. While he will take some pitches in the zone, I thought there was some good aggression in the zone as well. For those who have read my stuff before, you will know this is a complaint I have made with George Lombard Jr., as he would take too many hittable pitches. While a couple of these first pitch swings resulted in groundouts, he did have one very nice double on a strike to the outside portion of the plate that he hit into the gap the other way. This strong understanding of the zone and what pitches to swing at is a very good start.

Expanding on this, as a 23-year-old, Jackson is facing competition below his age level. That doesn’t mean he isn’t facing good talent. On Thursday, he had two at-bats vs Seth Hernandez, one of the top pitching prospects in the sport. In a game where the Tarpons had no hits against the young righthander, Jackson offered the best at-bats. Both at-bats, Jackson worked the count to 2-2, featuring some aggressive foul hacks, one chase, and a couple impressive takes. While both at-bats ended in strikeouts, one was because of a clock violation for not getting in the batters’ box in time and the other was a whiff on a 100mph fastball. In my book, these at-bats raised Jackson’s stock for me.

The main issue early on with Jackson is his bat path. There is too many swings going into the ground. His 51% ground ball rate is too high, and his 6.9% pull air rate tells me he is leaving a lot of damage on the table. Jackson doesn’t appear to have huge exit velocities, with below average max and 90^th percentile EV’s on the young season. Because of this, it is imperative for him to pull the ball in the air more to improve his slugging. It is a somewhat similar story to that of Brendan Jones, so let’s hope Jackson can follow in his draft class peer’s shoes.

While Jackson is a switch hitter, I only got to see him from the left side. While the sample size is much smaller, Jackson has shown better contact ability from the right side, but his production and expected production far lag his appearances from the left. As an older prospect, it is good to see Jackson managing well. I hope to see him in Hudson Valley soon, as it will be a good test for his discipline against tougher pitchers. For the moment, Jackson is a guy who will generate plenty of walks, but will succumb to some strikeouts because of a combination of passivity and average contact ability. While I am not ready to declare him the next big-time prospect, I believe he is a name who should garner attention beyond being organizational depth.

Ben Grable

Line: 3.1 IP, 2 H, 0 R, 1 BB, 7 K, 0.00 ERA, -.20 FIP

There has been a lot of talk early about the 2025 draft class. While the main pitching name driving conversations has been Jack Cebert, 11^th rounder Ben Grable should start receiving plenty of praise as well. Take this comparison on for size: in his brief stint as a reliever at the end of the 2025 season for Hudson Valley, Cebert recorded a 44% K rate and 4% BB rate in 6.1 innings, only allowing 4 hits and 2 runs. In Ben Grable’s 7 innings at Hudson Valley to begin the 2026 season, he has a 55.6% K rate and 7.4% BB rate, with only 3 hits and 1 run allowed. He has struck out 15 of the 27 batters he has faced. As a true reliever, Grable might be a big-time weapon, so let’s discuss why.

Grable’s bread and butter is his four-seam fastball. While it only sits at about 96mph, the pitch looks to have excellent inverted break, giving the pitch the rising effect. Given his high release point, it is not surprising Grable is able to generate good iVB on the pitch. More impressive was his command of the pitch. Grable was able to put the fastball anywhere he wanted in the zone, as well as dangle it just above the zone where batters can’t help but chase. During his outing on 4/15, he dominated the Frederick Keys batters he faced with it. Of the 23 pitches he threw to the 7 batters faced, 21 of them were fastballs. Here is a breakdown of these fastballs:

- 19 strikes/ 2 balls

- 8 up in the zone or just above

- 18 swings

- 12 swings and miss

It was an utterly dominant performance by the pitch. Even with such little time at the level, it is very apparent to me that the 23-year old’s fastball is too good for the level. Even though his Sunday outing didn’t feature the same number of whiffs, his fastball is clearly tough for hitters to read, leading to a lot of strikes looking or late foul swings. His secondary offerings are a splitter and a slider. While I didn’t get to see either of these featured much during the week, I did go back to get a better feel for these pitches. The splitter is the main secondary weapon. With its sharp 6-12 drop, it tunnel’s extremely well with his fastball. If the fastball is a plus weapon, the splitter can be right with it. The slider is a pitch that looks more average right now. From the few times I saw, it looked a little loopier/sweepy. With the splitter a better offering vs lefty, refining the slider will help a great deal vs righty. While I think the fastball will be a weapon regardless of level, the improvement of these secondaries will be paramount, as upper minors’ hitters should be peskier than what we’ve seen in High-A.

It is somewhat refreshing seeing the Yankees utilize an interesting pitcher immediately from the bullpen instead of stretching out to be a starter. Turning 24 in May, Grable clearly has a polish to his game that makes him a clear candidate to move through the system fast. It would not surprise me at all to see him in AAA by August, and I’d even give him a non-zero chance to make the MLB at some point this season (albeit still a very low chance). I typically veer towards keeping relievers off my top 30 due to their lack of volume and trade value, but Grable is currently testing my resolve. If he keeps this up, don’t be surprised if he makes an appearance in my mid-season update.

Marco Luciano

Line: 25 PA, 6 H, 1 2B, 3 HR, 5 RBI, 1 BB, 7 K, 0 SB, .261/.292/.696

After covering a former top 100 prospect from another club last week, I felt it would only be appropriate to cover the other former top 100 prospect from another team the Yankees acquired. Luciano was a former top 100 prospect with the San Francisco Giants, ranked as high as 8^th overall in 2021 by Baseball Prospectus and as recently as 49^th by MLB Pipeline in pre-season 2024. With short but unimpressive stints at the MLB level in 2023 and 2024, Luciano lost his prospect pedigree, and after an ok 2025 in AAA, he was DFA’d, falling into the Yankees laps. The Yankees have chosen to put the 24-year-old in AA to get some confidence back, and it seems to be working.

From watching his at-bats this week, it appears clear to me that Luciano takes a somewhat aggressive approach. While he showed a good amount of patience early in counts, he is not afraid to take a hack on the first pitch. While this did lead to him swinging through a slider on one occasion and getting handcuffed and sawed off on a popup on another, Luciano did take a first pitch fastball deep to center field before the outfielder ran over to it. Even with some chasing of pitches down, Luciano had plenty of aggressive hacks in the zone. This was seen on his 3 home runs this week, 2 of which were hanging breaking balls. With high level quality of contact, when Luciano hit a ball, he hit it hard.

As alluded to, there was some swing and miss in his game. While his chase wasn’t as big of a concern as it is for Yanquiel Fernandez, he will go fishing somewhat often on sliders and changeups down. The more concerning issue to me is the zone contact doesn’t seem to be a strong tool. There were plenty of swings and misses in the zone by Luciano, especially on breaking balls. While he handled fastballs well, managing to at least foul them off most of the time, the whiff is my number one concern with the infielder. While he didn’t strike out too much this week, a nearly 30% K rate at AA isn’t sustainable when he gets back to AAA.

While I do have concerns as stated, it cannot be denied that Luciano can create a lot of damage. Not only does he hit the ball hard, but he hits it in the air quite often. With good power to all fields, Luciano seems like the type of bat that would really succeed in Yankee stadium should he be able to resolve some of the whiff concerns. While it is easy to point to the fact that Luciano has been in AAA and MLB so he should be dominating AA, he only ever spent 56 games at the level in 2023 before hasty promotions. If he keeps hitting like this, he should not long for AAA, where we can really get a better idea if Luciano may be a legitimate 2^nd base candidate for the Yankees. As of now, this looks like an excellent find by the Yankees, taking a chance on a player coming from a pretty poor player development organization.

Spencer Jones

Line: 19 PA, 5 H, 2 2B, 2 HR, 4 RBI, 2 BB, 6 K, 2 SB, .313/.389/.813

No one reading this is unaware of the enigma that Spencer Jones is. Blessed with some of the best power in all of baseball, Jones also has been plagued by his inability to make any consistent level of contact. Despite his 2-month heater from June to the end of July last year, his last month seemed to stick with people more where he deeply struggled. After a very poor first week of the season, people were beginning to say it was the same old. However, over the last two weeks, he has really begun to turn it around. Since 4/7, Jones has a 84.4% zone contact rate, while only striking out 25.6% of the time. With this turnaround, I wanted to watch Jones’ at bats this week and see what has been going on.

From watching his at-bats, I was impressed with Spencer’s ability to get to the ball in zone. While this included many foul balls, there were only a handful of pitches this week where he swung through a pitch in the zone. With zone contact probably the most important statistic to follow with Jones, it was good to see him fouling off pitches to lengthen at bats. While there were a few groundouts to the right side, Jones overall did a good job hitting the ball hard to the outfield. This included two big home runs. One of these home runs was on a fastball in the lower portion of the zone off Jack Wenninger, a top 10 prospect for the Mets.

Speaking of Mets pitchers, Jones also got to battle Jonah Tong and Christian Scott, two well regarded pitchers in the organization. In these at bats, he went 1-3 with a walk and 2 strikeouts. These four plate appearances tell a lot about Jones. The double was a blooper that landed in center after Jones was able to get to a pitch in on his hands. His walk vs Tong was a good battle with some tough takes. While his strikeout by Tong was him getting beaten by fastballs, his strikeout against Scott was a tough battle, fouling off several pitches.

These at-bats also help paint the picture of Jones’ weaknesses. As an aggressive swinger, while he does swing in the zone a lot, it also means he will chase. I found Jones to be susceptible to fastballs up and breaking pitches coming down and in. There were some good takes down, but there were several sliders/curveballs down and in he was all too happy to chase and miss. While he does chase, he does a fairly good job of making contact with pitches in the shadow both inside and outside the zone. It is up and down where he struggled to make contact. While he only had a couple of at-bats vs lefties, he looked more uncomfortable in those at-bats. As seen by the splits below, his swing rates and contact rates are quite different than vs righties.

Jones will continue to remain polarizing. While people like to compare him to Joey Gallo, Jones is far more aggressive a swinger than Gallo ever was. While he has done a reasonable job working walks to begin the season, there is more work to do. Improving his ability to spit on the breaking balls down and it will really help in this regard. Most importantly, Jones will need to sustain this level of zone contact. If he can stay at or above 80%, or even potentially 75%, he does such a remarkable job getting the ball in the air that he will create enough damage to be a starting caliber MLB player, especially with his solid defense and speed. While he has shown he can do this in spurts, we will need to see it over several months of a season.

Every Prospect. Every Level. Every Day.