Mar 7, 2016; Salt River Pima-Maricopa, AZ, USA; Chicago Cubs infielder Gleyber Torres looks on during the first inning against the Colorado Rockies at Salt River Fields at Talking Stick. Mandatory Credit: Matt Kartozian-USA TODAY Sports
Mar 7, 2016; Salt River Pima-Maricopa, AZ, USA; Chicago Cubs infielder Gleyber Torrres looks on during the first inning against the Colorado Rockies at Salt River Fields at Talking Stick. Mandatory Credit: Matt Kartozian-USA TODAY Sports /
The New York Yankees acquired SS Gleyber Torres in a deadline trade with the Chicago Cubs. What sort of player is he?
Who Is He?
The Cubs signed Torres as part of the July 2nd international free agent class in 2013 with a $1.7M bonus out of Venezuela. The Cubs started him in 2014 with their Arizona Rookie League, where he hit .279/.372/.377 before being promoted to their Boise team as part of the short-season A-ball Northwest League to finish out the season, where he absolutely crushed it over 7 games. His overall line on the season was .297/.386/.440 with 2 home runs, 6 triples, and 10 stolen bases.
His 2015 season started with the Cubs’ South Bend team in the Midwest League, and he played well enough to push himself to their high-A team in the Carolina League at Myrtle Beach. Overall, Torres hit .287/.346/.376 with 3 home runs, 24 doubles, 5 triples, and 22 steals at 18 years old across two full season leagues. That level of play got him some high-end notice. He was ranked as the #41 prospect by both Baseball America and Baseball Prospectus. MLB.com ranked him as the #28 prospect in all of baseball.
His 2016 season began back at high-A Myrtle Beach, and he was playing very well, earning lots of notice before he was the key piece of a trade for the Cubs’ acquisition of Aroldis Chapman. On the 2016 season, he’s hit .274/.358/.429 with 10 home runs and 26 doubles with 20 stolen bases as a 19 year-old at high-A. That performance has him rated #24 in the midseason rankings at MLB.com, #34 at Baseball Prospectus, and #27 at Baseball America.
Torres is listed at 6’1 and 175 pounds, though he’s filled out some coming into the 2016 season, and I’d wager he’s probably more accurately about 185 pounds now. He’s a right-handed hitter and thrower from the shortstop position.
Hitting
Torres has a busy set up at the plate, with a lot of movement in his body and bat. This leaves him in some issues with hard breaking stuff, and you can see it in the high strikeout numbers he’s had in his career. He does have good zone judgement in general, but the movement in his set up makes it tough for him to work with breaking stuff in the zone at times.
Torres does well leveraging his swing, and he’s grown into his body in the last year to give him much more power in his frame. I could see him becoming a legit 20-homer guy with his growing frame, but the movement to get to the ball is an issue, and I fear that he could get to leveraging too much into the swing trying to get even more power and lose the present contact skills, which are about a 5.5 on a 20-80 scale.
Base Running/Fielding
Torres had a reputation of being a big time runner coming over the U.S., but that has certainly not been the case. He’s certainly fast, but his instincts are not very good, as evidenced by the fact that he’s only been successful on 61% of his stolen base attempts thus far in his minor league career. He does have excellent speed, however, so if he can be taught more, he could at least be solid as a base runner if not a base stealer.
In the field is where it will be an interesting discussion. The Yankees have another highly regarded shortstop prospect, Jorge Mateo, who is also at high-A Tampa with Torres since the trade. The Yankees have moved Mateo to second base, and that’s honestly a position I thought he’d end up at in the future due to exceptional range but an arm with quick release but not the strength you’d like in the 5.5 hole between short and third.
Torres has the opposite issue. He has all the arm one could possibly want in the position. His first step, though, is not fluid, and often he ends up missing balls that a good shortstop should get to. That said, he has excellent glove skills on the balls he gets to, and that arm is very nice, to say the least. I honestly could see Mateo at 2B and Torres at 3B long-term with the Yankees still looking for a shortstop!
I had a feeling I’d seen a profile like Torres before, and it took a while before I could think of it, and to help myself out, I just took a general projection of what I foresaw as a legit projection of a season from Torres being (.275/15 homers) and plugged it into Play Index on Baseball-Reference. After looking at a few guys, there are two that stand out.
On defense presently, he reminds me a ton of Michael Young. Young is a guy who should have been off the shortstop position probably 2-3 years before the Rangers made the decision to do it, but he still worked hard enough to be able to help at the position up until his final season. He has the same sort of skills as Young, though Young was always more blessed with his exceptional release than arm strength whereas that’s the reverse for Torres, but a similar profile defensively for sure.
Offensively is where I think the better overall comparison could come in, especially if he continues to fill in and moves to third base. In the early 1990s until the early 2000s, there was a very solid third baseman with above average offense and elite defense at the hot corner, based primarily on his big arm. He even was able to fill in a couple of years at shortstop when his team needed. That guy was Travis Fryman. Now over a 162 game average in his career, Fryman was a .274/.336/.443 guy with 21 homers, which doesn’t sound amazing, but he worked himself into a very high-end defender, though he had the misfortune of playing in the same era as an all-time great defensive third baseman in Robin Ventura, so he only won one Gold Glove in his career for his work at third.
I really think that Torres could have a bit more hit tool than Fryman showed in his career, but I think that level of hitter would be spot on for what the Yankees can expect out of Torres going forward, and that’s a 4-win player every year if you add in the defense.
Having spent about 425 at bats at high-A with very good success, I wonder if it may not be time to move Torres up to AA. That sounds crazy for a guy who’s not 20 until December, but seeing upper level pitching is exactly what will be his determining factor going forward, and better to start that process now than to blow it up later. I’d imagine he’ll be going to the Arizona Fall League as well, so it should be fun to watch how he plays with some of the top prospects in the game in that league this October.
