It’s just his first full season, but Los Angeles Angels outfield prospect Jo Adell has been establishing himself as one of the best prospects in the game.
The Los Angeles Angels are fighting for their playoff lives and are now trying to do it without their big offseason signing, Shohei Ohtani. While Mike Trout is having possibly one of the best all-around seasons in history, other members of the lineup are having such negative seasons that it’s really dragging down the impact of Trout’s brilliance. Through all of this, one of the big things that emerged this offseason for the Los Angeles Angels is establishing itself even stronger and more impressively than thought preseason.
In preseason rankings of every farm system in baseball, I had the Los Angeles Angels as the #21 farm system in the game. While this may not sound all that great, that was a drastic improvement for the Angels, and frankly, the Angels have seen even better performance from that farm system than even what was seen there, likely pushing that ranking even higher. There has been one significant standout on the farm, though.
Jo Adell
In the preseason list of the top 150 prospects in baseball, I had Adell at #51 overall, and I got some very interesting responses on that ranking, assuming that I was very bullish on Adell to have him that high. Instead, in his first full season after being selected 10th overall by the Los Angeles Angels, Adell may be firmly entrenching himself in the top 20 for my midseason list, coming early next month.
With an even 25 games at both levels, it’s a good time to review Adell’s performance at low-A and high-A thus far, but the crazy part is that there really has been no slow down since he got up to high-A. Adell hit .326/.398/.611 with 6 home runs and 4 stolen bases at low-A before being promoted to high-A, where he’s hit .311/.348/.623 with 8 home runs and 7 stolen bases.
Next: CTTP's top 150 prospects
The strikeout rate is nearly identical between the two levels (low-A 24.1%, high-A 26.8%), but his walk rate has been nearly half at high-A so far. Obviously, he still has some work to do there, but with a tremendous performance so far, Jo Adell will continue to fly up rankings.