Today I want to look at one of the top prospects in baseball, Eloy Jimenez. First of all, some background info. Jimenez was signed out of the Dominican Republic at age 16, like many Dominican prospects are. He played in his first season in the states in 2014 at age 17. He recently was traded from the Cubs to the White Sox as a major part of the Jose Quintana deal. He is in advanced A ball with the Sox. Also, he is 6’4, 205 lbs.
So now we know a little bit more about this top prospect, lets get into a couple swings.
Cage work (from mlb.com clip):
Double (from rkyosh007 on youtube):
Home Run side view (from Nathan Graham on youtube):
And finally a home run from the Futures game:
There is one thing I want to talk about with Jimenez today that we can learn from. I’ll describe it in two different ways: soft shoulders/elbows and direction.
First, soft shoulders/elbows. We talked about this a little bit in yesterdays installment on Todd Frazier (you can read that here) in a different context, based on Frazier’s feels. With Jimenez, we can see it present here:
We can see Jimenez keeping his front shoulder in, which allows his elbows to stay bent and work to get the barrel out in front. We’ve talked about this in the past, but I think it’s so relevant to hitting that we need to talk about it again. If that front shoulder pulls to the left too early, it is going to have an effect on up through the arms and into the bat and barrel as well. If the shoulder is yanking to the left, the barrel is not going to be able to keep its’ direction through the middle of the field. Take a look at this video I posted a couple days back on throwing and positive disconnection. Throwing and hitting are very relatable. The same issues exist and those same issue cause the same problems:
(file is roughly 2 minutes, too big to embed on site. Just click on link)
As I talked about in the video, pulling/spinning with the upper half causes all sorts of issues in throwing as well. The left side goes left and that leaves the right side trying to play catch-up. You end up not being able to put force into the baseball with the correct direction, straight ahead of you. The same thing happens when you don’t maintain your shoulders in the swing.
Direction goes hand in hand with being able to have soft shoulders/elbows. When I say direction, it simply means the path in which your force is being created. So if you are constantly hooking balls to the pull side, that likely means your direction is off a little bit… to the pull side. Duh. Likewise if you slice balls oppo all the time, your direction is likely off a little bit to the opposite field. This means that something is acting on your barrel to disrupt it from taking the path it needs to, towards the middle of the field. Jimenez does a great job letting his body allow the barrel to go where it needs to go.
I think Eloy Jimenez is going to be a stud. He seems headed in that direction and it will be interesting to keep an eye on him as he develops.
That’s all for today. Installment 12 will be coming out tomorrow.