Cleveland’s best hitting prospect should be in the Bigs
Since 2021, Cleveland’s right field has become one of the weakest units in all of baseball. Within these five seasons, the position had become a revolving door. Will Brennan assumed the bulk of those at-bats, posting a paltry 87 wRC+ across 622 plate appearances, but outside of Brennan, 15 other players have taken at-bats in right, amassing a combined 93 wRC+, the 3rd worst mark in the American League in that span. It’s not been for the lack of sustained success either. This span is counting pre-injury Josh Naylor’s 123 wRC+ across over 200 plate appearances, Harold Ramirez’s 156 wRC+ across over 100 PAs, and even both Linsanity runs from Oscar Gonzalez and Jhonkensy Noel.
However, it also includes both Oscar and Noel’s total collapses, and that’s a major part of the issue within this outfield. In between Gonzalez and Noel, it’s primarily been Will Brennan, and despite Brennan being the steady bat across from Steven Kwan in the corner outfield, he simply wasn’t very good, and with no help on the horizon, the position’s future felt very bleak.
Until now.
With their first round pick in 2022, Cleveland selected outfielder Chase DeLauter out of James Madison. By now, we’ve all heard about DeLauter, but if you haven’t, here’s a quick recap.
Health has long been all the talk with DeLauter, and rightfully so. Coming out of James Madison, it was a foot injury that took him out of talks to go within the top five of his draft as teams both knew he wouldn’t play at all in 2022 and that it had potential to be a long-term concern, and when Cleveland took him at pick 16, the overall talk was that if he can avoid major injury, Cleveland got the steal of the entire draft. This was all well and good until the giant elephant in the room reared its ugly head. DeLauter didn’t play at all in his draft year as he recovered from foot surgery, and after a torrid start in Lake County in 2023 and subsequently in Akron, he broke his foot again. 2024 did not bring a lot of baseball for DeLauter either, and the doubts began to creep in. Can DeLauter ever stay healthy enough to get to Cleveland? Is his swing negatively impacting his foot?
Coming into 2025, the hope for DeLauter was less about if he could work his way up to another promotion and more just seeing if he could sustain an everyday player’s workload. He was sidelined once again, and this time it wasn’t anywhere near his foot. In early March, after being extended a Spring Training invite, DeLauter’s Spring was cut short after needing surgery to repair a sports hernia, sidelining him 8 to 12 weeks. At long last, after two months of rehabbing, DeLauter was assigned to Arizona to begin his rehab assignment, and on May 23, he made his way back to Columbus.
If you spend five minutes on Guardians Twitter, you’ll see he’s all anyone can talk about right now. The conversations has ranged from team savior to Bradley Zimmer-esque bust who can’t stay healthy. The beauty of what we’re about to discuss, however, is that while he won’t come up and save the team, I can guarantee that not only will he not be a bust, he will become a staple of the middle of the lineup for years to come.
DeLauter’s 2025 in Columbus saw a slow start as he shook off some rust. Though he hit just .186 through his games in May, DeLauter was smoking the ball, and it was only a matter of time until the process got back to his norm and the results followed suit. Since the start of June, DeLauter is slashing .340/.438/.509 with 51% hard hit rate and just a 13.8% whiff rate in that span. DeLauter saw early struggles with pitches in the zone, running a 76% z-con rate through his first couple of weeks. In June, that number is flirting with 90%, sitting at 89.2%.
The most remarkable part about DeLauter is the overall quality of contact he finds a way to produce despite both hitting way too many ground balls while hardly swinging and missing. His 90th percentile exit velocity, a.k.a. EV90, which is the exit velocity value greater than 90% of a player’s batted ball events, sits at 107 mph despite his max exit velo in Triple-A sitting at 108.8. In short, he has torn the cover off the ball in Columbus, and though it’s not been in the most optimal way possible (low air-pull and line drive rates), it’s obviously translatable to the next level.
A huge reason why Cleveland’s right field extravaganza has failed them so much comes from their inability to hit any kind of velocity. Will Brennan hit just .231 against fastballs that were thrown at least 94 mph, Jhonkensy Noel hit .167, and Oscar Gonzalez hit .243. None of these three players slugged over .320. Now, this absolutely comes with the caveat that not all fastballs are created equally, and the pitching at the Major League level vastly dwarfs that of Triple-A pitching, but thus far in Columbus, DeLauter has hit .286 against fastballs of at least 94 miles per hour with a .476 SLG.
Another major positive that DeLauter has over his counterparts? He absolutely crushes offspeed pitching. Against changeups and splitters since June 1st, DeLauter is hitting .375 with a .750 SLG and 62.5% hard hit rate and a very low 13.3% whiff rate to boot. José Ramírez destroys changeups. He’s about the only one that does for the Guardians. Taking Ramírez away, Cleveland hits just .222 with a .333 SLG and 33% whiff rate. Cleveland’s outfield has just a .243 wOBA against offspeed pitches.
My insistence for DeLauter to be in Cleveland is not that I think he’s ready or that the current production has been so poor, it’s both. DeLauter is a better prospect than any single player on this Guardians team ever was, José included. Now, that doesn’t really mean all that much in the grand scheme of things. We see prospects flame out all of the time, but I’ve never been this bullish about the success of a Guardians hitting prospect the way I am with DeLauter. I can never predict what anyone’s health will be in the future, but it’s fair to say it’s always in the back of anyone’s head when DeLauter is involved, but the bat control he possesses in the zone is unmatched against anyone within the entire organization sans Ramírez and Kwan. His plus power is a natural, easy-flowing gift, and he has it to all alleys of the field against any kind of pitch. Defensively, he’s shown he’s more than capable in the corners, and the more we see of him in 2025 in Cleveland, we will begin to get more answers about the future as he gets his feet wet in the Bigs, and if he finds success early on, a bat like that can help transform a stagnant, top heavy lineup into a 1 through 5 with actual thump.
Simply put, anyone that tells you DeLauter needs to get Triple-A reps to prove he can withstand everyday play is looking at baseball wrongly. He can do all of those things in Cleveland just the same while acclimating himself to the level both he and the team need him to be at in order to be successful in the future. The 40-man situation is also favorable for DeLauter to be added. DeLauter is not currently on the 40-man roster, but as things stand, the 40-man sits at 39, and with Will Brennan likely to hit the 60-day IL at some point, that would knock it down to 38.
Promotions within the Guardians minor league system over the course of the past couple days have been solely in the outfield as well with Tommy Hawke and Jonah Advincula receiving promotions to Lake County and Akron respectively, creating logjams across the daily lineups for the RubberDucks and Captains. This is, of course, merely speculation, but as outfielders move up the ranks, no team within the Guardians organization is as clogged in the outfield as Columbus. There is a simple solution, we just need the team to finally do the right thing: PROMOTE Chase DeLauter.