Some notes from recent minor-league games I’ve hit up, with more to come later this week …

Two of the main prospects the New York Mets acquired in pitching trades at the deadline are now on their Double-A Binghamton roster, and I saw both infielder Jefferson Rojas and right-hander Gary Gill Hill in action on Tuesday morning at Reading (Phillies’ affiliate).

Hill, acquired from Tampa Bay in the Freddy Peralta deal, was a projection pick out of high school. He was still 17 when the Rays took him in the sixth round in 2022, but his success in the minors to date is largely about his command and feel for pitching because his stuff hasn’t really ticked up yet. He pitched well twice through Reading’s lineup on Tuesday, but the third time through, hitters were all over his dead-straight 91-94-mph fastball, and he doesn’t have an average second pitch to keep them off it. He’s throwing a sweeper now as well as a true slider; the latter pitch is 85-89 but short like a cutter, while the sweeper has better shape and about 10 miles an hour less in velocity.

There’s a lot more in the tank here, especially because his delivery is really inefficient — he doesn’t take much of a stride, straightens his front leg really early, lands hard and doesn’t finish the breaking stuff out front. He should be able to throw harder than this, especially on that sweeper, and he has to get his breaking pitches down more than he is right now. He doesn’t walk many — zero in this outing in 22 batters faced — and other than throwing a few sliders to lefties when he should be going changeup, he showed pretty good feel for what he was doing. Right now, I wouldn’t have him as a big-league starter, but I also think he has mid-rotation upside if the Mets are really aggressive about changing things up.

Rojas, acquired from the Cubs for Clay Holmes and Tyrone Taylor, was the DH in this game, so I didn’t get to see him field, because that’s how the DH works. He has outstanding bat speed, using it once to homer on a pitch he caught way out in front and still managed to drive out the other way, but he also went after some pitches well out of the zone and struck out in his other three plate appearances. There were five homers in this game, all by Binghamton hitters, as Reading is a launching pad, so keep that in mind when looking at this box score.

Mitch Voit, the Mets’ 2025 first-round pick, led off for Binghamton and had his first hitless game since August 13, and just his third since he was promoted to Double A at the start of the month. He looked great at second base, but at the plate his bat looked a little slow — it doesn’t help when Rojas is batting two spots after you — which became an issue later in the game when Reading brought in a little velocity.

One note on Reading: Shortstop Bryan Rincon has had a real breakout season this year in his first go-round in Double A, with 20 homers already (his previous season high was eight) and a .267/.402/.501 line that has him up 98 points of OBP and over 200 points of SLG from 2025. Reading is a great home-run park, but Rincon doesn’t have much of a home/road split.

I don’t think he’s going to be a 20-25 homer guy in the majors, but he is clearly hitting the ball much harder now, and there will probably be 15-20 homers in his peak seasons. With his eye and his plus defense at short, he looks like he could be an everyday player. He probably should be in Triple A by now, even if it’s just to get him a look at the better pitching there before he goes to that level next year.

Keith Law on the Astros’ GM firing

Keith Law

That Reading game started at 11 am, so I doubled up and drove down to Double-A Harrisburg (Nationals’ affiliate) for the night game against Chesapeake (Orioles’ affiliate), which had a great pitching matchup of two lefties: Caden Hunter (Orioles) and Alex Clemmey (Nats).

Hunter was Baltimore’s sixth-round pick last year out of USC. He started the year in Low A, which was no challenge at all for him as an advanced college product. Since then, however, he’s continued to miss bats in High A and now Double A, punching out eight in five innings in this outing to raise his strikeout rate at the level to 32.7 percent. Hunter is a true three-pitch guy who was 93-96 with his four-seamer and showed two above-average secondaries in his changeup and slider. The changeup is his best pitch, 85-88 with excellent deception, and he uses it enough against righties that he can get misses on the fastball up and away to them because those hitters are late enough to pick up which pitch he’s throwing. I’m not sure there’s a true plus pitch here for big-league hitters yet, so right now I’d say he’s a definite big-league starter but trending more towards a third/fourth starter than an above-average one.

Clemmey had a great outing by the box score but a disappointing one from the stands. Acquired from the Cleveland Guardians in the Lane Thomas trade at the 2024 deadline, Clemmey has shown huge stuff in the past — he hit 100 in high school — with poor control, the latter of which is still true this year, as he has a 14.6 percent walk rate in Double A. He only walked one Chesapeake hitter in his five innings on Tuesday but was only 90-93 and had some trouble keeping his arm slot consistent. Both the slider and changeup were above-average pitches in isolation, but without a functional fastball I’m not sure what he is.

The Nationals added Kendeglys Virguez in this year’s trade with Cleveland that sent Foster Griffin to the Guardians. Virguez was 96-97 with a well below-average slider, working with an extremely long arm swing that I doubt he’ll ever be able to repeat. He gave up a long homer on a slider in his one inning.

Right-hander Robert Cranz, Washington’s 2024 seventh-round pick, has had a weird year where he wasn’t great in High A, has been ridiculously dominant in Double A and posted a 13+ ERA in Triple A that led to a demotion back to Harrisburg earlier this month. On Tuesday, he was 93-96 with two breaking balls, a slurve and then a hard slider/cutter, with the slower pitch the better of the two. I’m surprised he was that bad in Triple A, but nothing missed bats for him at that level.

Infielder Devin Fitz-Gerald, who came over to Washington from the Texas Rangers in the MacKenzie Gore trade, started the year on fire in High-A Wilmington, hitting eight homers on a 10-game road trip in the first half of May, but he’s been awful for three months now, including his promotion to Double A. He’s hitting .220/.296/.293 in 49 games for Harrisburg, and he’s swinging much more uphill now than he was at the start of the year, which is producing more swing-and-miss without more production to balance it out. It’s like watching a completely different player from the one I saw in April.

The power surge was always suspect; he’s a smaller guy and his batted-ball data did not support a massive increase in power output. I think he needs to reset his swing and approach to where he was before that fateful road trip, focusing on hard contact wherever it goes rather than trying to lift and pull everything.

When the Orioles traded Adley Rutschman to Boston for five players, including two pretty famous pitching prospects, an exec told me he thought Enddy Azocar might be the best player in the trade. I can see why — Azocar has incredible bat speed, with lightning-quick wrists, and he’s been out of his mind at the plate since the trade, with a .356/.400/.616 line in 18 games for High-A Frederick. I saw him in a doubleheader at Wilmington last week, where he homered, had three hard-hit singles (including one right back at the pitcher) and doubled to the center-field warning track off a position player pitching.

He doesn’t strike out much, but there’s more swing-and-miss here than you might infer from the stat line. He’s hunting fastballs and can catch up to good velocity, while he’s struggling more with secondary stuff. He’s also only 19 years old and in High A already, with plenty of time to work on his pitch recognition. There’s huge offensive upside here.

The Nats sent their 2026 first-rounder, Chris Hacopian, straight to High A, and he’s even playing the field after a back injury limited him to DH duty for most of the spring with Texas A&M. I still like the swing, which looks geared to drive the ball out to left-center, but saw him take too many pitches in the zone. His swing rate on pitches in the zone in a small sample at this level is around 70 percent, which is around the MLB median, and besides the sample size, it’s his pro debut, so I’m not exactly worried about this.

Hacopian sat in the second game in favor of Luke Dickerson, recently called up from Low A, and Dickerson was not good, striking out three times in four plate appearances, twice looking at fastballs right down the middle. He’s struck out 30 times in 55 plate appearances since the promotion.

Baltimore took right-hander Christian Rodriguez in the 10th round in 2024, but he didn’t debut until this year because he had open-heart surgery to remove a tumor discovered during spring training in 2025. He dominated Low A to start the year and has been just OK since his promotion to High A. He’s 92-95 with a solid-average changeup, coming from a low three-quarters slot that adds some more deception. He was excellent twice through Wilmington’s order, giving up one hit and two walks in 4 2/3 innings, and then the moment the third time through started, it all came apart — four singles in a row, a walk, another single and finally the last out.