Even if it may seem like Jasson Dominguez has been around for a while, the hype surrounding him only began four years ago.
Which means he has been in the Yankees organization for roughly 20 percent of his life. And he is now closer than ever to The Bronx.
At the age of 20 years and 196 days, Dominguez made his Triple-A debut on Tuesday.
In the International League, where the batters’ average age this season is 26.4 and the pitchers’ average age is 27, Dominguez fit right in with his performance, if not his age.
Facing a 33-year-old starting pitcher who has spent parts of seven seasons in the big leagues (Drew Hutchison), Dominguez recorded his first Triple-A hit, a two-run single. He later added a double off a 28-year-old lefty reliever with 39 games of major league experience (Ben Bowden) and then another RBI single off another 27-year-old lefty reliever, albeit one who has yet to crack MLB (Taylor Lehman).
In all, Dominguez went 3-for-6 in a lineup that also included 28-year-old Franchy Cordero, 31-year-old Wilmer Difo and 32-year-old Jake Lamb — a trio with more than 15 combined years of major league service time.
“You can put the kid in any stadium you want, put him in any jersey you want, put any pitcher on the mound, change the environment, and with how good his preparation is and how talented he is as a player, he’s going to perform,” Joe Migliaccio, the Yankees’ hitting coordinator, said by phone on Wednesday. “There’s no doubt about that. Now it’s just making sure that we continue to make strides in certain areas and just continue to see those trends move in the right direction, like he has been.”
Though it’s hard to imagine Dominguez’s late-season cameo at Triple-A turning into a path to the Yankees by the end of this year, it puts 2024 very much in play. It was only last year that Anthony Volpe was promoted to Triple-A at the beginning of September, providing a springboard for him to win the shortstop job in spring training and start the season in the big leagues.
Every player’s development path is different, but Dominguez certainly has taken important steps forward this season, especially after his recent tear that led to this week’s promotion to Scranton/Wilkes-Barre.
The switch-hitting outfielder took some time to get going at Double-A Somerset. In his first 67 games through the end of June, Dominguez was hitting just .197 with a .702 OPS, 85 strikeouts and 56 walks in 304 plate appearances.
But a flip switched when the calendar turned to July. Across his final 42 games at Somerset, he hit .333 with an .895 OPS, 44 strikeouts and 21 walks in 202 plate appearances.
“We saw some really good trends in his second half of the year in Double-A,” Migliaccio said. “I think what a lot of the credit to that goes to is Jasson not pushing the emergency button and thinking he needs to change his stance, he needs to change this mechanic, he needs to change this way he trains. He has a true, really quality, optimal, professional routine that he executes daily.
“I think that’s the most impressive part about him being 20 years old, is whether he goes 0-for-3 with three strikeouts or 3-for-4 with two doubles and a home run, he has a routine that is specialized to the objectives he has to get better at. It’s so impressive how he comes into the cage every day.”
Migliaccio said Dominguez was hitting into some bad luck early in the season, but his work ethic and “infectious” personality remained the same. So did his plate discipline, which saw him making good decisions on swinging at pitches in the zone and not chasing pitches out of the zone.
“We felt like it was just a matter of time until an explosion was coming,” Migliaccio said. “Really just working through upper-level pitching, working through hitters’ strengths versus pitchers’ strengths and how to maybe couple those together to put together a really good approach. To his credit, he did a really good job when you look at how he trended during his time in Double-A. Obviously, he got a promotion for a reason.”
In part because of the natural progression as he gets more physically mature and stronger, Dominguez’s ability to make quality contact has improved this year. So have his contact rate and swing decisions.
According to Migliaccio, in Dominguez’s first season in Single-A (2021), he missed on 25 percent of the pitches he swung at in the strike zone, which was higher than league average. At Double-A this season, that number had decreased to 18 percent.
Dominguez is also chasing outside the strike zone nearly 10 percent less than he did in ’21, Migliaccio said, as well as swinging in the strike zone at nearly the same clip as he did before.
“So if I take that and kind of break it down, before when he was younger, he swung at everything in the strike zone and he swung at everything outside of the strike zone,” Migliaccio said. “Now he swings at everything in the strike zone and he doesn’t swing at anything out of the strike zone.”
That said, there is still plenty of room for Dominguez to improve as he continues his development. Migliaccio cited elevating the baseball as one of the areas that Dominguez is working on, which came with a caveat.
“There’s this common misconception — whether it’s about Yankee development, or baseball development in general — that we teach this swing, whether it’s just home run or strikeout and there’s nowhere in between,” Migliaccio said. “And that [is] the furthest thing from the truth. The last thing we want to do is really sacrifice contact to increase contact quality. There’s give and take there.
“I think we do it almost just as good as anybody else where we believe we can help him elevate the baseball more not by sacrificing contact rate. So far, like I mentioned earlier, the seven percent improvement in miss in-zone, that’s huge for him to be able to make contact with the type of impact he has.
“So as he just keeps fine-tuning some of these areas, he already does things so well that if he does hit a single — which it’s definitely OK that he hits singles — he’s probably going to steal second base because he’s got 37 stolen bases. But if he ends up, in an ideal world, hitting it over the infield’s head, he’s gonna hit a double, triple or he’s gonna have a jog from home plate to home plate. So I think regardless, he’s in a good place to have success.”
One other area that has the Yankees excited about Dominguez, who was ranked as their No. 3 prospect in Baseball America’s midseason rankings, is what he has shown them off the field.
It was something they took note of this spring when Dominguez impressed in big league camp, and it has continued throughout the year.
“I think it’s important to know how special of a person he is,” Migliaccio said. “He’s such a good person. He’s such a phenomenal young man. He’s got great humor. He carries himself so well. I get goosebumps thinking about the type of person he is, and when you couple that with how good of a baseball player he is, that’s the sort of player that you want your organization to get molded around for the next however many — 10, 12, 15 years.
“So, yeah, you kind of sit back and you go, ‘Man, what he’s doing is special.’ But then about 10 seconds later, you better flip the switch and realize, ‘Hey, we’ve still got work to do. This is the last month of the season, we need to keep pushing forward,’ and then you get back into the, ‘OK, let’s get back to work mode.’”
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Rice is cooking
One of the Yankees’ hottest prospects is a 24-year-old catcher who was not on many people’s radars until recently.
Ben Rice is on fire at Double-A Somerset, crushing his 11th home run in his 28th game there on Wednesday. The left-handed hitter is batting .310 with a 1.041 OPS and just 23 strikeouts in 130 plate appearances.
“I would say this to anyone: I think he’s probably one of the top 10 hitters in our organization,” Migliaccio said.
Rice was a 12th-round pick out of Dartmouth in 2021, but he had just 110 plate appearances at the collegiate level because most of his sophomore season and all of his junior season were wiped out due to the pandemic.
That may be one of the reasons why he is something of a late bloomer, but now he has emerged as an intriguing piece, even after missing two months this season because of a back issue.
The Yankees’ system is fairly well-stocked at catcher, with Austin Wells — currently at Triple-A and likely pushing his way toward a September call-up — their highest-rated prospect at the position, along with Agustin Ramirez (Double-A) and Carlos Narvaez (Triple-A).
But Rice, who has also played some first base, is pushing his way into the conversation because of his bat.
“When you look at some of the characteristics of the best hitters in baseball … they all tend to check some similar boxes, wouldn’t you know it?” Migliaccio said. “They tend to make more contact than average. They tend to make better swing decisions than average. They tend to hit the ball hard. And when they do hit it, they hit it in the air.
“Coincidentally enough, Ben Rice also checks all four of those boxes. And I think as he continues to collect more and more plate appearances in his relatively young career in pro ball, to see the trends that he’s made and the progress he’s made in the last two years or so, has been so exciting.
“I don’t know what the limit is. I don’t know how high [it is]. Is it backup catcher? Is it starting catcher? Is it future All-Star? I don’t know any of that. But what I do know is what his current performance is and what his metrics are telling us, is that this guy is going to be a bat in somebody’s lineup, whether it’s the Yankees or another big league team. He’s gonna be in that lineup one day relatively soon because of how impactful his left-handed bat is.”
Luis Severino’s feel-good moment
Given how difficult this season has been for Luis Severino, whose underperformance likely has cost him a good chunk of money in free agency this offseason, it was hard not to feel good for him on Wednesday, when he tossed 6 ⅓ shutout innings and received a standing ovation from Yankee Stadium.
Yes, it was against the Nationals, and no, it does not mean that he is fully out of the woods just yet.
But at least for one night, the popular clubhouse presence got to feel good about himself again. And that has to count for something.
