With the Dominican Summer League (DSL) season beginning this weekend, Ben Badler of Baseball America named 2o prospects who played in the DSL last year who are sleeper prospects that are primed for a breakout 2018 season. There would be one Mets prospect who made this list – Luis Santana.
Santana, 18, is a 5’8″ second baseman who has played sparingly at shortstop. Last year, while playing in his second season in the DSL for the DSL Mets2, Sanata hit .325/.430/.481 with 12 doubles, eight triples, three homers, 52 RBI and 16 stolen bases in 65 games. Certainly, those are attention seeking numbers, and those numbers have caught the attention of Badler, who had this to say about the Mets prospect:
Santana is a tenacious, fiery competitor with a small but strong, bulky build. Santana was one of the most difficult hitters to strike out in the DSL. Santana has a compact swing with great hand-eye coordination to barrel balls consistently. He’s an excellent fastball hitter who takes an aggressive swing but also shows good selectivity at the plate. While Santana isn’t tall, his strength enables him to put a strong charge into the ball, although he will probably always have a hit-over-power profile. Santana is an offensive-minded second baseman who could be an average fielder, with solid-average speed and an average arm. He’s not flashy in the field, but he committed just six errors in 65 games, which is an unusually low total for a DSL middle infielder.
Given his skill-set and success, Santana is exactly the Mets prospect you would expect to have a breakout season. Badler and Baseball America aren’t the only ones to have this opinion. As noted by MMN‘s Michael Mayer, he expects Santana to have a breakout season as well.
Overall, if Santana does deliver on the promise he has, the Mets may be forced at some point to bring him stateside to show how his improving bat and glove would fare against a higher level of competition. Due to his being a “tenacious, fiery competitor,” he may just be up to the challenge sooner than we all expect.
