While it is currently the heart of MLB Draft scouting season (check out my first mock draft of the year if you haven’t already), I’ve been able to catch a few minor-league games recently featuring several top prospects. Below are notes from some of the top players I saw from the Philadelphia Phillies, St. Louis Cardinals and Baltimore Orioles systems.
Outfielder Dante Nori was the Phillies’ first-round pick in 2024, a mild surprise given that he was a high school prospect who was already 19-and-three-quarters at the draft, and played in Michigan, meaning that his competition was not very strong. After a miserable start to his 2025 season, he finished well thanks to some approach changes. That has carried over into this year, and he is off to a solid start with Double-A Reading, hitting .286/.341/.462 with a 16.9 percent strikeout rate. I saw Reading play against Somerset last Wednesday night in a light rain that wouldn’t let up for most of the game.
Nori does have some real feel to hit, in the sense of getting the bat to the ball — the swing is pretty simple and short, with enough bat speed for him to swat line drives to the outfield, at least. He has fringy power, and I’m not sure how much more he can get to, as he’s already 21 and doesn’t have a lot of room left to fill out on his smaller frame.
Dante Nori, who suited up for Team Italy in the WBC, is showing good contact skills and above-average speed with Double-A Reading. (Alex Slitz / Getty Images)
He’s a 55/60 runner who gets good jumps in the outfield, backing up a misplay in left in this game where he was in position much sooner than the typical center fielder would be (if he backed it up at all), so I can see an upside where he bats low in the order and adds value on defense and with contact skills. He is not patient, however, with a chase rate of 29 percent on the year, because he can get the bat to the ball so easily. He has to show he can focus on swinging at pitches he can hit well and taking more pitches to avoid becoming another Johan Rojas.
Shortstop Bryan Rincon has always had elite defense to keep him going as a prospect, but he spent the last two years in the Phillies’ system in High A, playing around some injuries, and didn’t hit at all, with a .186 average and .308 slugging percentage in those stints, along with a 3 for 44 showing in the Arizona Fall League last year.
He’s hitting well this year for Reading, boosted somewhat by the Fightins’ hitter-friendly home park, but also looking stronger and healthy maybe for the first time in three years. I only saw him hit left-handed, which is his better side, and he has much better bat speed this year, so I buy some of the power increase — maybe not all, since the ball really flies there, and he’s slugging 183 points higher at home, but I’ll buy that there’s enough power to allow him to hit for a higher average on balls in play. He didn’t see a pitch over 93 in this game, so it wasn’t a great test of the bat speed.
Rincon can still really defend and would be the Phillies’ best defensive shortstop right now in the majors (not that I’m advocating that they call him up). For all the years he’s been listed in their prospect rankings, he’s still only 22, and if the improvements at the plate are real enough to make him a .260-ish hitter with 12-15 homers — he’s always drawn walks, even when not hitting — that’s a regular at short.
Phillies prospect Aroon Escobar didn’t have a great game, with a bloop single, an infield single, a lot of inside-out swings and a TOOTBLAN* where he was on first for an infield fly and somehow just took off for second after the ball dropped. (*Thrown Out On the Bases Like a Nincompoop, a phrase with a delightful etymology in online baseball discourse.) He’s hitting .277/.362/.420, better at Reading than on the road even though he’s not a power hitter, with just a 15.3 percent strikeout rate. He’s a year younger than Rincon and three months younger than Nori. This is just kind of what he is — he’s going to put the ball in play a ton, without much power, maybe not looking very pretty doing it.
While I was in Arkansas to see the Razorbacks host Mississippi, I ducked into the Northwest Arkansas Naturals’ lovely stadium for about seven innings of their game last Saturday night against the Springfield Cardinals so I could see lefty Liam Doyle pitch. The Cardinals prospect showed top-shelf stuff once again, and is now working on multiple new breaking-ball shapes, but his command isn’t great, and I could see why he was off to a bad start on paper even with this kind of arsenal.
Doyle was the No. 5 pick in the draft last year in large part because his fastball was one of the best in the class, up to 100 with crazy ride that made it almost unhittable when he’d throw it at the top of the zone. He was 93-98 in this outing and did get two of his strikeouts on the pitch, but he was missing that top rail enough that hitters weren’t chasing it like they did in college. He still has the tumbling splitter up to 90 mph, and the Cardinals have worked with him to expand his breaking ball arsenal — he had a slider in college that scouts didn’t love, so he’s added a very promising cutter that’s up to 89 and a slower sweeper that has some curveball shape to it. I don’t think he’ll keep all of those weapons, but having something beyond just the slider should help him against batters on both sides.
The delivery is still funky and there’s some effort there, which also isn’t always a great indicator for command. That said, he threw plenty of strikes in college, and I’m inclined to think at least some of the command issues now are a function of making changes in real time to his repertoire. I’m still optimistic about him as a long-term rotation guy, but he’s a work in progress.
Orioles right field prospect Ike Irish, their first pick in the 2026 draft, looks fantastic right now, which is easy when you’re hitting .326/.434/.573. In the game I saw, he went 1 for 5 with a walk, but even the outs were loud, with three hard-hit flyouts to center, while his one hit was dropped by the center fielder at the wall for a ‘single.’ He’s fine in right field, not good yet (he was a catcher for much of his time at Auburn), with a plus arm, but the bat is going to carry him. I’d like to see him in Double A soon to challenge him.
Shortstop Wehiwa Aloy, the Orioles’ second pick in 2026 and a selection I loved at the time given where I’d ranked him, entered the game in the eighth inning and had two at bats, striking out once looking and once swinging. He looked bad both times, as if he couldn’t catch up to 92 mph, which is surprising because I didn’t see any issues with bat speed when he was in college — his swing decisions were a much bigger issue. It’s a two-plate appeareance sample, and two days prior to that he had four hits, including a homer plus a walk in five plate appearances.
Right-hander Yeiber Cartaya started the game for Frederick (now the Orioles’ High-A affiliate, relocated from Aberdeen this year) and was a pleasant surprise. He has three pitches and the hilarious 0.68 ERA isn’t just a fluke. He was mostly 93-95 and seemed to miss some bats with the fastball, while he showed an above-average changeup with good tailing action that he really should use more often, as he prefers to go to his mid-80s sweepy slider even to left-handed batters. He has a lower three-quarters arm slot that looks like it has some of that deception from the lower release height that teams are chasing now, and he lands slightly on the third base side, cutting himself off a little while adding some deception against right-handed batters.