Sometimes prospects arrive with great fanfare and after a long time of fanbases pleading with their team to call the player up. Other times, necessity forces a team’s hand to call up a heralded prospect. The matter of the Mets calling up Luisangel Acuna from Triple-A Syracuse to make his Major League debut over the weekend is certainly the latter.
With Jeff McNeil done for the season and Francisco Lindor set to miss several games with a back issue, David Stearns made the call to bring up Acuna, rated as the Mets’ No. 14 prospect by Baseball America in their August update, to the show. In his debut on Saturday, he played all nine innings at shortstop and went 2-for-4.
“It’s something we’ve been talking about for a while,” Stearns told reporters about the decision to bring Acuna up. “With Lindor’s tweak … we thought now was the right time.”
That is kind of a telling quote from Stearns. They have clearly had internal discussions about Acuna, but decided to leave him in Syracuse when the rosters expanded on Sept. 1 because he wasn’t ready in their eyes. What ultimately made it the right time to bring him up was the injury to Lindor, not necessarily anything in his performance.
Acuna’s season in the minors has seen prolonged slumps and hot streaks, as well as some defensive struggles as he continues to learn centerfield, a position where he has played 31 times this year but only four times in his career prior to this season. How much that positional instability has played a role in his turbulent season is unknown, but it probably hasn’t helped. Overall he hit for a .258/.299/.355 line in the International League and was 40-for-54 on stolen base attempts.
In addition to that, there are some other red flags in Acuna’s season, including a walk rate that has cratered to just 5.5%, down from over 10% in 2022 between High-A and Double-A, and a sharp increase in his groundball rate to 54.6%, up from just over 48% last year. Those extra grounders are coming at the expense of fly balls, and his infield fly rate has also spiked, which is a bad combination.
Some good news is that he is pulling the ball more, but that is really only useful in concert with hard contact and balls in the air, which he is not doing. That just means he is grounding out to the shortstop or third baseman more often. His first big league hit – a chopper up the middle on Saturday night – is a good illustration of the kinds of hits he will have to rely on with a groundball rate that high.
That is one of the reasons why the bloom has fallen off Acuna’s prospect rose to an extent. Before the season he was a consensus top five prospect in the organization, and he has fallen out of the top 10 on every major ranking. He is no longer considered a top 100 prospect in the sport.
That doesn’t mean that hope is lost or that he can’t go on to have a good career. His flaws are fixable – coaches are able to make tweaks to get a higher launch angle on batted balls just as they can coach swing decisions to help his walk rate rebound. And on a positive note, his strikeout rate has dipped in the past few seasons, so his struggles have not been compounded by a ton of swinging-and-missing. His speed and athleticism still make him a really exciting player.
Right now it is pretty clear that the 22-year-old needs more seasoning before he will be ready to contribute to the big league club on a consistent basis. As a short-term fill-in until Acuna is feeling better and able to play, he is fine, but without that it is hard to believe that he would be on the active roster right now, whether the Mets were locked in a playoff race or not.
And therein lies the problem with handing the reins over to Acuna now. The Mets are fighting for their playoff lives and they don’t have another healthy player on the 40-man roster who can capably play the middle infield after Jose Iglesias and Eddy Alvarez other than Acuna. Hopefully Lindor’s time missed will be minimal and Acuna can play well enough that the team isn’t hurt by having him in the lineup.
MLB’s slash line this year so far is .244/.312/.400 for a .712 OPS
The problem is that the production for Syracuse is noticeably better than that – to the tune of a .765 OPS
People who only look at AVG see Acuna as being ready. But if you zoom out from AVG and look at OPS – he’s nowhere near ready. Instead, Acuna had a .654 OPS at SYR, 111 points worse than team average.
And then you have to factor in that it’s tougher to hit in the majors than it is in AAA.
It makes it a lot easier if Acuna can develop into an MLB regular some point down the line. He’s young and no one should give up on him yet. It’s just that some people have completely unrealistic expectations of his chances to make an impact right now.
Currently, it’s probably a coin flip as to who’s better prepared to play in the majors between Acuna and Eddy Alvarez. The latter has no future with the Mets, so you might as well give first crack to Acuna. But if a guy has a .654 OPS in AAA, we probably should expect less than that in the majors.
Ready or not Acuna is here. And he certainly did a good job filling in at SS and making the routine plays that needed to be made. Did we hold our collective breaths as the ball was hit his way? Oh yeah because only Lindor is Lindor. Acuna is much stronger at this position than in the OF where they are trying to find a position for him at Syracuse. Offense does look limp and they need to get their big boy pants on and make up for Lindor being out. Need to sweep the Gnats.
Wow what a game by Acuna! Joe, I think your article spurred him on.