Looking for the next Maikel Garcia and/or Geraldo Perdomo

“Okay, but what if you could steal first base?” is certainly a thought that occurs to almost every baseball fan. We’ve all seen players come up who look like absolute studs, except for one thing: they can’t hit. It’s just one skill, but it’s the most important skill for a position player.

I remember having a simply overwhelming version of this thought in the press box at Camden Yards during the 2024 ALDS. Michael Garcia’s tool hissed and crackled with potential. He has stolen 37 bases in 39 regular season attempts. His defense at third base was very good, good enough to play shortstop on a team that wasn’t built around the best shortstop in the world. Garcia played 157 regular season games for the Royals in 2024, and he was about as good a player as he could be with a single-digit home run total and a .281 OBP.

These two main numbers unfortunately limit one’s potential.

In October, Garcia hit enough grounders through the infield to post a .318 batting average in Kansas City’s six playoff games, teasing us with the hope of what could have happened if he had just learned how to hit.

In 2025 he learned to hit. Davy Andrews wrote about Garcia’s explosive campaign in August. Throughout the winter, Garcia had focused on getting back on the ball. Without changing his position much, he hit the ball harder and more in the air. The result was a career-high 16 home runs: 15 to the pull side of dead center, with one opposite-field error the only exception. Overall, he hit .286/.351/.449. Combined with some gains on the defensive side of the ball, Garcia went from a Punch-and-Judy fifth infielder who was overexposed as a starting third baseman to an All-Star, a five-win player and a downballot MVP vote-getter.

At the same time, Geraldo Perdomo was doing something similar. Also a glove-first infielder, Perdomo started out as an offensive liability. In 2025, he found a power stroke, turning him from an average shortstop to a top-five MVP finisher. By WAR, Shohei Ohtani was the only player in the National League who was more valuable last year.

Backup infielders who can’t grow on trees. Shortstops (or shortstop-like infielders) who can hit in the middle of the lineup are going for $300 million on the open market. The usefulness of converting the former into the latter should be obvious.

So who’s next?

Well, finding the next Garcia or Perdomo is a little more complicated than just making a list of young Latin American infielders with a wRC+ in the 70s. These two guys had something else in common, even when they were hitting King OrdónezBoth Perdomo and Garcia showed plus-or-better control of the strike zone and their bat-to-ball ability.

In 2024, when he had a wRC+ of 71, Garcia was in the 92nd percentile in both chase rate and whiff rate, according to Baseball Savant. Garcia turned into a star overnight, but for Perdomo the process was more gradual. The Diamondbacks’ shortstop spent two seasons (2023 and 2024) as about a league-average hitter, but with a specific mold in his production: pretty average, lots of walks, zero power.

That’s instructive in itself, but even in 2022, when he hit .195/.285/.262 in 500 plate appearances as a rookie, Perdomo ranked in the 89th percentile in chase percentage and 84th in whiff percentage.

In other words, both boys knew how to hit before they broke out. It only took a minute for the quality of contact to catch up with the approach.

When I wrote about Perdomo in May, I noted that he possessed this particular combination of contact ability and strike zone control. But a look at other hitters with those qualities showed that there’s more to hitting than just not chasing and not whiffing. The Perdomo profile describes Alex Bregmanbut it also describes Luis Urias.

Hitters like Perdomo and Garcia, even in their larval stages, don’t give up strikes. That’s great, but it allows the pitcher to issue an implicit challenge: If I throw a strike, what are you going to do about it?

One way to make a lot of contact is to sacrifice bat speed. This in itself is not a bad thing; Luis Arraez had no bat speed even when he hit .350. Steven Kwanlast days Mookie Bettseven boys like it Ichiro And Tony Gwynn could punish pitchers without swinging from their heels.

But for hitters who are just below that level of hand-eye coordination, the answer to pitchers’ challenge may be, “Not much.” If a batter has an ISO of .100 or lower (or .067, in the case of my muse, Chase mileswho keeps showing up when I study Perdomo), the pitcher is going to storm the zone and take his chances.

Getting to a 30-homer capacity from that point is tough. But remember: that’s not where Garcia and Perdomo started; There’s a reason Garcia made me wish you could steal first base.

These are guys who already add a lot of value to the defense, who can steal a few dozen bases a year. They already walk a lot and don’t move much. This goes back to the topic I kept writing about Pete Crow Armstrong when he emerged – players who produce defensively and on the bases can be quite valuable without doing much on offense. And hitters who already control the zone and don’t smell much don’t need to hit the ball That It’s hard to be productive offensive players in general.

Garcia and Perdomo therefore started from a position with a huge advantage. (And if you want to go back to a time before bat tracking, Jose Ramirez actually had these skills and career path too.)

Neither Garcia nor Perdomo scored that much power in 2025. Perdomo had an ISO of .173 and an average bat speed in the seventh percentile. Garcia looked Gary Sheffield for comparison, with a bat speed all the way up in the 46th percentile.

Here’s another Davy Andrews joint from September, detailing how Perdomo didn’t generate elite bat speed overall, and he still took a lot of half-speed swings. But he had traded mediocre swings for grip-it-and-rip-it cuts, and that provided the power surge. (Side note: When I get fixated on a player, it’s nice when Davy writes about him too. It’s reaffirming to know that the player in question is actually interesting, and I’m not a total weirdo.)

This shows what seems to me to be a fairly easy way to identify who could be the next Garcia or Perdomo. I don’t know how much overlap there is with guys who do that shall be the next Garcia or Perdomo; every hitter is a snowflake who has to do different things to unlock that extra bit of power. I just look at who has the raw material.

According to Baseball Savant, 275 Major League hitters took 500 or more competitive swings last season. Six of them met the following criteria: average bat speed of less than 75 miles per hour, hard swing rate of 18% or less, whiff rate of less than 20%, chase rate of less than 25%, zone contact rate of 87.5% or better, and hard hit rate of 30% or less:

One of those six batters was Kwan, who is already an established offensive weapon as well as a corner outfielder. One of the others is Santiago Espinal, who at 31 years old is slightly older than the profile of the player I am looking for.

That includes Bryson Stott, who just turned 28 and has been a Major League starter for four full seasons. But stylistically, he’s quite similar to Perdomo and Garcia: an excellent defensive second baseman and a great base stealer whose plate discipline and contact skills make him a very difficult out at times. When I watch him the rest of the time, I throw silverware at my TV and scream, “WHY ARE YOU NOT A BETTER HITTER?”

But Stott is similar to Garcia and Perdomo in another respect: He’s made a big change in his approach, dropping his hands and trying not to be so passive. You can read more about it Matt Gelb op The Athletics And Timothy Jackson op Baseball prospectus. Ultimately, Stott made much better contact after dropping his hands and producing more hard swings:

That leaves Durbin, Hicks and Edwards, three short ones (all 6 feet tall or less) with languid swings that generate lots of line drives but little hard contact.

In terms of where and how Durbin hits the ball, he makes one of the best contacts in all of baseball. According to bat tracking stats, he’s in the 95th percentile squared, with an airborne pull percentage of 20.4%. He’s not a huge fly ball guy, but he doesn’t just hit the ball into the ground either. Durbin, who was acquired from the Yankees in the Devin Williams trade last winter, was an average hitter in 2025. His combination of plate discipline, contact skills, and R2-D2 body shape had made him a hipster favorite (much like Meidroth), and he was a solid average hitter for the Brewers as a rookie. But that is a team that could certainly use some extra gas in its lineup.

That includes the Marlins, who employ both Edwards and Hicks. Both the Brewers and Marlins have had some major league development success stories of late – Isaac Collins, Jakob Marsee, Kyle Stowers – so maybe they know something that will help Durbin, Hicks and/or Edwards unlock that extra degree of power.

Because you can see the lack of bat speed in all three of these guys. Here’s an example, a line drive single from Edwards:

The swing is lethargic. He’s clearly not ripping the bat through the zone as hard as he can. That probably has to do with his excellence in hitting contact, but the inability to put an attack into the ball is holding him back.

Maybe it’s not possible. But with the underlying skills these players have, the difference between an average part-time player and a star is not as great as it seems.