With more than a month of Arizona and Florida Complex League play behind us, standout players will begin to see promotions to full-season levels. Over the last few seasons, how the top domestic complex league performers have fared in their full-season debuts can be best described as a mixed bag. Often lurking behind great in-game performances are concerning trends regarding swing and miss, chase and underlying power.
Listed below are 10 domestic complex league standouts in order of wRC+ as of June 11. We’ll look into contact rates, chase rates and exit velocity data for each player. While defensive and running abilities impact a players overall future value grade, metrics such as these still give a clearer picture as to the authenticity of each player’s performance.
Brian Sanchez, OF, Yankees (190 wRC+)
The Yankees acquired Sanchez in November 2023 as part of a trade for Jake Bauers. Across 20 games with the Yankees’ Florida Complex League team, Sanchez is hitting .369/.474/.646 and has the highest wRC+ of any player age 19 or younger in domestic complex league play. Under the hood, Sanchez looks like a three-true-outcomes type hitter. Though his contact grades below-average with a 22.7% zone-miss rate, Sanchez doesn’t chase very often with a (22.9%) and has a strong quality of contact.
Sanchez has an above-average xwOBAcon at .384, and his 90th percentile exit velocity (103.8 mph) is well above-average for a 19-year-old. Sanchez’s ability to elevate on hard-hit contact stands out, too, as over 30% of his hard-hit batted ball events fell in the optimal launch angle range of 10-30 degrees. That’s well above to 14% to 16% median range across the minors. In all, Sanchez looks like a bat-first prospect with legitimate power and on-base skills, but concerning contact abilities.
Franyerber Montilla, SS, Tigers (175 wRC+)
One of the early favorites of RoboScout, Montilla has been a standout for the Tigers’ FCL squad. In 22 games, Montilla is hitting .346/.481/.556 with just as many walks as strikeouts and underlying data very much backs his performance. Montilla shows strong plate skills with a 13.4% in-zone whiff rate and a low chase rate of 16.7%. On the face of it, those numbers showcase excellent bat-to-ball and pitch recognition skills. Like with Sanchez, Montilla’s 90th percentile EV (102.7 mph) is above-average for his age, and he shows the ability to consistently elevate the ball with a 58% fly+line drive rate….