Jean Joseph, Tor (A), First 50 BBEs of 2025

Mud­ding involves doing home­work on 0%ers. Jean Joseph caught my eye while doing up some pitch­ers. There were some hard-hit balls not land­ing for hits, and then I saw the fol­low­ing posts:

Joseph start­ed the sea­son in extend­ed spring train­ing. The bot­tom of A‑ball line­ups aren’t typ­i­cal­ly gold mines, but Jospeh was­n’t a noth­ing IFA in 2022, sign­ing for 450 K. Turn­ing on some games, I got sucked into watch­ing all his broad­cast BBEs. Here they are:

That was a .485 SLG on a .239 BABIP. The plus 13% swing­ing strike rate sug­gests a swing-and-miss wart. The 23.5 K% might be a tad mis­lead­ing, as he is aggres­sive ear­ly in counts. Joseph will prob­a­bly get tabbed as a guy repeat­ing a lev­el, but the actu­al­i­ty is he’s logged about 3/4 of an FSL sea­son’s worth of PAs due to injuries inter­rupt­ing things. Joseph is hit­ting the ball hard­er in this sam­ple than he did last year as a teenag­er. Joseph’s 2024 (ground­ball) Savant sam­ple had him with a 90th EV of 102.5, a 107 max, a FB EV of 87.5 with two fly­balls over 100 mph. In our small 50 BBEs here, his 90th is 104.62 (at or above MLB aver­age), a 109 max, 88.2 FB EV with two over 100. His 2025 90th sam­ple is 80% balls in the air, while his 2024 sam­ple was 59% balls in the air.

I take up an argu­ment with Fan­Graph­s’s bat­ted ball data here. I count a 14% IFFB, not 30some%. If you go by the launch angles/standard divi­sions of bat­ted balls, I count 40% GB, 18% LD, 28% FB, 14% PU, (42% FB+PU). Any­who, here’s what Joseph has done as a pro:

I’m not sold that the 0 stolen bases tell a good sto­ry this year. Game sit­u­a­tion-wise, I’m not sure I saw him on first base, with sec­ond open. If there was, it was only a few times. I’m going to lean stolen bases are com­ing. Noth­ing wild, but some.

I caught one throw from the out­field, and the arm was­n’t over­ly impres­sive, but it was­n’t a sit­u­a­tion I’m cer­tain was max effort, so maybe some YTD there.

Dynasty-wise, Joseph is just a 0% name right now, but one I’ll be keep­ing an eye on. A young cen­ter­field­er who hits the ball hard, might patrol a good out­field, might have some bags in him…there’s curios­i­ty here. And I find ultra-aggres­sive young bats inter­est­ing, at least ear­ly in their devel­op­ment, as long as it isn’t sab­o­tag­ing them. Joseph showed out a bit here, hit­ting all speeds and loca­tions hard. And hold­ing his own against some of the bet­ter pitch­ers in the FSL. Those are traits I val­ue and don’t see in every video mash-up. Joseph plays the game aggres­sive­ly all the way around and is, at the very least, a fun guy to watch.

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