Looking back on when I undertook this exercise a year ago — identifying pitchers and hitters in the Rangers’ minor-league system who took big leaps forward in their just-completed seasons — there was an interesting outcome. One of the hitters, Evan Carter, made it to the majors in 2023. Another, Luisangel Acuña, ended up with another organization. And the third, Aaron Zavala, took an unmistakable step backward.
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And the same happened with the pitchers. Owen White made his big-league debut in 2023, Mason Englert moved on, and while Emiliano Teodo’s regression wasn’t as pronounced as Zavala’s, he had a similar injury-related delay to the start of his season and fell short of his 2022 results.
It’s probably not a terrible idea to get used to that sort of aftermath. The Rangers are in win mode, and this year’s half-dozen will surely come up in trade talks. There is also at least one player in each group likely to get to Arlington in 2024, and while forecasting a decline for any prospect is unfair, it’s a player development reality. Aside from Zavala and Teodo, it happened this year with many Rangers prospects: some setbacks due to injury, other times statistically, and in some cases both.
Just like last year, two groups are ineligible for this list: 1) players who reached the major leagues (such as Carter, Cody Bradford, Grant Anderson and J.P. Martinez), and 2) players who played primarily in the short-season leagues in Arizona and the Dominican Republic (such as Sebastian Walcott, Echedry Vargas, Marcos Torres, Yeremi Cabrera and Braylin Morel).
Pitchers
Jose Corniell, RHP, Low-A Down East/High-A Hickory
Season-opening ranking: No. 63; Midseason ranking: No. 17
It’s astonishing that Corniell is still just 20 years old, given that the Rangers traded for him three years ago when they sent reliever Rafael Montero to the Mariners. The move seemed designed more to shed a 30-year-old reliever entering his arbitration years from a bad roster than to add Corniell, a Dominican teenager who hadn’t even thrown a minor-league pitch.
Little about that changed until 2023. There was no minor-league season in 2020, and the lanky right-hander posted ERAs of 6.84 and 5.45 the next two years at the Rangers’ two lowest levels. Things fell into place this year, however. Corniell returned to Down East but forced his way out of the Carolina League in mid-June by striking out four times as many hitters as he walked while limiting the rest to a .175 batting average and .554 OPS. He was nearly as dominant in the South Atlantic League, with a similar strikeout-to-walk rate and a .208 opponents’ average (.637 OPS). All told, his 119 strikeouts were second most in the system. Named the organization’s Minor League Pitcher of the Year, Corniell will be eligible for the Rule 5 Draft this winter and presents Texas with an interesting decision. Taking up a 40-man roster spot and starting the options clock for a pitcher who has only 13 games of High-A experience is not ideal, but the Rangers might not be willing to gamble that no team would take a chance on hiding him in a major-league bullpen next season to satisfy Rule 5.
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Aidan Curry, RHP, Low-A Down East/High-A Hickory
Season-opening ranking: No. 68; Midseason ranking: No. 18
Corniell got Down East’s Opening Day start this year, and Curry started game two. He also forced his way to High A by season’s end with a huge breakout season. Curry had gone undrafted out of a New York high school in 2020 and took $20,000 to sign with the Rangers as part of a standout free-agent class that included fellow right-handers Josh Stephan and D.J. McCarty. That group, when added to the five-player haul the organization landed in that summer’s truncated draft — Carter, infielder Thomas Saggese and pitcher Tekoah Roby (who were sent together to St. Louis in the Jordan Montgomery trade), infielder Justin Foscue and pitcher Dylan MacLean — has a chance to make 2020 one of the Rangers’ best years on the amateur front in recent memory.
Curry has posted gaudy strikeout totals in each of his three pro seasons, but after allowing opponents to hit .343 in 2021 and .259 in 2022, that clip plummeted to .178 in 2023. He also walked only 3.2 batters for every nine innings with Down East, after rates of 8.0 per nine and 5.2 per nine his first two seasons. There’s projection with the 6-foot-5 hurler’s standard fastball-slider-change starter’s arsenal; he has the chance to add good weight to his frame and with it, a tick or two on top of what is already mid-90s velocity.
Antoine Kelly, LHP, Double-A Frisco/Triple-A Round Rock
Season-opening ranking: No. 37; Midseason ranking: No. 30
Based on age and proximity, if things follow last year’s pattern and one of these pitchers gets to the big leagues in 2024, it’s going to be Kelly. All things considered, it’s somewhat surprising that it didn’t happen in 2023.
Acquired along with utility player Mark Mathias in last summer’s Matt Bush trade with the Brewers, Kelly arrived as a starting pitcher prospect bearing down on a winter roster spot but he had a troubling finish with the Rangers’ Double-A affiliate. Kelly held batters to a sub-.200 batting average while fanning nearly 12 per nine innings just as he’d done in High A with the Brewers, but in Frisco he racked up more walks than innings pitched and the Rangers opted to leave him off the roster. He slid through the draft, but that’s unlikely to happen again this winter. Kelly refined the command of his upper-90s fastball and plus slider in a big way in 2023, reducing his walks per nine innings to 3.7 — which included a minuscule 1.7 in five season-ending appearances in Triple A. He finished the year allowing only three earned runs in his final 32 appearances, striking out 49 and walking six in 36 1/3 innings. Given the Rangers’ bullpen woes — and especially if the plan is to add Kelly to the 40-man roster this winter — their decision to add Jake Latz to the roster on Sept. 16 rather than Kelly was interesting. Instead, he finishes the year as the club’s Minor League Reliever of the Year.
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Other pitchers considered: Dane Acker, Josh Stephan, Brock Porter, Joseph Montalvo
Hitters
Abimelec Ortiz, 1B-OF, Low-A Down East/High-A Hickory
Season-opening ranking: No. 55; Midseason ranking: No. 14
While Corniell and Curry joined the Rangers without much fanfare, Ortiz arrived almost without notice. He went undrafted in 2021 like Curry had in 2020, but it took 20 rounds rather than five for every team to pass on Ortiz. Standing six feet tall and weighing 230 pounds as a junior college hitter at Florida SouthWestern State College, he didn’t offer the physical profile or projectability that teams tend to invest draft capital in. But Ortiz, the organization’s 2023 Minor League Player of the Year, has done nothing since but hit.
A graduate of the Carlos Beltrán Baseball Academy in Puerto Rico, Ortiz blasted 33 home runs and drove in 101 runs this year in just 109 games between the Rangers’ two Class-A levels. No Rangers prospect had driven in as many runs since Joey Gallo’s 2014 season. Ortiz had a .990 OPS this year and hit .294 — a remarkable improvement over .233 and .226 averages his first two seasons, perhaps boosted by offseason Lasik vision correction — and his home run and strikeout rates were even better after the promotion to Hickory. In fact, he led the South Atlantic League with 26 home runs even though he gave the rest of the circuit a seven-week head start, and it was good enough to earn Ortiz league MVP honors. He will finish his breakout season with a stint in the Arizona Fall League, listed as an outfielder, even though he spent 90 percent of his defensive time at first base this year.
Cam Cauley, SS-2B, Low-A Down East/High-A Hickory
Season-opening ranking: No. 31; Midseason ranking: No. 13
Cauley is the fourth of five on this list to have forced his way from the Low-A level to High A during the 2023 season, and it was a somewhat surprising improvement in his game that might have helped prompt the move. A small middle infielder whose profile is headed by elite speed and defensive range, the 20-year-old from outside of Houston added a power component to his game this year.
The Rangers steered Cauley, a two-sport high school standout, away from Texas Tech by paying him $1 million to sign out of the third round (slot value: $857,400) in 2021. He hit a punchless .255 in a 24-game rookie summer and followed it with a .209 season and .289 slugging percentage (including his first two pro home runs) at the Low-A level in 2022. Texas returned him to Down East to start the 2023 season, and in three months, he slugged .405 in 66 games, with 22 of his 59 hits going for extra bases, including seven homers. Promoted in mid-July, he upped his slugging percentage to .424 with Hickory, homering five times in 34 games. Cauley also stole 36 bases in 2023, getting caught only five times, improving his career numbers to 84 steals in 95 attempts over 201 games. He will join Ortiz as part of the Rangers’ Arizona Fall League delegation next month.
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Wyatt Langford, OF, NCAA/Rookie/High-A Hickory/Double-A Frisco/Triple-A Round Rock
Season-opening ranking: N/A; Midseason ranking: No. 1
I really didn’t plan to include Langford. I mean, the theme is players who took the biggest jumps in 2023 and the 21-year-old was attending college classes when the baseball season began. But considering what Langford has done since turning pro — even with all the expectations fairly hoisted on an early-first-round pick — it would be wrong to omit him.
Consider the OPS numbers Langford has put up in 2023:
- University of Florida (NCAA): 1.282
- Arizona Complex League (Rookie): 1.275
- Hickory (High A): 1.097
- Frisco (Double A): 1.280
- Round Rock (Triple A): 1.171
In his four pro stops, Langford has more walks (35) than strikeouts (31). He’s hitting .365, with half of his hits going for extra bases. Even those that ended at first base didn’t stay there long; he’s stolen 12 bases in 15 attempts. All of it lines up with his draft profile (elite power to all fields, advanced approach and strike-zone awareness, above-average speed), but the consistency in damage has been astonishing.
Just as astonishing was a confluence of luck that paired Langford and the Rangers. They should have had the seventh pick in the draft but ended up fourth due to the first-ever MLB draft lottery. Then, Langford, despite projections by The Athletic’s Keith Law and just about every other draft expert to be the first overall pick, fell to Texas at No. 4. Two months later, Bruce Bochy was being asked by reporters whether Langford was a legitimate option to help the Rangers down the stretch. Given Langford’s acclimation to pro ball, not to mention the immediate impact Carter made since joining the team earlier in the month, it was not an unfair question.
Langford and Carter are the team’s top two prospects and are judged by many to be among the top 10 in all of baseball. They should share residence in the Rangers outfield in 2024 — conceivably as soon as Opening Day.
Other hitters considered: Davis Wendzel, Daniel Mateo, Justin Foscue, Blaine Crim
(Top photo of Jose Corniell courtesy of Michelle Thompson / Hickory Crawdads)
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