The Rockaway Wave
Originally published August 25, 2023
The New York Mets appear to have had a theme with their 2022 draft class when it came to high school position players. Of the five they selected, three of them signed: First-rounder Jett Williams, second-rounder Nick Morabito, and fourth-rounder Jacob Reimer.
All three of them have one thing in common: They can take their walks.
Morabito, 20, was recently promoted to Low-A St. Lucie, and is hitting .297/.396/.401 this season with an 11.9% walk rate. He was having more success at rookie ball, posting an OPS over .850 with 20 walks to 22 strikeouts, but has struggled in 15 games in St. Lucie. Still, his overall numbers are impressive for someone playing in his first full season in professional baseball.
Williams, 19, had a strong showing in Low-A to start the season and has been tearing up High-A since being promoted. On the season, he’s hitting .269/.434/.456, a .890 OPS, with a walk rate of about 20%. His OPS jumped to 1.112 in his first 20 games of High-A while maintaining a 20.2% walk rate.
Then there’s Reimer, also 19 and the youngest of the bunch, he’s the only Mets minor leaguer born after 2004 to play at High-A this season. Like Williams, he had a nice start to the season at Low-A and even earned his promotion on the same day, something Reimer said has made things easier as the two have gotten super close this year.
In 95 games in 2023, Reimer is hitting .265/.402/.377 with a 14.8% walk rate. Among minor league qualifiers to reach at least High-A, he’s one of just four teenagers to have an on-base percentage of at least .400, joining Jackson Holliday (No. 1 MLB prospect on MLB Pipeline), his teammate Williams (No. 83) and Termarr Johnson (No. 23).
“I’ve always had a good eye,” Reimer said. “I stick to an approach too at the plate, so I’m not really gonna chase too much compared to the average player’s chase rates.”
His approach stands out to his coaches, especially at his age. Cyclones hitting coach Richie Benes said Reimer takes pride in his pitch selection and called him a grinder.
“He does not get cheated,” Benes said. “He works hard every single second of every workout that he has, and I love it. He’s a good kid.”
Cyclones manager Chirs Newell said his approach is one of the reasons why he, along with Williams, is able to play in High-A at just 19 years old.
“I’m not gonna mention names, and I don’t get caught up in all that chase stuff and all that other stuff, but the one thing I know, there’s a guy that hasn’t yet gotten there yet because of the chase, and he’s a pretty damn good player,” Newell said. “So yeah, it matters, and it’s the reason why [Reimer and Williams] were able to gain the trust of the hierarchy to move them up. … If they weren’t ready they wouldn’t be here.”
Ralph Grajeda, Reimer’s coach at Yucaipa High School in Southern California, said his plate discipline was one of the things that stood out to scouts.
“There wasn’t a lot of swing and miss,” Grajeda said. “The times that he’d get punched out, I hate to say it, it was kind of out of the zone. We’d go look at video and stuff like that, and that’s just high school baseball, it is what it is. But his eye was really good, and that’s one of the things that was an analytic that a lot of major league clubs, when they go draft kids, they look at that.”
Grajeda said he could see right away that Reimer was going to be a really good hitter, standing out on an already good offensive team when he made varsity as a sophomore. By the time he was a senior, he reminded Grajeda power-wise of two of his former players who made the majors, Xavier Scruggs and Thomas Neal. Scruggs played for the Cardinals and Marlins and is now an analyst on ESPN and MLB Network, and Neal played a handful of games for the Guardians, Yankees and Cubs.
A moment that stands out to Grajeda is when Reimer was struggling during his senior year, trying to put the team on his back.
“We talked, I said hey, quit pressing, just let your talents run through you,” Grajeda said. “He got out of his head and hit three home runs in one game, and then after that he took off. … He was just trying so hard, and I just told him hey buddy, let other people do their jobs, and you do you, and if you’re walking, you’re walking, don’t expand the zone.”
Reimer hasn’t had as much success in High-A to start as he did in Low-A, hitting just .179 through his first 18 games, but the plate discipline has remained. He has 13 walks to 17 strikeouts, a good ratio, with an 18.3% walk rate in that small sample size.
He’s still had success at times though, most notably on August 17 when he collected four hits in a game, becoming the first teenager to do that for the Cyclones since Gavin Cecchini in 2013.
“I stuck with my approach, the same approach I’ve had all season,” Reimer said. “My process was the same, just good process on four of the five at-bats and got good results.”
Sam Dykstra, who is in charge of creating the Mets top-30 prospect list for MLB Pipeline, said the people in the Mets organization he talks to say Reimer “lives to hit.”
Now the No. 13 prospect in the Mets organization, he’s two spots below current Cyclone Alex Ramirez and one behind former Cyclone Christian Scott.
“It was fun to see them aggressively push him to High-A because of how well the bat’s played so far,” Dykstra said. “Even if he struggles a little bit, that’s good, he kind of needs that, just to learn okay, how do I adjust from here?”
Dykstra said he is definitely a bat-first prospect, and he might not necessarily ever be a defensive third baseman. While he’s mainly been playing third base, the Mets have also given him a few looks at first, starting 11 games there in Low-A and three so far in High-A. Reimer said he’s never played the position before so he’s just trying to be an athlete and do the best he can while he learns it.
He had a college commitment to the University of Washington but chose to forgo it when the Mets came calling. He said he was always going the pro ball route, that’s the dream — and he’s been enjoying his first full season.
“I’ve gotten super used to it,” Reimer said. “This is for me for sure. It’s not for everyone to play baseball every single day, but I love the game so much, so I’m loving it.”
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