I gotta give a lot of love to Cubs Den’s John Arguello, who is on the scene in Mesa, Arizona, and today was watching Chicago Cubs prospects work at the back fields.
There, he got a first look at new Cubs prospect Eddy Julio Martinez, whom the Cubs signed for $3 million out of Cuba:
Pic of Eddy Julio Martinez. 1st impression in BP- drives ball well to both gaps. More of a line drive swing path pic.twitter.com/RvOiWYF88j
— John Arguello (@CubsDen) March 1, 2016
Arguello also took some BP video of Martinez:
We’ve been wondering for a long time what Martinez was going to be, given the extremely wide range of reports about his ability last summer. We know that he’s a tremendous athlete, but with so little experience professionally, the big question is whether he can hit already, or whether there’s going to be a long developmental path there.
[adinserter block=”2″]One BP session or video isn’t going to answer those questions – and, indeed, it’s going to take a ton of games for us to have any real sense at all – but my early take is that he’s got a line drive swing that doesn’t look too bad, but also doesn’t really look all that conducive to generating power. That’s not necessarily a problem in isolation – gap power is good, and Martinez has a lot of speed, too – but you’d like to see him develop some power in the coming years. And he might. Maybe he already has a bunch, and I’m just wrong.
Like I said, we won’t really know for a while. But at least we get to watch him a bit in the interim. We know that some feel he has tremendous upside.