Five lesser known Tigers prospects who are performing well in 2024

Baseball’s calendar is rarely busier than it is in July, with interest in the world of prospects often at a midseason high due to buzz around the MLB Draft and trade deadline. Tigers fans have been rightly frustrated with the direction of the major league team, but unfortunately, that has also led to a great deal of apathy about everything to do with the organization. With the eyes of fans turned again to the minor league ranks, it’s a worthy time to look into which minor leaguers are performing well enough to make waves the next time rankings are released.

The older top prospects will be covered elsewhere. In this article, I’ve put together a look at three pitchers and two hitters who are thriving down on the farm, but not yet well known top prospects. Two of them are relievers, who rarely get any prospect writer love unless they turn into really top shelf relief prospects. We’ve written about these guys before, so the names will probably sound familiar, but they deserve a little notice for what they’ve accomplished before taking a macro-level look at the farm system.

RHP Rayner Castillo, Lakeland Flying Tigers

The Tigers are giving Rayner Castillo, a 19-year-old starting pitcher who has been playing professionally since 2021, his first look at full season ball this year. He began his time in Lakeland with four outstanding starts that left him with an ERA under 2.00 by the middle of June. Things haven’t gone quite so well in three starts since then, but the skills he’s putting on display are enough to capture the attention of both Chris Brown of Tigers Minor League Report and our own managing editor, Brandon Day.

Castillo has the physicality to stand up to a starter’s slate of games. He’s listed at 6-foot-3 and 180 pounds, but with a powerful lower half and a thick torso, he’s clearly added significant bulk since that weight was taken. Correspondingly, his fastball velocity has climbed by several miles per hour as well. He was hovering around the 90 mph mark three years ago, but these days, he’s a mid-90s pitcher who gets into the high 90s at times.

At this point, Castillo has just one meaningful off speed pitch. It’s a curveball that he throws at 80 miles per hour and isn’t especially remarkable in terms of movement or spin rate. It’s plenty enough to keep Low-A hitters off the board, but if he’s going to be a starter long-term, it’s not enough. There’s a lot of work left to do for Castillo and a future in the bullpen may await him. He’ll need a better third pitch to avoid that, either a changeup or splitter, and probably a slider over the curveball because he’s largely a sinker guy rather than a fourseam heavy pitcher.

For now, there’s no harm in letting him start games while he remains effective. He can stand up to the innings load and the added reps may help him implement that extra dimension that will help him start games at the higher levels of the minors. He’ll probably find himself on in the back third of our next top prospects list.

SS Franyerber Montilla, FCL Tigers

Another player who will assuredly make his first appearance on our top prospects list next time around, Franyerber Montilla has been terrorizing Complex League pitchers all summer long. The teenage switch-hitter is slashing .278/.417/.444 and walking 18 percent of the time. His season stats were verging on the ridiculous after the first month of play, but a brutal 8-for-47 stretch since June 28 has thrown a splash of cold water on the situation. However, even in that difficult series of games, he hasn’t lost track of the strike zone and has taken 12 walks while striking out an equal number of times.

“Montilla right now is profiling as a very complete player,” said Tigers player development chief Ryan Garko to Baseball America. “He can defend at shortstop. He runs. He has a strong arm. The hit tool from both sides is advanced for his age, and he is showing power that we hope he will continue to unlock as he gets stronger.” Montilla also featured on Baseball America’s list of best Complex League performers and was selected as one of the biggest risers in the Tigers organization.

On defense, the odds are good that Montilla will be able to last up the middle long term. He’s a good size for the position at six feet even, and while his slender build will add muscle in the coming years, he doesn’t have the look of a future beefcake. His quickness and arm strength are both above average, and should stay that way. Currently he’s the organization’s second best shortstop prospect after Kevin McGonigle. Bryce Rainer may have something to say about that soon, but Montilla is only three months older and already impressing in pro ball against much tougher competition than Rainer has seen yet.

SS Gage Workman, Erie SeaWolves

The Tigers selected Workman in the fourth round of the 2020 MLB Draft, a selection that I was thrilled about at the time. The team’s draft class from that year has been defined by the rise of Colt Keith and the fall of Spencer Torkelson, with Workman fading out of fans’ collective memory just a year or two after the pick was made. It looked like his career was on the verge of collapse in 2023 as he struggled in Double-A and was even demoted to West Michigan for the final third of the minor league season.

Evidently, that experience served as the wake up call he needed, and Workman has been a steady presence in the Erie lineup all year. The biggest change from earlier stages of his career is that he’s finally starting to exhibit a mature understanding of the strike zone. He starting taking walks at an average rate or better last season and has maintained that into this year, drawing free passes 13.2 percent of plate appearances in Erie this year. This year, he’s married that with a drastically reduced number of strikeout. Whacking a whole 10 percent off last year’s terrifying 38.8 percent whiff rate in Double-A has done wonders for his overall productivity.

I’m not going to go so far as to say that he’s having a breakout season; after all, a .248/.348/.412 and 117 wRC+ is nothing exceptional for a nearly 25-year-old in Double-A. That batting line is being propped up by a .337 batting average on play — high, but not unreasonable for a powerful, athletic player who hits plenty of line drives. Like Hao-Yu Lee, Workman’s sometime double play partner in Erie, he’s also sporting a career-high number of batted balls to the pull side in his career-best season. It’s a large enough body of evidence to resurrect my hope in his future.

What’s exciting about this development is the fact that Workman might be the best infield defender in the upper half of the Tigers’ minor league system. The Tigers have a few infielders in Double- and Triple-A who pack a bigger offensive punch, but the shortstop depth chart has looked awfully scrawny for years. Workman is best suited to third base, but he can capably play shortstop too. If Workman is able to sustain this level of play in the offensively friendly International League, he’ll supersede Ryan Kreidler as the Tigers’ default break-glass infielder. It’s a modest ceiling, but a role the Tigers haven’t filled capably in a long, long time.

RHP RJ Petit, Erie SeaWolves

Petit has been hanging around the fringes of Detroit prospectdom for the last year and a half. His small school background and enormous size make this relief arm a fun player to track on the margins. He captured the attention of FanGraphs’ Eric Logenhagen and was ranked on that website’s top Tigers prospects list for the first time this year, placing 28th and being assigned a 35+ FV. We also mentioned him in our list of players who just missed our preseason top prospects ranking.

The Tigers sent Petit to Erie last year, where he deployed his 98 mile per hour fastball against high level competition for the first time, and met with a measure of success, but did nothing to cement him as a top prospect. What really got him on the radar was his assignment with the Arizona Fall League’s Salt River Rafters. He returned to Double-A this year. He’s inducing both whiffs and ground balls at a much higher rate this time around, and his 4.42 ERA isn’t reflective of the solid peripheral stats that fuel a 3.02 FIP. The odds are strong that he’ll be in Toledo once minor league rosters are reassessed to accommodate incoming draft picks.

What makes his performance notable is that this is RJ Petit’s Rule 5 Draft evaluation year, meaning Detroit has to place him on the 40 man roster after the season or expose him to be poached by another team during this year’s Winter Meetings. Relief arms with unique traits and high strikeout rates — exactly Petit’s demographic — make up the majority of Rule 5 Draft selections. Brendan White was a surprise addition to the Tigers’ roster following the 2022 season for that very reason.

RHP Yosber Sanchez, West Michigan Whitecaps

The Rangers signed Sanchez as an international free agent in mid-2018, and he proved unable to stay healthy during his career in the Texas organization. He pitched just 30.2 innings across five seasons and was released shortly before he was scheduled to reach minor league free agency. He latched on with the Cardenales de Lara, a Venezuelan professional team, in December 2022 and pitched in two games with the team before being scooped up by the Tigers as a minor league free agent in May 2023.

No one noticed when Sanchez was brought aboard at the lowest levels of the Tigers’ minor leagues, but he pitched well enough to get on the radar as a legitimate relief prospect by the time the year ended. Too old for the level he was pitching at, his numbers don’t really matter. His command is poor and neither FanGraphs nor Tigers Minor League Report expects it to get much better, but he was able to show off a high-90s fastball and short, hard curveball that doesn’t show too early out of the hand. Most importantly, he stayed healthy in his return to affiliated ball.

Sanchez has pitched with Lakeland and West Michigan this year, and has been exactly as dominant as you’d hope a 23-year-old fireballer in the low minors would be. Batters have struggled to connect against him, and when they do, Sanchez is inducing ground balls at an above-average rate. He’s touching triple digits with his fastball and the fellas over at TMLR reported that, like most hard throwers in the system, he’s added a cutter. He’s thrown 17.2 innings in High-A this year, resulting in a 1.53 ERA, but allowing far too many walks in the process.

Sanchez has a maxed-out frame and is much closer to a finished project than you’d expect from a player who threw significant innings in Lakeland this year. If he can stay healthy, Sanchez will probably find himself in Erie before the season ends, where he will face more age-appropriate competition and we’ll get a sense of how effective his arsenal really can be. If he can refine things enough to throw more quality strikes, a career as a quality setup man is in play.