Texas Rangers’ Lewis Brinson continues to improve in 2015
Among their best prospects at the beginning of the season, the Texas Rangers had three toolsy, athletic outfielders with strikingly similar builds. Two of them, Nomar Mazara and Nick Williams, started the season in Double-A Frisco. On July 31, Williams was a key piece of a trade package that brought the golden goose of the trade market, former Philadelphia Phillies ace Cole Hamels, to Texas. The Rangers reportedly valued Mazara more than Williams, which is why Williams is now part of a potentially loaded Phillies future and Mazara is still a future Ranger.
On the same day the Hamels trade became official, the third outfielder, Lewis Brinson, quietly made his debut in Frisco after being promoted from the class High-A High Desert Mavericks of the California League. He earned the promotion after not-so-quietly abusing CL pitching, finishing his time there with a 14-game hit streak where he hit .463 with a .508 on base percentage and slugged .981 with four home runs. In his 64 games in High Desert, he hit .337/.416/.628 with 13 homers.
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For those you who like a heaping helping of sabermetrics with your baseball stats, that’s a 179 wRC+. (He hasn’t slowed down since his promotion, but more on that later.)
While he may not have received as much interest from the Phillies as Mazara or Williams, he is still a very promising prospect and the Rangers ultimately may have held on to the two best position players in their system. A quick comparison of some other recent Rangers outfield prospects shows he can swing the bat with any of them, but his approach may need some work:
(Brinson’s stats are entering play Saturday; all other players’ stats are minor league stats through the season in which they debuted at Double-A, as Brinson is doing in 2015)
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Rua and Choice aren’t very optimistic comparisons, but Brinson still has a lot of time to develop into a more polished player than either of them. It can also be argued Choice was promoted before he was truly ready, considering he was called up to play for a Rangers team that was ravaged by injuries in 2014.
The numbers above don’t show how much Brinson has improved the past two seasons and his raw tools. He was one of the Rangers’ first-round draft picks in 2012—the others were supplemental picks Joey Gallo and Collin Wiles—and he started his pro career with an encouraging .283/.345/.523/7 HR line in Rookie-ball. Although he hit an impressive 21 home runs in Class-A Hickory in 2013, his line slumped to .237/.322/.427 as he struck out in a putrid 38 percent of his plate appearances; the next season he cut that rate down to 24.9; this season, it’s all the way down to 21.1. As his strikeout rate improved, his other numbers followed suit. Now he’s hitting .332/.399/.609 on the season with 17 home runs, the most recent of which came yesterday in a win over the Springfield Cardinals. His career BABIP entering play Saturday was .374.
It’s worth noting that some of his improvement can be attributed to playing in the offensive hotbed of the California League most of the season. However, that shouldn’t undercut the improvements he made in 2014 in the less accommodating South Atlantic League or his sweltering start in Double-A, where he’s hitting .317/.341/.549 with four homers in 21 games.
It’ll take several years before either Brinson or Mazara emerges as the better outfielder. Brinson is rapidly developing a well-rounded game, but Mazara is younger, equally well-rounded and having a superlative season in his own right. It may be an unnecessary argument, as both of them could be playing in the outfield behind Hamels sometime in 2017 or sooner.