Yankees 2025 Season Preview: Roderick Arias
03/21/2025 10:00 AM
The Yankees' other shortstop prospect has much to prove after an up-and-down 2024.
In baseball, a prospect's stock is wont to rise and fall like the daily tide. Based off less information than we have about big-leaguers, it can be difficult to project what someone in their late teens or early 20s will be able to accomplish once they reach their peak.
The 20-year-old Roderick Arias has already experienced a bit of this roller-coaster ride. MLB Pipeline's top-ranked international prospect coming out of the Dominican Republic in 2022, the Yankees signed the middle infielder for $4 million. Then just 17, Arias' first couple of years in rookie ball were slowed by wrist and hand injuries. Still, he turned heads in limited action in 2023, posting a .928 OPS with six homers and 17 steals in 27 games.
2024 Stats (Single-A Tampa): 124 games, 552 plate appearances, .233/.335/.393, 13 HR, 74 RBI, 37 SB, 31.0 K%, 12.3 BB%, 111 wRC+
That was enough to catapult the middle infielder in prospect rankings, all the way up to 68th across the league according to Baseball America. He struggled out of the gates the next year, though, hitting below league average while struggling mightily in the field. While a torrid end of the campaign raised his wRC+ to a respectable 111, as our own Smith Brickner detailed last year, whether that mid-season improvement is sustainable is subject to debate. Arias significantly increased his contact rate and dropped his chase rate, encouraging signs that may have been due to an adjustment in his batting stance. On the flip side, the youngster continued to get eaten alive by off-speed pitches, a frequent ceiling-limiting shortcoming for developing players. He was also dogged all season by his inability to hit left-handed pitching. The switch-hitter's OPS from the left side of the plate was more than 200 points higher than from the right, and he failed to take a southpaw deep once all year.
On defense, while his arm is well-regarded and likely sufficient to stick at short, Arias' 29 errors last year have led some to project him more realistically at second, where he played 32 games in 2024. That move would strip him of some of his value. Additionally, while he led his league last year with 37 steals, he was caught 13 times, an unsustainable ratio.
Arias had a brief cameo in big-league camp this spring, notching three hits in eight at-bats before getting reassigned to minor-league camp in early March. It's unclear if the Yankees saw enough at the end of last year to promote him to High-A Hudson Valley or if they will start him out back at Low-A Tampa. Complicating factors is the ascent of George Lombard Jr., the younger prospect who outplayed Arias by enough of a margin to leapfrog him to High-A and replace him on most top-100 prospect lists.
With MLB Pipeline projecting both middle infielders to reach the bigs in 2027, Arias still has time to reassert himself as a viable option, whether at short or elsewhere. His strong finish to the 2024 season has kept him from falling off the map altogether (MLB Pipeline still has him as the Yankees' seventh-best prospect, a significant drop-off from fourth last year but not an insurmountable one). The 20-year-old should receive multiple chances to show his impatience at the plate and lack of discipline in the field were a product of growing pains at the professional level and that the tools that made him among the most highly-regarded teen prospects in the world will still see him through.
