Kansas City Royals prospect MJ Melendez is back on the rise with 30-homer season
The key factor in Kansas City Royals prospect MJ Melendez producing one of the most statistically eye-popping offensive seasons of any player in Minor League Baseball?
It seems to be the year he worked on his craft in the absence of statistics.
That was 2020, when Melendez was coming off a dreadful offensive year in High-A ball but the minor-league season was canceled because of the pandemic.
But the 6-foot-1, 190-pound, athletic 22-year-old left-handed hitting catcher was promoted from Double-A Northwest Arkansas to Triple-A Omaha last week during an outstanding bounce back season.
He entered this week with 30 home runs, the second-highest total of any player in the minors this season. He homered in his second Triple-A at-bat.
“I wouldn’t say (I’m) a power hitter, I know there’s some assumptions about power hitters and whatnot — that they’re going to have to swing and miss a lot and strikeout a lot,” Melendez said prior to his Triple-A debut last week. “That’s not a part of my game. That’s something I’ve really worked to adjust. I would say more of a gap-to-gap hitter — try to sting the ball hard, and if it happens to go over the fence, that’s a positive.”
All of this year’s success comes after a dreadful offensive performance for Melendez at High-A in 2019, which included a .163 batting average, a .260 on-base percentage and a .311 slugging percentage.
“We knew that there was going to have to be some changes made, and I feel like at the alternate site I was able to do that and kind of experiment while facing live pitching but not having to have the pressure of putting up stats,” Melendez said of working out without games in 2020. “We were just able to try out different things, find what worked and figure out some things that didn’t work. It was just a really good time to be able to learn and grow.”
No longer burdened by having statistics such as batting average and OPS staring back at him from scoreboards and box scores as daily litmus tests and reminders of his failings and missteps, Melendez found a level of comfort at the plate last year and immersed himself in “the process.”
His pandemic baseball season included big-league spring training camp, spring training 2.0 and a summer at the Royals’ alternate site as well as their minor-league fall camp. He emerged from that a changed hitter.
At the time of his promotion last week, Melendez led all Double-A players in RBIs (65), OPS (.999), extra-base hits (46) and total bases (187), as well as homers (28) and slugging percentage (.628). He batted .285 with a .372 on-base percentage through 79 games this season.
“I think what the alternate site allowed him to do, and some others, is that there’s no results attached to what happened in the at-bat. It was either, I did what I wanted to do and I didn’t get a hit or I got a hit, but it wasn’t 0-for-1 or 1-for-1,” Royals assistant general manager JJ Picollo said.
“They could just continue to work on things without any real consequence. For a couple of guys, at that moment in time in their career it was really good. They just gained confidence in what they were doing and trying to accomplish and kept doing it and kept doing it.”
Melendez had previously shown tantalizing potential in the minors. The second-round pick out of high school in the 2017 MLB Draft, he produced a 19-homer season in Low-A Lexington and threw out a league-best 42 percent of base stealers from behind the plate and helped his team to a South Atlantic League championship in 2018.
Following his struggles in 2019, the bloom certainly seemed to have come off the rose.
Patience and planning
The biggest adjustments Melendez made over the past year included opening his stance in order to see the ball better as well as a focus on game planning.
“Having a specific approach against each pitcher and just really looking for good pitches to hit and laying off of some borderline pitches,” Melendez said of the changes he made at the alternate site. “I was the type of hitter that I always wanted to swing, swing, swing.
“It just took a little bit more of being patient. If I have to take strike one or strike two because that’s not what I’m looking for, that’s fine. I’ll tip my hat to the pitcher, and then I’ll be a tough out with two strikes.”
Repeated match-ups against the same group of pitchers at the alternate site, most he’d caught multiple times, helped foster the game planning aspect for Melendez.
For example, he knew he had to be conscious of the changeup in any at-bat against pitcher Jackson Kowar. He’d go to the plate determined to see the ball in certain locations otherwise he’d be vulnerable to the late fade of Kowar’s elite changeup.
He also knew to be on the lookout for the pitch “hanging” in other locations, recognizing that as a pitch he could do damage with.
“Little things like that have helped me develop into a better pitch taker and really just finding the pitches that I’m looking for,” Melendez said.
The Royals moved top prospects Bobby Witt Jr. and Nick Pratto from Double-A to Triple-A in the middle of July. They’ve had similarly productive seasons at the plate, all having benefited from the Royals’ revamped hitting department structure.
Melendez stayed in Double-A primarily because he plays catcher, and the club had multiple catchers under the age of 24 at Triple-A who already warranted regular playing time.
Sebastian Rivero, who was added to the 40-man roster earlier this year, made his major-league debut earlier this year. The 22-year-old has drawn glowing reviews for his defensive ability.
Meibrys Viloria, 24, appeared in major-league games for the Royals in 2018 and 2019. He split catching duties in the majors in the final two months of the 2019 season after the club traded away catcher Martin Maldonado. Royals All-Star catcher Salvador Perez missed the entire 2019 season due to elbow surgery.
Viloria went back to Double-A to catch regularly when Melendez moved up to Triple-A. The plan in Omaha is for Melendez to catch 3-4 days per week and also get at-bats as the designated hitter when he’s not catching. Rivero will catch 2-3 days per week.
“Offensively, he was arguably even performing better than the other two guys,” Picollo said. “But given that he’s a catcher, the demands of the position, things he needs to do to be prepared for the major leagues, we thought it was more important at the time that he was catching four or five days a week, which he did for the couple weeks that he was still at Double-A when they went up.
“But then he sort of took the offense to even another gear after they left. It just became real apparent, we can’t hold him back any further because we can get the defensive work done.”
