Mets Prospect Stock Watch: Alex Ramirez, Jake Mangum red hot to start season

Taking a look at the Mets' farm system, who's stock is up and who's is down early on this season? Let's break it down...

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Stock Up: CF Alex Ramírez

Ramírez was a curious case coming into the season. The potential was clear — the Mets don’t send just any 18-year-old with no prior professional to full-season ball — but his performance at Low-A St. Lucie wasn’t good or bad, he was just kind of there.

But Ramírez did the under-the-hood things well. He hit the ball hard, ranking in the 87th percentile among full-time Florida State League hitters, and he played an excellent center field while showing off elite athleticism. So while the Mets sent the now-19-year-old back to repeat the level to begin 2022, Ramírez has been able to parlay his tools into dominance of the league.

Even with a recent slide, Ramírez is hitting .327/.365/.488 with 10 doubles, three home runs, and five stolen bases in 40 games. While his walks could definitely come up, his strikeout rate sits at a respectable 21 percent. If he continues performing among the best in Florida, a promotion to Brooklyn is certainly in the cards by mid-summer, where he’ll be one of the youngest players in the South Atlantic League.

Stock Up: CF Jake Mangum

Even when his profile looked skeptical shortly after he was drafted, as a classic college performer who didn’t quite have the bat for pro ball, Mangum still had something about him that made you believe he’d be a major leaguer one day. Less than three years later, he’s one step away from making that a reality.

Mangum’s speed and glove were never a question. Those tools have been major league quality since his college days. But his bat, as shown during his first pro season with Brooklyn in 2019, was lacking the path and angle commensurate with major league success. To his credit, Mangum worked over the canceled 2020 minor league season and, though he’s still not a power hitter by any means, added the thump that allows him to drive the ball into the gaps.

After a cold April — literally… he spoke recently about learning to play in cold weather for the first time in his life — Mangum hit .367 with a .916 OPS over 60 at-bats in May with Double-A Binghamton to earn a call-up to Syracuse.

A realistic outcome for Mangum at the major league level looks a lot like what Travis Jankowski provided the Mets before going down with a broken hand. Had that injury not coincided with Mangum’s first week in Triple-A and occurred a bit later, he would have been a logical replacement. The fact that he isn’t on the 40-man roster also complicates things to a certain extent.

Stock Up: RHP Mike Vasil

This blurb could really be dedicated to any of the arms from the Mets’ 2021 draft class that have enjoyed a strong start to their first full professional season, but Vasil has quickly jumped from the back of the organization’s Top 30 to arguably the Top 15 in a short sampling of innings.

It only took eight starts with St. Lucie for Vasil, the Mets’ eighth-round pick last summer, to earn a promotion to High-A Brooklyn, where he was scheduled to make his first appearance on Sunday. Before the promotion, Vasil had a 1.80 ERA with 37 strikeouts in 35 innings.

With a fastball topping out at 96 mph, a curveball inducing whiffs at a 42 percent rate, a firm cutter that reaches the low 90s, and a changeup that gets good fade, Vasil is already showing the makings of a complete arsenal. 

The Mets have already been successful at making adjustments to take him to a higher level than where he was at in college, so it stands to reason that he’s only going to keep getting better.

Stock Down: OF Khalil Lee

While some regression was to be expected from Lee’s 2021 statline — when his .274/.451/.500 slash was propped up by a .402 batting average on balls in play — his production has absolutely cratered through two months worth of game. As of Saturday, Lee was hitting .174/.296/.261 with Syracuse.

Those numbers have been posted across two separate stints in Triple-A, as Lee was shockingly demoted to Low-A St. Lucie earlier in May for an eight-game stretch. It was a move that appeared to be as much of a mental reset as a physical one, and perhaps the effects are just beginning to show. In five games since his return to Syracuse, Lee has as many extra-base hits (three) as he did in the 22 games before his demotion.

Still, it doesn’t seem like Lee is shaping up to be in the Mets’ major league plans any time soon. 

Nick Plummer, who offers a similar profile on paper, has already been summoned to the majors on multiple occasions when a spot opened up. Lee was acquired by the previous baseball operations regime, and while he isn’t close to being on the 40-man chopping block, he isn’t doing much to prove that his loss would sting.

Stock Down: LF Carlos Cortes

The Mets have always been high on Cortes. They drafted him twice, skipped him over Low-A in his first full professional season, and sent him to the prestigious Arizona Fall League. But once they decided against adding him to the 40-man roster last November to protect him from the Rule 5 Draft (which ended up never happening), it became unclear what the future held.

Cortes’ game revolves around his bat, so a .168/.231/.234 line in 34 games for Syracuse was a sign of something just not clicking at the plate. It was enough for the organization to send him down to Double-A, where he hit a career-high 14 home runs in 2021, to get back on track. He’s off to just a 3-for-19 start with Binghamton.

Entering 2022, it would have been reasonable to assume that Cortes had a shot at cracking the major league team at some point during the season as a bench bat. As long as he’s taking steps backwards in his development, that simply won’t end up happening.