Projecting Spencer Jones

By Andy Singer

February 11th, 2026

Photo Credit: Somerset Patriots

Spencer Jones has long been a divisive prospect.  Some of this has to do with largely hyperbolic media reports following a draft that immediately try to create lofty points of comparison between star big league players and a prospect years away from a potential Major League career.  As many Yankee fans will recall, many media outlets dubbed Spencer Jones, “The Left-Handed Aaron Judge.”  While Spencer Jones was blessed with height and broad shoulders, comparing Jones to Judge before he ever played a single professional inning wasn’t fair to anyone involved.

The reality of prospect projections and growth is far more nuanced, as most good fans understand.  While it’s fun to imagine the left-handed Aaron Judge sharing the same lineup with actual Aaron Judge, outcomes like that are far from reality most of the time.  However, in all public prospect discussions, the media creation cobbled from short scouting summaries tend to hang around.  For few prospects has this phenomenon been truer than for Spencer Jones.

It’s not fair to Spencer Jones (maybe even more so to Aaron Judge, but that’s another story), because this idea that Jones has some likelihood of attaining Judge-like performance is just not rooted in any sort of fact or evidence-based analysis.  Aaron Judge is without question the best hitter baseball has seen since peak Barry Bonds.  There is no prospect who can ever be projected with any degree of certainty of attaining that level of performance.

With that disclaimer out of the way, I think it’s time we really evaluated what Spencer Jones’ future might look like.  It feels like Jones has been around forever, but many opinions are tainted both positively and negatively by overwrought perceptions created by the early media firestorm around Jones’ similarity to the Yankees’ current star outfielder. I, and other far more accomplished scouting voices, have long noted the loud tools Jones possesses, but also the very significant flaws that will likely hinder Jones’ pursuit of a valuable MLB career.

Because of Jones’ unique profile and media exposure, I didn’t craft a traditional scouting report for consumption.  I have often expressed my concerns about Spencer Jones through other posts on this site over the years, and most of you know that while I think Jones can have an All-Star peak, I think that his current tool-set makes him very unlikely to get there.  However, I also recognize that my relatively muted opinion might also be tainted by Jones’ overwhelming media exposure such that I haven’t evaluated him fairly.  I feel fairly confident in the evaluation my eyes and brain have generated, but I wanted to take a deeper dive into the numbers to help anchor my thoughts.

The media’s quest to make player comparisons for prospects is a fools’ errand, mostly due to media personalities rather limited ability to understand scouting reports and their limited bank of knowledge of professional ballplayers, both successful and otherwise.  However, for those of us with a proper ability to evaluate prospects and statistics and who have a fairly extensive memory bank for specific players and their prospect tool-shed, the exercise is very helpful.  In fact, when a player’s tools are this loud and their flaws so clear, I think it helps average fans comprehend a player’s future value by giving them a fair model.  With that in mind, I have listed statistics for two players below who are stunningly similar.  If you were a big league talent evaluator, which of the following players would you rather have?

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I know what you’re thinking: Player A and B must be the same guy, right?!?  I assure you, it’s two different players.  Believe me, I know who the two players are, and even I was stunned by the striking similarities in their numbers.  Both guys hit the ball absurdly hard, commensurate with the absolute best of the best in the Major Leagues.  Both guys swing and miss to an alarming degree, an extent to which is almost never seen in a successful big league hitter.  Both guys get to absolutely elite power in-game, posting ISO marks that indicate that the high exit velocities and hard hit rates are not flukes.  Besides that, the differences between the two are relatively minor, though not insignificant.  Player B has a significantly higher batting average as compared to Player A despite the whiffs.  Player B’s average launch angle more closely averages that of a high line drive, and I would infer that there are fewer shallow popups in their profile than Player A.  However, Player A gives themselves a higher floor with an elite walk rate.  Player B’s walk rate is solid, but not elite, and one could imagine that swinging and missing with such frequency might eventually nip him.  Again, these two players are remarkably similar, but some differences are apparent.

So, I’ll ask again: which guy would you rather have?

Player A is Joey Gallo from 2017-2019.  Player B is Spencer Jones last season at AAA.  In evaluating Spencer Jones, I suddenly couldn’t stop thinking about the discussions regarding Joey Gallo as he climbed the minor league ladder.  Gallo stormed through the minors with true 80-grade power and whiff rates that no one had ever seen succeed at the big league level.  Gallo’s key to success would be making enough contact to allow the generational power to show up in games.  Gallo eventually got to a better than 30 hit tool, and made the Majors.

Joey Gallo is likely a very scary name to hear for Yankee fans, but the reality is that Gallo was a very good Major League player at his peak.  It took Gallo a bit of time to settle into a regular Major League role, and his propensity to whiff only got worse, but peak Joey Gallo was an All-Star level offensive player.  He wasn’t someone you wanted to build your entire offense around, but he was enormously valuable offensively in the aggregate.  Whiffing as frequently as he did was ultimately his undoing, and meant that his peak was noticeably short.

I think Joey Gallo represents the absolute minimum amount of contact a player with top-of-the-scale power can make and have a reasonably successful peak in the Majors.  Joey Gallo made contact just beneath 70% on pitches in the strike zone during his peak (also indicating that he whiffed on 30+% of pitches he swung at in the strike zone).  He paired that minimal contact ability with a highly selective approach at the plate where he swung less than most big league players, but he also chased well below the big league level.  Gallo worked counts, didn’t expand the zone, and hunted pitches he could handle.  Gallo was also reportedly incredibly coachable.

When you look at the realities of Gallo’s big league profile, I think Jones’ 95^th percentile outcome looks an awful lot like Joey Gallo purely based on the numbers.  We must remember one very key difference between Gallo’s and Jones’ numbers above: Gallo compiled those numbers over 3 seasons in the Majors; Jones compiled those in a few months in a very diminished AAA environment.  I don’t say this to denigrate Jones, rather to highlight how far Jones still has to come.

There are a few more clues to Jones’ progression that I think we need to keep in mind.  Obviously, Jones needs to continue to refine his gameplan at the plate, mirroring Gallo’s selectivity.  No matter how Jones develops, it is very clear that he will never have even an average hit tool.  Jones clearly has an ability to put the ball in the air with pop, which will be essential to Jones creating value, but he isn’t just a launch angle darling, as evidenced by the separation in Jones’ and Gallo’s launch angle readings.

Importantly, Jones also has elements of his game working for him that Gallo did not.  Jones is a legitimately plus runner underway despite his size, giving him the ability to either stick in CF or play a very rangy corner outfield spot.  Like Gallo, Jones has a plus arm.  Gallo did not have Jones’ athleticism, and it took the Rangers years to finally find a defensive position where Gallo could thrive.  Jones will not have that issue early in his career, so Jones will have defensive value.  He also is a very good baserunner fundamentally, and as a bonus, appears to be a good bet to steal 12-15 bases each year or more.  That gives Jones a floor for value that Gallo didn’t have.

Spencer Jones has huge tools, and his ability to defend and run the bases all give him a good chance to reach and play in the Majors for some time.  Whether Jones has any value as a regular hinges on his ability to hit.  I mentioned before that Gallo posted in-zone contact rates just below 70% at his best, a mark that I think is the bare minimum for a big league hitter only if there is legitimate plus-plus power.  According to Fangraphs, Spencer Jones made contact with 72% of pitches swung at inside the strike zone at AAA.  This represented a huge jump for Jones over previous seasons according to those with inside access to non-public minor league data.  I think this shows that Jones is still developing, which is a real positive, though he still has much further to go on that front.  I will be very interested to see how he performs to begin this season, particularly as he gets further away from the back injury that plagued him for the last month-plus of his 2025 season.

I expect Jones to struggle upon his first taste of Major League Baseball.  That said, many players struggle in their first taste of big league action, and many recover to play long careers.  Joey Gallo is one such player.

Despite all of his flaws, Joey Gallo had a very valuable offensive peak.  It is frequently unfair to compare prospects to players who established themselves in the big leagues, but in this case, I think Joey Gallo’s peak is highly instructive as to what the best possible outcome would be for Spencer Jones’ peak.  Like Gallo, Jones will always play with fire running such high whiff rates.  However, if Jones beats my expectations for his ability to make contact in the strike zone, Gallo-like performance with CF defense and good baserunning is an incredibly useful, All-Star caliber player.  Again, I think that is the absolute best-case scenario for Spencer Jones, but one that is much more exciting than it sounds on its face.  No, that’s not “The Left-Handed Aaron Judge,” but the potential exists for Spencer Jones to be an All-Star caliber player.  Jones has a long way to go to maximize that potential, but even 70% of that outcome makes for a very interesting player.

The variance for Jones remains wide; if he doesn’t improve his ability to make contact inside the strike zone beyond what he’s showing right now, he will have a very short big league career.  If he maximizes his tools, he’s a perennial All Star.  I’ve been betting on the former far more than the latter, but I must admit that the comparison to Gallo has caused me to rethink this split a bit.  The upside is fascinating, and maybe I’ve underrated Jones’ ability to get to at least some of it.  That might be a more likely 3^rd path.  The more I watch Jones, the more I believe that the 3^rd path, where Jones gets to some of his raw tools to have a few valuable years with power, defense, baserunning, and a nearly unplayable hit tool, is the most likely outcome.  That said, I think there’s a better chance that he gets to all of it than I realized before updating my evaluation.