The sleeper tag is one that can be applied to any player, depending on the context of how that player might be “sleeping”. I wrote earlier this month about what constitutes a sleeper for these Saturday articles. For me, it’s largely a prospect who falls outside of the top 30, though that isn’t universal.
Not everyone follows the minor league system. There are a large majority of Pittsburgh Pirates fans, and fans of every other Major League team, who can’t name a single prospect. They couldn’t even do it before Paul Skenes arrived in the majors. As such, a “sleeper” to these fans could be any prospect who turns into a Major Leaguer.
This is a prospect site, and if you’re reading this, you dive deeper in knowledge than the majority of fans. Especially if you’re one of the site’s Patreon supporters who gets to read this full article. Your version of a sleeper is likely to fall outside of the top 10, top 30, or further down, depending on how deep of a dive you take.
When does a player stop sleeping? That’s the question today.
Charles McAdoo is a great player to start to formulate an answer. I wrote about McAdoo as a sleeper last month, while he was crushing the ball in High-A. He ended up batting .336/.415/.561 with nine homers in 258 plate appearances. The Pirates promoted him to Double-A, and in his first six games, McAdoo is batting .292/.393/.708.
I’ll have updated prospect rankings next week, and McAdoo is likely to jump from his spot already inside my top 30. I had him in my “System Depth” tier, as a guy who could one day serve as MLB depth. McAdoo gets the sleeper tag on hopes that he can be more than a depth option, emerging to a future regular in the majors. He also gets the tag because he’s a 13th rounder out of college, so expectations were much lower than what we’ve seen from him so far.
Watching McAdoo hit in Double-A is encouraging. As a 13th rounder out of college, the results against upper level pitching provide more comfort in projecting his future. He’s still a sleeper in terms of projecting him as a future starter in the majors, but every hit at this level and beyond causes him to wake up a bit more to that future possibility.
Luis Peralta is another player I’ve written about in the last month. [ppp_patron_only level=”5″ silent=”no”]He was just promoted to Double-A, after an 0.60 ERA in 30 innings with Greensboro, along with a 50:15 K/BB ratio. The left-handed pitcher moved to relief full-time this season, after initially making the move in Single-A during the 2023 season.
It’s difficult to trust the results from lefty relievers in the lower levels. A lot of players in A-ball haven’t seen a lot of quality left-handers at that point in their careers. Double-A becomes the make-or-break against hitters that have seen more quality left-handers. Yet, you look at numbers like Peralta put up, and you can’t help but dream of them translating to the majors as a shutdown reliever.
Peralta threw 2.1 shutout innings in his first appearance in Double-A, allowing two hits, no walks, and striking out four. If he were to continue putting up elite numbers at the Double-A level, I think the dream of a future MLB reliever would start to transition to a more likely future reality.
McAdoo and Peralta are both on the older side. McAdoo is in his age-22 season, while Peralta is 23. They both receive less benefit of the doubt with their projections, due to the reduced time to develop their skills.
There’s more benefit of the doubt in the lower levels with younger players. The Pirates have three “sleepers” in the Florida Complex League who are all standing out this year.
Jhonny Severino was acquired as a lottery ticket trade return in the lower levels in last year’s Carlos Santana trade. He’s batting .280/.372/.576 with eight homers and eight stolen bases in 148 plate appearances.
Tony Blanco Jr. is a huge DH/1B prospect at 6′ 7″, 243 pounds, and is batting .325/.396/.550 with four homers in 91 plate appearances.
Yordany De Los Santos is a middle infielder in his second season in the FCL. He’s hitting .328/.392/.485 with three homers and 15 stolen bases, which is all an upgrade over his results last year.
All three players are in their age-19 seasons. They’re all likely to move up to Single-A Bradenton for a full season in 2025 at the age of 20. Right now, they all are sleepers to some degree. If you want to buy in on a young prospect early, you could elevate their current ranking to the point where they’re ranked around people who aren’t considered sleepers. I don’t think it’s fair to remove the sleeper tag for most young players, since there’s a ton of projection involved in forecasting any 19-year-old to the Major League level in any role.
If these three put up these types of results across a full-season in Single-A next year, they might start to shed that sleeper label. There’s still a large gap between Bradenton and the majors, regardless of whether you play your games at Pirate City or LECOM Park.
The individual positions of these players matter.
Severino and De Los Santos can play more difficult positions, and have more projectability for value on the defensive side of the game. They also both add value on the bases with their speed. Blanco, on the other hand, only gets value from his bat as a large first base prospect. Thus, Blanco would need to succeed at a higher level to show that his singular path to the majors is legit, rather than the middle infielders who can find multiple paths to provide future value in the majors.
All of this is subjective. It’s trying to dig through the inherent risk of projecting prospects to future Major League positions, with the end goal of presenting players who have less risk than others. There’s no actual system which quantifies prospect development risk, and there isn’t a system that identifies sleepers in this way. But this is ultimately what anyone is calculating inside their own minds when projecting a player as a sleeper.
The point for every prospect is to progress their game to the highest level possible. How they entered pro ball largely plays a role in their sleeper designation, as that would impact their initial ceiling projections. When a player starts to put up real results in pro ball, their forecasts change. The sleepers are largely the risers or potential risers in the system.
As to when a sleeper “wakes up”, that’s another subjective matter. It’s the point where you go from thinking a player might reach a outcome, to a point where you expect the player to reach that outcome.
That’s when a player becomes a real prospect. And anyone who follows prospects enough knows that this is when the heartbreak truly begins. In a way, the sleeper tag is just there to protect our baseball hearts from being let down. Whenever you’re comfortable getting your heart broken by the possibility of a player not making it, that’s when that player is no longer a sleeper.
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