Seven At-Bats

On March 29, Deyvison De Los Santos hit a double in his first major-league game. He played first base, went 1-for-2, and Miami beat Colorado. He was twenty-two years old. Arizona had signed him out of the Dominican Republic as a sixteen-year-old, for two hundred thousand dollars, on July 2, 2019. He made his professional debut in 2021 and had been in the minor leagues ever since.

The next day the Marlins made a trade with Toronto for an infielder named Leo Jiménez, and to clear the roster spot they optioned De Los Santos back to Jacksonville.

He has been there ever since, except for ten days in April.

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The bat was never the problem.

Through July 25, feverbaseball's engine has him at an EV95 of 109.4 mph. EV95 is the one number worth carrying through this piece, so here's what it is: not his average exit velocity, but his top end — the speed the ball leaves when he actually gets one. The engine takes the hardest five percent of a man's contact and reads that, rather than the mean, because mishits drag a mean down and the top of the range is the skill. It's the most stable thing the engine measures. A hitter's EV95 correlates with itself year over year at .88, which in this business is close to a fingerprint.

Translated: at his best, Deyvison De Los Santos hits a baseball at a speed that plays in any park in America. Fish On First had him measured as high as 119 miles an hour in 2024 — a maximum, which our engine doesn't publish. Nothing about that has gone away.

Among the 391 Triple-A hitters feverbaseball tracks, 109.4 puts him above roughly ninety-five percent of them.

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In 2024 he hit forty home runs, which was more than anyone else in minor-league baseball.

He turned twenty-one in the middle of it. He hit twenty-eight in eighty-seven games in the Arizona system, between Double-A Amarillo and Triple-A Reno, and then, on July 25, with the home run title still in progress, the Diamondbacks traded him. He and Andrew Pintar went to Miami for a left-handed reliever named A.J. Puk. De Los Santos reported to Jacksonville and hit twelve more.

Forty. Ryan Ward of the Dodgers finished second with thirty-four, and by Fish On First's accounting the six-homer margin was the widest between a minor-league leader and a runner-up since Ryan Howard in 2004, the most home runs in a minor-league season since MJ Melendez in 2021, and the youngest anyone had led the minors in homers since Joey Gallo in 2013. He went to the Futures Game. The Pacific Coast League named him its top major-league prospect.

One thing belongs next to the forty, because it changes the size of it. Reno plays in the Pacific Coast League, where the ball carries and everybody hits; Jacksonville plays in the International League, where it doesn't and they don't. Same classification, different sport.

There is a stat that corrects for exactly that — wRC+, which grades a hitter against his own league and park and sets average at 100. By Fish On First's numbers, De Los Santos posted a 121 over 49 games at Reno. Over 50 games at Jacksonville after the trade, an 85. Same player, same summer, both at Triple-A: twenty-one percent better than average in the league that flatters him, fifteen percent worse in the one that doesn't. He has never slugged .460 in the International League.

Miami put him on the forty-man roster that November and sent him back to Triple-A the following spring, and the spring after that.

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The door has opened twice, both times because somebody else got hurt.

Christopher Morel was scratched from the Opening Day lineup with a strained oblique, and in the last week of March the Marlins promoted De Los Santos for the first time. He debuted on the twenty-ninth and doubled. He was optioned on the thirtieth for Jiménez.

Griffin Conine tore a hamstring. De Los Santos was recalled on April 10, and on April 19, when Kyle Stowers came off the injured list, he was optioned again.

That's the whole thing. Seven games, seven at-bats, two hits, one double, no walks, three strikeouts. Seven games and seven at-bats — he was on a major-league roster and mostly not in the lineup.

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Here's where the story is supposed to say chase rate.

It's the number that follows him into every scouting report: a 46 percent chase rate, which the scouts called a match for the worst percentage in the big leagues. Fish On First's Sean McCormack, writing in October 2024, put the last thirty games of that season at 51 percent against what he noted was a league average of 28. He walked in five percent of his plate appearances after the trade. He struck out in 28.4 percent of them. The verdict wrote itself: enormous power, no idea what to swing at, a first baseman with nowhere to hide.

Both of those chase figures are from 2024, and nobody has published a 2026 one that we could find.

What is public is this. In 300 at-bats at Jacksonville — about 330 trips to the plate once you add the walks — De Los Santos has 62 strikeouts and 26 walks. That is a strikeout in roughly nineteen percent of his plate appearances, against 28.4 percent in his half-season at Jacksonville in 2024. His on-base percentage is .330. He is hitting .267/.330/.433 with eleven home runs in seventy-seven games, and his OPS is .763.

Set that against 2025, which is the year most of this argument gets decided. He spent all of it in Jacksonville and hit .241/.311/.363 — a .674 OPS, twelve home runs in 107 games. His slugging in the International League went from .459 the year before to .363 — ninety-six points, same park, same league. And that was the year the plate discipline the scouts had been demanding finally showed up: by Fish On First's numbers his swing rate dropped from 58.2 percent to 51.4 percent, his contact rate climbed from 66.2 percent to 71 percent.

That was also the year the bat went quiet.

So 2026 is the best of the three. Better than 2025 in every column, seventy points of slugging recovered, the strikeouts still down from 2024. It is also seventy-seven games long and not a finished season.

Last winter, in Jupiter, he was asked what he had worked on. He said, speaking in Spanish, that it wasn't mechanical.

"I'd say what I need to improve is my mindset and my maturity," he told Kevin Barral of Fish On First in February. "I focused on that, I matured, and that's what I'm applying here."

Clayton McCullough, his manager, said he was seeing a different Deyvison — a kid who was first to the academy in Jupiter every morning, putting his hard hat on and going to work.

Five weeks later he was in the big leagues. Eight weeks later he was not.

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Our own engine can't help with the rest of it, and it's worth being straight about that. EV95 grades how hard he hits a baseball. It does not grade which pitches he offers at, and feverbaseball publishes no swing-decision metric at all — there's nothing on our legend page that measures the thing standing between this bat and a job. The engine says one thing and the box score says another, and they are both correct, because they are not measuring the same event.

Which means the honest version of the last three years is a description and not an explanation. The strikeouts came down. The slugging came down with them, and then some of it came back. Why is a question with at least three plausible answers — he changed leagues in the middle of 2024; the last time anyone published the figure he was hitting the ball on the ground better than half the time; he cut his swing rate in 2025 — and the numbers that would separate them are not ours to see.

Meanwhile the roster kept clearing.

On June 21 the Marlins designated Christopher Morel for assignment, clearing the roster spot for Griffin Conine to come off the sixty-day injured list. Morel was hitting .162 in 73 plate appearances with a 38.4 percent strikeout rate. The oblique that opened the door in March had ended in a transaction, and Morel was gone.

It was De Los Santos's twenty-third birthday.

Four days later Miami optioned Connor Norby, the other man who had been playing first base, and recalled Graham Pauley instead. MLB Trade Rumors noted that day that "Deyvison De Los Santos and Graham Pauley are both hitting well in the minors and could be recalled."

One of them was.

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The Marlins were 52-53 through Thursday, fourth in the National League East, ten and a half games behind Atlanta, and they have nine days until the deadline. De Los Santos is 23, plays first base full time now, and is in his second season on a forty-man roster he could still be dropped from.

He hasn't spoken publicly since February, as far as we can find. Every quote we have is from the spring, when he was talking about maturity and his manager was talking about the hard hat.

There is a version of this where the approach holds, the power grows back into it, and a team that needs a right-handed first baseman finds out what a 109.4 looks like over four hundred at-bats instead of seven. There is a version where the man who hit forty home runs is gone and the one who replaced him is a .763 OPS in Triple-A, which is not a major-league job. Nobody knows which. Not the scouts, not the Marlins, and not our engine, which is very good at measuring the ball and has nothing to say about the decision that happens a tenth of a second before contact.

He led the whole minor leagues in home runs and got traded. He cut the strikeouts and got optioned. The men in front of him were designated and demoted, and the phone still has not rung.

Seven at-bats.