Twenty-Five of Eighty

On the night of July 23, in Binghamton, New York, Franklin Arias hit his nineteenth home run of the season and Portland won 3-2.

Tim Crowley of MLB.com reported what happened after the game. Arias's manager, Kyle Sasala, found him with a phone. Chad Epperson was on the other end of it — he managed Portland before this season and coaches third base in Boston now. Between them they told him he was going to Triple-A, the last stop before the major leagues.

He called his parents while he packed his equipment.

The next day he rode four hours in an Uber from Binghamton to Worcester, and that afternoon, July 24, he stood at Polar Park and answered questions through the translator Juan Montero.

"Something that I've been dreaming of since I was a little kid," he said. "Now that I'm here with living my dream one call away, I'm really happy and really grateful for the opportunity given."

He is twenty years old. Until that Uber ride he had never played above Double-A.

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The reason he moved is printed on his own page, in a table anyone can read.

Franklin Arias began this season with eighteen home runs. Not eighteen last year — eighteen in his professional life. One in thirty-seven games in the Dominican Summer League in 2023. Six in the Florida Complex League in 2024, where he was named the league's most valuable player, and three more that summer at Single-A Salem. None in nineteen games back at Salem in 2025, six at High-A Greenville, two in a ten-game look at Portland to finish.

Two hundred and forty games. Nine hundred and thirty at-bats. Eighteen home runs.

He hit his nineteenth of 2026 in his seventy-fifth game.

Eight of the nineteen came in April, when the Eastern League named him its player of the month and he hit .375 with a 1.196 OPS — on-base percentage and slugging added together, the rough one-number version of a hitter's offense. On the day he was promoted he stood first in the league in that number at .994, second in batting average and slugging, third in home runs and on-base, fourth in hits. Earlier in July he had started at second base for the American League in the Futures Game and driven in its first run.

A twenty-year-old who suddenly finds power usually pays for it in strikeouts, because the swing that produces one produces the other. Arias struck out forty-six times in three hundred and thirty-two plate appearances at Portland, under fourteen percent of the time, and walked thirty-seven. The power arrived and the contact stayed.

He puts it down to the winter.

"I've been working really hard since Spring Training," he told Crowley that afternoon. "On the hitting side, I've been working a lot with the guys in Double-A and all the hitting coaches and putting all the work and all the effort into having a good year and the results have shown."

By his own account the specific work was strength and nutrition, done in Fort Myers, and the results showed up in April.

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Five shops rank him and they don't agree. FanGraphs' 2026 update has him second in baseball. Baseball America, whose Top 100 was refreshed on August 2, has him third. Feverbaseball's own farm watchlist — an aggregation of outside shops, not an engine output — has him fourth. MLB Pipeline had him seventh on the day he was promoted. His feverbaseball player page carries the consensus at No. 8. That last figure is the market's, not ours.

All five have him first in Boston's system.

FanGraphs and the watchlist both put his arrival in 2027. Arias said he was one call away.

The shops agree on the contact and the glove. Baseball America grades his hit tool 60 and his glove 60 — 60 on a scale where 50 is an everyday major leaguer and 80 is the ceiling — with a 55 arm. FanGraphs has the hit at 50 now and 60 at his peak, the glove at 50 and 55. The contact and the defense have never been the question.

The power is.

Going into this season Baseball America graded it 40, below average, and called him a clear hit-over-power profile. On the Top 100 it published on August 2 the grade is 45. Every other number on his card is unchanged. They revised one line.

The report moved with it. Arias "has taken a step forward in 2026 with his ability to impact the baseball," it now reads. "He's showing more power than ever on the back of added strength and increased bat speed." Their overall grade on him went from 55 to 65.

FanGraphs splits the tool in two, and the split is the more useful way to hold it. Raw power — the strength itself — it grades 50, dead average, now and at his peak. Game power, the strength arriving as home runs, 40 now and 50 later.

Nobody ever said he wasn't strong. They said the strength wasn't turning into home runs.

Twenty-one of them — nineteen at Portland and two since — is the argument he has been making since April. Baseball America moved five points of power grade and ten of overall while he made it.

And the strength underneath those home runs is what feverbaseball's engine measures.

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The engine reads how hard a hitter strikes a baseball. Its number is EV95, and the 95 is a percentile, not a speed: take every ball a hitter puts in play, sort them by how fast they came off the bat, and read off the top five percent. Not how often he connects — how hard it goes when he does.

A ball in play is any ball he hits into the field, home runs included. Not a walk, not a strikeout.

It is the measurement the site trusts furthest, and it publishes the reason: a hitter's number one year predicts his number the next at a correlation of about .88, where 1.0 would be a perfect match and 0 no relationship at all. It exists only where Hawk-Eye cameras are installed, which means the major leagues and Triple-A, and nothing below.

Until July 24, the engine had never seen Franklin Arias hit a baseball. It has measured twenty-five since. Eleven of them are on the site.

Feverbaseball started printing Triple-A scorecards on July 30, with the speed off the bat on every batted ball. Three Worcester games are up so far, and Arias is on all three.

Date	Result	Off the bat
Jul 30	fielder's choice	68.0 mph
Jul 30	flyout	96.2
Jul 30	single	83.9
Jul 31	home run	103.1
Jul 31	groundout	91.2
Jul 31	double	102.6
Jul 31	single	88.7
Aug 1	groundout	92.7
Aug 1	double	102.4
Aug 1	groundout	80.0
Aug 1	flyout	91.4

The home run opened the game on July 31 — a 92.9 mile-an-hour four-seam, first pitch, 376 feet.

Every ball he has hit at this level since July 30 is on the site with its speed beside it, dated, free to read.

What the engine will not do is average them.

His player page carries no EV95, no percentile and no rank. Feverbaseball's watchlist puts it in a line: no qualified batted-ball sample on file yet. Under his name it reads INDEX, the site's label for a player it is watching and hasn't graded.

Two figures are withheld, for two different reasons.

He isn't on the site's Triple-A hitters board, and he never will be while the market has him where it does. That has nothing to do with how hard he hits it. The board's own description reads: "We rank the qualifying AAA sample by EV95 and hold the consensus top 25 off this board on purpose — 'pre-consensus' has to mean the market hasn't priced these tools yet." FanGraphs has Arias second and Pipeline had him seventh. He is lifted out of the pool before the sorting starts.

He didn't miss that board and he isn't waiting on it. A list of players the public hasn't found is worth nothing if it lists the ones the public has found.

The board does carry a Worcester infielder. Mikey Romero is twenty-two and bats third in the lineup Arias leads off; he sits nineteenth with an EV95 of 108.2 across 249 balls in play. What puts him there is a screen about the market, not about the bat: no prospect list has him in its top twenty-five.

The second is on his own page, and it is arithmetic. To carry a percentile a hitter has to be inside the population the percentile is measured against, and that population has a floor. Feverbaseball tracks 399 Triple-A bats through August 2, with a median EV95 of 105.2 miles an hour. Those 399 aren't every hitter at the level. They are every hitter at the level who has put eighty balls in play this season.

Franklin Arias has been at Triple-A for seven games.

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Here is the count.

He has made thirty-five plate appearances for Worcester. Four of them were walks and six were strikeouts. That leaves twenty-five balls put into the field of play — seven hits, one sacrifice fly, and seventeen he hit at somebody.

Twenty-five, against a floor of eighty. Fifty-five to go.

The engine's counter runs a little behind the box score, because it keeps only the balls that came back with a speed attached and about one and a half percent don't. Over eighty, that is roughly one ball.

Eighty is where a ninety-fifth percentile stops jumping around. Five percent of eighty is four batted balls, and below that the number moves on one lucky swing.

A reader can do with the eleven above what the engine won't. Take the top five percent and you get a single ball — the home run, at 103.1.

Baseball America, having watched him all season, puts his exit velocities "topping out around 110 mph." That is Baseball America's figure, and a different measurement besides: a maximum is the hardest ball a man has ever hit, where EV95 is the speed he beats on his best five percent of them. But eleven balls didn't find the 110 either.

One of the twenty-five came on July 28, in the first game of a series against Norfolk. Chris Bassitt started it — thirty-seven years old, 228 major-league starts behind him since 2014. He opened with a ninety-two mile-an-hour sinker, and Arias put it over the wall in left field on the first pitch of the night: his first home run at the level, and his only hit. Baseball America wrote it up the next morning.

There is no card from that night. The scorecards started two days later. Whatever that ball left the bat at, nobody printed it, and nobody can now.

At Portland this season he put 241 balls in play across seventy-five games. That is 3.21 a game — a box-score rate, since Double-A has no tracking at all. At that rate fifty-five takes about seventeen or eighteen games, and Worcester has forty-two left, through September 20. A shortstop plays most of them.

The number lands this season.

One more marker sits past it. The board puts a dagger beside any hitter under a hundred balls in play, and says what the dagger means: the number next to it "is a rumor, not a reading." Eighty earns Arias a percentile. A hundred earns him one that arrives unhedged, and that is about twenty-three games.

And when it lands it will answer one question and leave the others alone. EV95 grades contact quality: the top of a hitter's range rather than the middle of it. That is much nearer to what a scout means by raw power than to what he means by game power — it reads the strength, not the home runs, and FanGraphs already put the strength at 50. It is blind to how often he connects, which is the hit tool that has been his entire case since he was seventeen. It has nothing to say about whether a twenty-year-old can play shortstop at Fenway Park in April. It has nothing to say about the thirty at-bats he has taken at Worcester. Thirty at-bats say nothing about anybody.

A high number won't make him a major leaguer and a low one won't stop him becoming one. It will say how hard he hits a baseball. That is all it has ever said about anyone.

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Worcester is 2,216 miles from Caracas, where he was born in November 2005. Boston signed him out of Venezuela in 2023 for $525,000, and the transaction feed has him assigned from Portland on July 24 with nothing since.

Some time around the end of August, if nothing intervenes — a call-up, a trade, a pulled hamstring — the count clears eighty, and a page that has never carried a number on Franklin Arias will carry one.

At Polar Park they asked him what it meant to be this close to Boston.

"It feels really special, especially as a kid seeing all the games as the Red Sox against the Yankees and that rivalry," he said. "Now I'm trying to be a part of it."

Fifty-five more.