Six-Foot-Seven of Maybe

In the second inning at Progressive Field on June 9, Spencer Jones hit a baseball 443 feet to dead center off Slade Cecconi at 112.2 miles an hour. It was the first home run of his major-league career, it put the Yankees ahead in a game they won 3-2, and his teammate didn't recognize the swing.

"That was sick," Jazz Chisholm Jr. told MLB.com afterward. "I thought it was Aaron Judge hitting when he hit that ball."

Chisholm was standing in a lineup that had Jones in it precisely because Aaron Judge was not. Judge had gone down four days earlier with a stress fracture in a rib, and Jones came up from Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, the Yankees' Triple-A club, to fill the hole. He is left-handed where Judge is right-handed, and 25 where Judge is 34, and he's somewhere between six-six and six-seven depending on which outlet you believe, which is close enough that people have been drawing the comparison since he was drafted. He is also, at that size, a center fielder.

Three and a half weeks later the Yankees optioned him back down — the mechanism that lets a club move a young player between the majors and the minors as often as it likes, without offering him to anybody else.

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He was born in Encinitas, California, and he went to Vanderbilt as a two-way player, and in his last college season he hit .370 with a .460 on-base percentage and made All-SEC. The Yankees took him twenty-fifth overall in 2022 and paid him $2,880,800.

The power has never been the argument. In 2025 he hit thirty-five home runs across Double-A and Triple-A and stole twenty-nine bases, which isn't a combination that shows up often in a man his size.

The argument has always been about the other thing. At Double-A Somerset in 2024 he struck out in 36.8 percent of his plate appearances, a rate no other qualified hitter at the level matched. That summer he tore his swing down mid-season and lowered his hands.

"Lowering my hands just allowed me to create more freedom in my rotation," he told MiLB.com at the time. "I'm not even thinking about my hands as much. In the past, they were up high, and that would just cause me to chop down on a lot of balls, be late and get beat by a lot of pitches, especially inside."

It worked. His groundball rate fell from 52.2 percent to 44.2. His line-drive rate climbed from 15.2 to 25.6. The ball started leaving at angles that turn a tall man's leverage into home runs, and the thirty-five homers followed the year after.

He also struck out about 35 percent of the time in 2025, and swung through 42 percent of the pitches he offered at.

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He's been a major leaguer three times this season and not once because of anything he did.

The first call came on May 7, when Jasson Domínguez sprained the AC joint in his shoulder. Jones debuted the next day against Milwaukee and went hitless. He got his first hit two days later, a run-scoring single off Logan Henderson. On May 21 the Yankees sent him down. He had gone 4-for-24 with three walks and twelve strikeouts.

"Really tough call," Aaron Boone told reporters the next day, per Heavy. "Even though he didn't get a lot of results, I actually feel like he held his own pretty well ... It was a tough call."

The second call came on June 5, when Judge got hurt. That's the trip with the 443-foot home run in it. It ended on July 3, when Trent Grisham came off the injured list.

Judge was still hurt when that decision was made. The Yankees had a fourth outfielder coming off the injured list and a rookie who had homered four weeks earlier, and they kept the fourth outfielder.

The third call lasted a day. On July 22 they recalled Jones as the twenty-seventh man for a doubleheader against Pittsburgh — a roster slot that exists only for doubleheaders and disappears when the second game ends. He went 0-for-3 with a walk in the matinee. The next afternoon he was optioned to Scranton/Wilkes-Barre.

Four days before that recall, the Yankees had moved Judge to the 60-day injured list. As of the All-Star break he hadn't resumed baseball activities, and he told reporters the rib was "not fully healed."

There's a reading of that day in the Bronx that has nothing to do with outfield depth. The trade deadline is August 3. Sports Illustrated and Bleacher Report have both run Jones as a deadline piece this month, relaying the reporter Francys Romero, who has named him and Domínguez as the likeliest two to go; Yanks Go Yard called the doubleheader start a final deadline showcase. The Yankees have not said why they used the slot on him.

He was in the RailRiders lineup on July 23. He singled on a soft line drive to left and drove in a run.

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Two sets of numbers describe him, and they do not agree.

In 142 plate appearances at Scranton this season he has hit .258/.366/.592 with eleven home runs and struck out 32.4 percent of the time. In eighty-six major-league plate appearances he has hit .224 with two home runs.

Through the first sixty-eight of those major-league plate appearances, Pinstripe Alley put his strikeout rate at 42.6 percent and his walk rate at 13.2 percent. Sixty-eight plate appearances is three weeks of baseball and settles nothing, but the shape of it matches everything underneath: over that stretch he was taking his pitches and working counts, and missing what he swung at.

Those two facts are not in tension. They measure different things. Contact quality is how hard the ball leaves when he hits it. Contact frequency is whether he hits it at all. A hitter can lead a league in the first and be unplayable because of the second.

The scouts have priced the split differently from one another. Depending on the outlet, his hit tool grades somewhere between 30 and 35 on the twenty-to-eighty scale, where 50 is average and 30 is close to the bottom of the published range — while the power comes in between 60 and 70. Baseball America has him at a 60 overall with the risk marked Extreme: "See Jones on the right day and he looks like one of the best prospects in baseball. See him on the wrong day and his strikeout issues appear to put a sizable roadblock in his path."

Our own board at feverbaseball.com — ours, and worth naming as ours — agrees with the loud half more emphatically than any of them. As of July 22 it had Jones at the top of its Triple-A hitters list. The board reads two things: how hard a hitter's best-struck balls leave the bat, and a model's estimate of what that would be worth in the majors. Jones leads it on both. Which is a measurement of how hard he hits a baseball and a projection built on top of that measurement, and neither one knows whether he will hit it.

The card market hasn't taken a position either way. He isn't among the movers on our own tracker as of July 23.

Empire Sports Media put it this way this week: "The power is not a theory. The question is whether the at-bats become consistent enough for the club to trust him against major-league pitching."

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Spencer Jones is in Scranton. Three times this year somebody else's injury opened the door and somebody else's recovery closed it, and the swing that made a teammate think Aaron Judge was hitting comes out of the same body as that strikeout rate.

Nobody knows which half of him is the career. Not the scouts, who can't agree within five points. Not the Yankees, who have the medicals and the batting practice and the player himself and have now sent him down three times. And not our board, which knows how hard he hits a baseball and nothing at all about the part that decides.

He's twenty-five, and he's playing in Moosic, Pennsylvania, while people who've never watched him take an at-bat argue about what he's worth.