OF Daniel Cabrera, Louisiana State
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DoB: 9/5/1998. B/T: L/L
2020 Stats: 2 HR, .345/.466/.500, 6 SB, 12/14 K/BB in 17 games
There are players with more exciting tool sets than Daniel Cabrera, but sometimes the straightforward guys get it done. Cabrera was a potential day one prospect coming out of Parkview Baptist High School in Baton Rouge in 2017, but he took his advanced bat across town to LSU and has done nothing but hit there. He made an immediate impact by hitting .315/.405/.525 with eight home runs as a freshman, then hit .284/.359/.516 with 12 home runs as he battled wrist problems as a sophomore. He was taking things to another level when the season shut down in 2020, hitting .345/.466/.500 to bring his career slash line to .305/.392/.518 with 22 home runs in 140 games. Overall, those aren't the flashiest numbers, but you'd be hard pressed to find a hole in his game.
Cabrera is as balanced a hitter as you'll find in this college class outside of that top tier. He employs an advanced approach at the plate, and he uses an extremely simple but powerful swing to produce average power to go along with his high on-base percentages. That swing has been his calling card all along, as it has no holes and very efficiently enables him to hit pitches in all quadrants of the zone. His approach got a bit out of wack during his sophomore year, but there's no reason to think he can't lock down the strike zone against professional pitching and he walked more than he struck out during his junior year. Defensively, he's decent but probably fits best in left field, where he'll get the job done but won't necessarily be an asset.
The biggest knock on Cabrera is his lack of upside. There's no loud tools here, just competent baseball ability. That gives him a great chance to be at least a fourth or fifth outfielder, but it also means even a best case scenario projects him with 15-25 home runs per season and high on-base percentages. That upside is considerably less remarkable than many other first round college bats, especially considering he won't add much on defense. To me, an optimist that he'll keep hitting, he seems like a guy who will fall between those two projections and end up a 15 homer bat with decent on-base percentages. That's a hitter who can start on some teams and might be a platoon hitter on others, but either way it's value. That might not fit in the first round, but it makes sense as a comp pick or as an early second rounder for a team that wants to be absolutely sure they recuperate some value out of this shorter draft.
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