Yankees top prospect Spencer Jones off to ridiculous start (with familiar issue)

New York Yankees slugging top prospect Spencer Jones has a reputational problem that can't be solved at Double-A. Still, given the choice between watching him sock tremendous dingers, and not watching that, we'll always take the former.

Jones entered 2024 with helium on his side, especially after an eye-catching spring with the big-league Yankees, but finished it without finding consistency or making the crucial developmental strides the Yankees were hoping to see. He reached Double-A Somerset for a 17-game cameo in 2023, and the hope was that he would transcend beyond it by midseason, inching up the Top 100 prospect lists. Instead, he fell off them entirely, and hit 17 home runs with a .788 OPS and an even 200 strikeouts.

Even those who are bullish on Jones' development admit that the whiffs, for a man his size, could be a problem forever in his quest to pair excellent oufield defense with the kind of power most players can only dream of.

To start 2025, Jones has opened with an offensive rampage the likes of which very few in the mid-minors are capable of. He socked two home runs in a game on Thursday, and both were gargantuan. They were his fourth and fifth of the season in just 12 games.

Of course ... he also racked up 17 strikeouts in that minuscule sample size. At the close of the second week of the minor league season, Jones wrapped with six homers (he drilled another on Sunday to lead the Eastern League) and has whiffed 22 times. His average is down to .236.

Yankees top prospect Spencer Jones has a familiar strikeout worry at Double-A Somerset

Jones quiets a small portion of his doubters, temporarily, every time he detonates a megawatt blast. The hope is that they'll become more frequent. More undeniable. And it seems like a genuine possibility every time he drops a crowd's collective jaw.

Of course, no one will really start to buy in until he's elevated to Triple-A; this is Jones' third season that includes a portion of Double-A ball, and it follows a full-season middling sample.

Will Jones finally make enough tweaks this season to get back to the level of his 25-game pro debut in 2022, when he struck out just 20 times in 93 at-bats? If any organization can figure it out, it's the Yankees, who turned Aaron Judge into the best right-handed hitter in baseball history with a similarly problematic frame.

For the eternal optimists out there, Jones is 23, and Judge was 24 when he was called up, gawky, lumbering, and oddly magnificent nonetheless, back in 2016. If you think about The Captain's timeline that way, it wouldn't be ridiculous to expect some additional progress from Jones in 2025.

For the pessimists out there? Only one number matters these days, and it's not the prodigious distance of these dueling blasts.