Psst…want a hot tip? Get Noelvi Marte…why are you still reading this? Get him!
- Born: October 16, 2001
- B/T: R/R
- 6’1″, 181-lbs
- Drafted by the Seattle Mariners in 2018 out of the Dominican Republic
The Numbers
His raw numbers are listed above courtesy of baseball-reference.com. Let’s aggregate by year then focus on the important numbers for minor leaguers:
First of all, let’s address the elephant in the room (and do you think elephants get tired of being addressed all the time just because they are hanging out in rooms minding their own business?), yes, that is a batting line from a foreign rookie league. The Dominican Summer League, to be precise. And yes, we are told to mostly ignore such results and wait for them to come stateside before looking at numbers.
But what if this is all we have?
And what if that sea of green and blue is so beautiful as to entice your eyes to a mesmerizing degree? On-base ability? Yup. Power? Yup. Speed? Yup. Good strikeout rate? Yup. Good walk rate? Yup. All that at age 17? Yup. Tired of the “yups” yet? Yup. OK, let’s move on.
He hit righties hard, and hit lefties into oblivion.
We see his home runs have been pull power but we also see triples to his opposite field, as well as doubles up the middle and to right, and singles all over the field. He’ll be fine.
See Marte start above an .800 OPS, dip to the mid-.650 range for a month, then he said the heck with it and started marching higher. 0.700…0.800…0.900…1.000… A relentless August and September.
The Scouts
- Rotowire: #27 on their Top 400.
- BaseballHQ: #88 on their Top 100.
- Fangraphs: Not on their Top 120.
- Fantasy Six Pack: #156 on their dynasty list.
- Prospects365: #42 on Ray Butler’s Top 200.
- Imaginary Brick Wall: #40 on the Top 487.
- Fantrax: #28 on the Top 250.
Warnings
He’s 18 and has never reached stateside, let alone upper levels, so who we we kidding? There’s risk.
He’s worked hard on his defense at short, and got quite solid by the end of summer. But some observers think he will wind up at third, or maybe even the outfield.
Conclusion
I’m going to turn this over to Ray Butler:
This is a prospect who appears to be on the cusp of becoming one of the best players in the minor leagues. There’s raw power that profiles from anywhere defensively. There’s underrated speed (pay no mind to his speed grade elsewhere; by all recent reports, Marte is a 70 runner). The market within the prospect industry is already beginning to account for this, but the 18-year-old has a lot of the same ingredients that allowed Kristian Robinson to ascend into the top-10 a year after ranking in this range.
Marte is one of the few players on this list who have ‘top overall prospect’ potential.
Yes, there are times in dynasty play where you need to jump ahead of your league mates in order to grab the next potential star. Noelvi Marte is that player. There’s no time to wait for him to come to the states, or to reach AA. You have to get him now and trust that the scouts will be right.
You have been warned.