Rafael Flores entered the 2024 season in a situation he had grown all too familiar with, as he was an unknown in the Yankees’ organization.
Spending his collegiate days at Rio Hondo College, a JUCO school in California, Flores went undrafted in the 2022 MLB Draft and ended up signing with the Yankees as a free agent. After posting a 100 wRC+ in 2023 with the Hudson Valley Renegades, 2024 would be a pivotal year for the right-handed slugger to translate his big-time exit velocities into game power. To call this past season a success for Flores would be an understatement, as the 23-year-old left his mark on the organization.
He finished with the second-most home runs (21) and posted the highest wRC+ (149) for any MiLB hitter in the Yankees’ organization (min. 400 PAs), and the underlying metrics showed massive potential. A power bat with the results and exit velocities to back it up, Rafael Flores could make an impact on the Major League team as soon as 2025.
Yankees’ Rafael Flores Has Tons Of Power Potential
The Yankees have always believed in Rafael Flores’ ability to do damage on contact, but last year he only hit eight home runs in 105 games while slugging .366. While he wasn’t playing in a super-high run environment, you would still expect more power than that considering his frame, but he’d see a massive spike in power output in 2024. He slugged .4955 in the regular season with a .217 Isolated Power across 122 games, a massive improvement from his 2023 season.
One of the key changes that Rafael Flores made between 2023 and 2024 was with his leg kick, going from a more quiet load to a loud load that allows him to get every little bit of his tall frame and quick hands:
If you include his four playoff games in the sample size, Rafael Flores finished the year with 23 home runs in 126 games, and he did this while playing in Hudson Valley and Somerset, where run-scoring isn’t as prominent. According to Baseball America’s Park Factor data HV had a 95 Park Factor and Somerset had a 94 from 2022-2023, meaning it would take a serious amount of thump to consistently get the ball out in those yards.
Perhaps it’s his home ballparks that have limited his offensive output, as he has a .918 OPS on road games with a .543 SLG% and a .829 OPS with a .448 SLG% at home. FanGraphs’ wRC+ doesn’t account for park factors at the Minor League level the way they do at the Major League level due to the lack of public data they have accessible to them, so there’s a chance that his 149 wRC+ is underselling his actual adjusted value.
Rafael Flores doesn’t just have decent home-run power, he has what many would consider a 65-70 Grade Raw Power tool, and few things correlate to production better than having a loud bat:
Few hitters do as much damage on contact as Rafael Flores consistently does across all of professional baseball, including the big leagues, and the Yankees should view him as a potential right-handed power bat at first or catcher in the not-so-distant future. Flores’ raw power is so outstanding that his batted ball data compared to Spencer Jones’ this past season, as he was just 0.3 MPH worse in terms of average EV and 0.4 MPH better in terms of 90th Percentile EV (EV90).
Only seven hitters at the Major League level averaged an exit velocity at or above 93.5 MPH (min. 500 PAs) and Flores’ EV90 matches up with the likes of Carlos Correa, Joc Pederson, and Gunnar Henderson.
What further impressed me was how Rafael Flores was able to improve his launch and spray angles once promoted from High-A to Double-A, seeing his groundball rate go from 48.1% to 35.5% and his pull rate improve from 41.4% to 46.4% during the level jump. If he’s able to maintain a more optimal launch angle for his powerful swing while getting the ball to left field consistently, we could see a hitter who routinely puts up 25-30 HR seasons.
Rafael Flores clubbed 17 home runs in 69 games (nice) after being promoted to Double-A when you include regular and postseason play, which paces him for nearly 37 home runs over 150 games. The one concern about Flores pertains to his ability to make contact consistently striking out over 25% of the time as a result of a more loft-oriented swing. He did improve on that as the season went on, cutting it down to just 20.8% of the time over his final 22 games of the regular season.
The Yankees have seemed to find their catcher of the future in Austin Wells, but first base was a black hole this past season. With Rafael Flores getting plenty of time there this past season, there’s a chance he could be developed as one and become a potential solution there. If the contact rates continue to improve, the patient yet powerful Rafael Flores might complete the ascent from an undrafted JUCO bat to a key part of a playoff-contending Yankees team.
