Athletics no. 1 prospect Tyler Soderstrom keeps belting homers
The Oakland Athletics front office seems fixated on moving the franchise to Las Vegas for reasons unknown and barely explained inside Nevada's courts. Why is that, considering there is a shiny young man making the A's franchise look great already in that place!?
Enter Tyler Soderstrom, no. 1 A's prospect on MLB Pipeline's and Baseball America's ranks and a member of the Las Vegas Aviators, the Triple-A affiliate of the Athletics in the Pacific Coast League.
The former first-round pick by the A's in the 2020 draft (26th overall selection) is having a month for the ages in Fabulous Sin City.
It's the second home run in three games for top-ranked @Athletics prospect Tyler Soderstrom!
— MLB Pipeline (@MLBPipeline) June 11, 2023
His 14th of the season for @AviatorsLV is a towering shot to straightaway center: pic.twitter.com/ULwf2FNNdi
That's Soderstrom's 14th homer of the season and fourth of June alone. We're not even a third through the month and the young catcher has belted nearly as many HRs already as he did in May when he hit five long-distance bangers.
Soderstrom made it to the 2021 Futures Game as part of the AL roster, but he has yet to make his official Major League Baseball debut with the Oakland Athletics. However, Soderstrom has already gone from Single-A in that 2021 campaign to A+, Double-A, and lastly, Triple-A starting this season.
This year in Las Vegas, Soderstrom has already appeared in 51 games completing 226 trips to the plate in which he's hitting .262/.314/.558.
The catcher/first-baseman has already bagged 14 HRs this year, while he's currently boasting a BB% of 6.3 against a K% of 26.7%. Both of those rates are quite promising considering he's coming off a 2022 season also at AAA getting 2.6% and 34.2% figures respectively in those two categories.
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Last April, Tess Taruskin of Fangraphs wrote a prospect report on the Athletics 2023 "Imminent Big Leaguers," giving Soderstrom an ETA for the 2025 season with the highest Future Value (FV) among all prospects in the A's minor league system.
Soderstrom got a 55 FV while aged just 21 compared to the only other prospects getting 50+ FV marks in Ken Waldichuk and Mason Miller, both already having turned 24 and 25 years old respectively.