Esteban Mejia Joins Top 100, Tantalizes With High-Octane Arsenal
Image credit: Orioles RHP Esteban Mejia (Photo by Mike Janes/Four Seam Images)
Life in the complex leagues requires patience. The temperatures are brutally hot, and Florida’s games—which are played nearly exclusively at high noon—come with several doses of sopping humidity. Sunblock is part protectant, part marinade.
Attendance can often be counted in the single digits. Full-season staples like the National Anthem, public address announcers and between-innings music are rarities, and most of the games are played on fields ringed by chain-link fences.
You won’t find the complex leagues on MiLB TV, though a few teams will stream the action on social media.
The baseball itself is a mixed bag. Some games are nine innings, but more than a few will end after seven innings in order to preserve pitching. Some players are recent graduates of the Dominican Summer League. Others are draftees whose tools and skills aren’t refined enough to make the jump to full-season ball. And there are plenty of rehabbing players whose skills—even at a fraction of their peak—are enough to easily overwhelm younger competition.
Sorting the prospects from the suspects can be a slog, but every so often someone comes to the fore with talent that places him more than a few cuts above the rest. These are the prospects who make you forget about the heat, the humidity and the jagged quality of play and demand your full attention.
Esteban Mejia is one such player.
The Orioles righthander is 18 years old and armed with the body, athleticism and pitch package that allow evaluators to dream big. He produces outings that burrow in your brain and stay there for weeks. Seeing ceilings this high requires binoculars.
Baltimore’s top pitching prospect now comfortably ranks inside the Top 100. He stands 6-foot-3 and checks in at about 175 pounds, leaving him plenty of room to add strength in the coming years. The thought alone should drench hitters in a cold sweat, given the pyrotechnics already produced by Mejia’s whip-quick right arm.
His four-seam fastball sits comfortably in the upper 90s and has peaked at 102 mph. His two-seamer—a feet-seeking missile against righthanders—comes in a couple of clicks slower, but he already has enough command of the pitch to land it for strikes on either side of the plate or to bury it in the dirt. Mejia pairs the heaters with a low-90s changeup with hard, devastating fade and a slider with sharp three-quarters bite.
Through eight starts, that arsenal has helped Mejia punch out 41 hitters in 32.1 innings, though he’s issued 18 walks in that time, too, and his strikes are sometimes scattered thanks to a longer arm action and a velocity increase from his professional debut last summer in the Dominican Republic.
“His ability to develop the two-seamer has been awesome this year and (now he has) the two different fastballs. The fastball (velocity) has increased, and he really had to learn how to throw strikes against the fastball velocity increase,” Orioles director of pitching Forrest Herrmann said, “And he’s very, very much done that throughout the FCL season and extended spring training this year. So it’s a swing-and-miss, hard, gyro-type of slider. It’s a really impressive two-seamer and changeup, too.”
Mejia’s stuff is undeniable. Each of his pitches grades somewhere between 60-80 on the 20-80 scouting scale, and his control could get to average with further development. There is, of course, plenty of refinement remaining. His arm slot varies on each of his pitches, a flaw hitters in the complex league have not been able to exploit. That might change once he reaches full-season ball.
“That’s part of polishing up a lot of young pitchers’ development over time. And, yeah, you look at his age and experience and what he kind of is focusing on right now, and there are a few different strategies you can see with pitchers later on in development, whether it’s further rounding out an arsenal to windows—as opposed to one release point for all pitches—or learning down the road to repeat those out of the same spot,” Herrmann said.
“Not everybody progresses in the same, and helping him maintain stuff and increase strikes in general has been the main goal, or the foundational goal for this point.”
As Mejia moves up the ladder, his arsenal might take a different shape. To his current gyro slider he could add a sweeper, which might be a more natural fit for his lower arm slot and would give hitters a different look to consider.
Those changes—and probably a lot more—will be addressed down the road. For now, his mix of pitches provides both rock-solid foundation and one of the highest ceilings in the minor leagues.
