P2Daily: Jared Triolo Finding His Power After Slow Start

Entering the 2022 season, I wasn’t sure what to expect out of Jared Triolo. He had himself quite the year in 2021, winning a minor league gold glove, leading High-A East division in hits, and finishing a tad shy of a 20-20 season.

All are good numbers, and an impressive starting point for his first full season in the minors after the pandemic wiped out the 2020 season. Offensively speaking, he did play in Greensboro, and we know how that hitter-friendly park can be sometimes.

Triolo wasn’t one of those players though, has he hit for better power numbers away from First National Bank Field as opposed to in it.

So was the power legit?

Two months into the 2022 season his 15 home run, 44 extra-base hit campaign from a year ago looked like numbers cooked up on a video game, and not actually what we should expect from Triolo.

The infielder slashed .265/.350/.309 with a .043 ISO and 87 wRC+ with no home runs and just seven extra-base hits (all doubles) in 162 at-bats. A far cry for a player who was able to keep pace with fellow infielders and Top 100 prospects Liover Peguero (14 home runs in Greensboro) and Nick Gonzales (18).

But like he did last year, Triolo is starting to dig himself out of another slow start. Since June, Triolo has nearly tripled his ISO (.121), and is batting far better than the average hitter (120 wRC+). The power isn’t coming to him like it was in High-A, even with the high road splits that still wasn’t likely to happen, but he has shown it didn’t completely leave him.

Triolo’s value will always come from his glove, but the difference between him potentially carving a role out in the majors and a guy that shuttles back and forth from the minors is going to be how much he can hit. He’s making the right adjustments so far as we approach the final stretch of the season.

–Speaking of players who were off to a rough start, Matt Frazier is another name that is slowly, and quietly, stringing some hits together.

At this point in the season, it feels like there was enough players that got off to bad enough starts that there won’t be enough time to really turn around their full numbers. It will take breaking it down month-to-month and see if they got better to really tell the whole story.

Fraizer had a wRC+ of 62 during the first two months of the season. Since the start of June, he is just a tad under ‘league average’ with a mark of 95. But all of the numbers are trending in the right direction.

As long as prospects are trending up, and not down, they are working in the right direction.