Nats' White rebounds with authority at Spring Breakout
Sam Dykstra
@SamDykstraMiLBPORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. – It admittedly took T.J. White some time to put his 2023 season out of his mind.
His .170 average for Wilmington was third-worst among 259 batters with at least 250 plate appearances while his 36.4 percent strikeout rate placed eighth among the same group. He fell from No. 10 on MLB Pipeline’s 2023 preseason ranking to his current spot at No. 30.
While that’s a precipitous drop, he still stayed on the list for two reasons -- his power and his patience.
Both were on display Friday as the switch-hitting slugger went 2-for-3 with a double and two RBIs in Washington’s 4-2, seven-inning loss to the Mets as part of MLB’s inaugural Spring Breakout – an event designed to put baseball’s potential future stars on display in Spring Training parks across Arizona and Florida.
“To me, it felt like playing in a real MLB game, and it felt like getting my first big league hit almost,” White said. “It was just a surreal experience. I want to thank the Nationals for giving me the opportunity to be here.”
That first knock came during the second inning in White’s first at-bat as the Nats’ starting designated hitter. Facing New York right-handed starter Dominic Hamel, White – batting from the left side – worked a 3-1 count as he refused to bite at a changeup, curveball and sweeper in the dirt. He swung through a 94.4 mph heater up and away for strike two but did not miss when he got a 95.6 mph four-seamer over the heart of the plate with the count full, driving the ball to the warning track for a double that drove in Trey Lipscomb from third.
White’s 107.4 mph exit velocity was tops among his fellow Nationals prospects in a game that featured Top 100 prospects Dylan Crews, James Wood and Brady House, and the double was the club’s only extra-base hit in the abbreviated contest.
“The biggest thing for him, like I told him, is to stay on the fastball,” said Washington manager Dave Martinez. “He can’t miss fastballs, and he hit the ball really well. It’s good for him.”
White added his second knock of the day on a 95.1 mph pitch from righty Blade Tidwell two innings later. Of the 15 pitches he saw on the afternoon, White faced seven offspeed pitches and swung at only two, fouling both off.
Standing at 6-foot-2, 210 pounds, White has at least plus raw power, and that continued to be true even when he was struggling at pitcher-friendly Wilmington last year. But the ballpark factors alone weren’t too blame for his ballooning strikeout rate. As indicated by his 12.2 walk percentage, White understood the zone, but his overall approach vacillated too much for him to find consistency at the dish.
“I feel like last year I put myself in a hole a lot taking pitches I shouldn’t have taken and swinging at pitches I shouldn’t have been swinging at,” he said.
Honing in on hittable fastballs bore fruit Friday, and as little as anyone wants to get too wrapped up in a single performance in the middle of March, perhaps no one needed a single performance like this as much as White. He had hoped to be Washington’s starting Spring Breakout first baseman, but that went to 2023 second-rounder Yohandy Morales, whose natural position is the hot corner. Having learned about his DH duties Thursday night, White took the assignment in stride.
“[Nerves] were way up there, I’m not going to lie to you,” White said. “But I found a way to corral them and come back together. At the end of the day, it was just a baseball game.”
Perhaps the most important number to remember about White’s 2023 is this one – it was only his age-19 season. There were only six age-19 players with more than 250 PA at High-A last year, and three (Jackson Holliday, Edwin Arroyo, Ryan Clifford) are Top 100 prospects.
Player development – especially this early in a young player’s career – is rarely linear, but at least for a day, White got the arrow pointing back upward in the right direction.
“I think it grows my confidence,” he said, “and it shows everybody else what I can do.”