Atlanta Braves Scouting Report on SS Alejandro Salazar

Scouting Report

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Salazar is listed at 6′ and 170 pounds. He’s definitely lean, though he could be an inch or so taller than the 6′ listed.

Hitting

Salazar sits moving in the box, but he does have a very good approach once he gets lined up for the ball. He is very quick to the ball with a quick, succinct swing.

One of the struggles I’ve noticed in his swing that could be an issue going forward is that Salazar knows he has remarkably quick wrists, so he can sometimes get a little bit lazy in getting his lower half connected in with his upper half.

Salazar has put on some natural strength in his lower half in the last couple of years, so he’s certainly got the strength in the lower half to generate power in his swing. I still don’t know that he’ll ever be a guy who would hit 20 home runs, but he could be a guy to use the gaps much more, sneaking over 10 home runs in a good year.

He will need to work with coordination in his swing to do that, however. His hands are some of the best in the entire system, especially considering all the video I saw of him was as a 19 year-old playing in full-season ball. However, if he could just get those hands in tune with his lower-half, he’d generate a lot more positive contact.

Base Running/Fielding

Salazar is one of those guys who really puts the difference between base stealing and base running into focus.

As a base stealer, Salazar is mediocre at this point. He’s got long legs, and while they’re fluid on the field (more on that in a bit), he takes a bit to get them going on the bases. As such, he’s played 206 games in his minor league career and stolen a total of 20 bases while being caught 13 times.

However, this is not due to being slow by any means as Salazar certainly has above-average speed, and the best place for him to exhibit that offensively is in his base running. He does an exceptional job of taking extra bases when he’s running bases, and he seems to have an extra gear that he kicks into about half way between bases that if he’s going for two bases of running, he’s running at an elite speed for a good portion, but going station to station, he’s just a shade above average.

Defensively is where Salazar really shines. He has incredibly fluid movement in his long arms and legs moving side to side for balls. His best instincts are two his arm side, which helped in Rome this year as Austin Riley was struggling badly on defense at third and Salazar certainly covered up a lot of his mistakes with his range.

Salazar’s arm is right on that border of above-average and plus, but his accuracy with his throws has improved impressively since his time at lower levels. In nearly double the innings and 1.5 times the chances this year with Rome, he made less errors than his 2015 time in GCL, and most of those errors could be traced to inaccurate or poor decision throws.

That defensive maturity as a 19 year-old is why Salazar gets such high remarks from people within the Braves organization that I talk with, who often discuss his glove leading his contact-oriented bat up the minors until the bat catches up.

Video

Next: Future outlook