Welcome to the Road to Wire Prospect podcast brought to you by Vivid Seats.

I'm your host James Anderson, and we've got a great show for you today.

Got my buddy, Zach Beck, from Dynasty Dugout, joining me to do some prospect superlatives,

you know, best, you know, potential breakout, maybe breakout you're not buying, struggling hitter to buy low on, all that kind of fun stuff. So it's going to be a great episode of prospect talk. Zach, thanks for coming back on the show, man. How are you doing? Thanks for having me back. Always fun to be here. I'm doing well. I'm catching a double header tonight, St. Paul Saints and Indianapolis Indians. It's not above a

Chandler start, but I am getting Thomas Harrington and Andrew Morris at least. So looking

forward to that. That's awesome, man. Really fun stuff right there. And you live up in the Twin

Cities, right? So I do. Yeah. Nice little double header in your backyard.

So this is just such a, it's a fun time of the minor league season because we're seeing all these guys, you know, face each other every day, basically for the first time in a handful

of months, but also a very challenging time as a prospect analyst because there's just so

many guys that are off to either really

good starts or really bad starts. And if we could fast forward, you know, a month, everything

would kind of normalize and we'd have a much better idea of what's real, what's fake. But if we're

trying to pick guys up this early in the season or decide who to drop. We do have to kind of work with this limited data.

So Zach and I are going to try to find some guys that we think have done something noteworthy,

either good or bad in the early going here.

And the first one I've got for you, Zach, is the potential hitter breakout that you are buying so far in 2025.

Yeah, I think hitter breakouts early in the season are harder to pin down than pitching.

You can kind of pop on a video of any pitcher and get a good sense for whether or not their stuff is going to play.

And then, of course, you're looking for results.

So hitters are a little bit more challenging where I'm going to stake my claim here is Arun Escobar, second baseman for the Phillies.

He has been excellent through his first 61 plate appearances, slashing 396, 475, 600. He was a really

buzzing name going into spring breakout. Basically, everybody I sat by in Florida a month ago, that was the name they were talking about when it came to Philly spring breakout.

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