The ink was still damp on Jasson Domínguez’s first contract when his Instagram blew up.
It was the summer of 2019, and Domínguez was a 16-year-old phenom from the Dominican Republic who’d just received a huge signing bonus from the Yankees. He’d affixed his signature to the deal and was on the way home when he checked his phone. “I picked it up and saw I had 1,500 new followers,” Domínguez said through an interpreter last month. “I pulled it down so it refreshed, and it was 2,500 new followers. It kept going up.” If the $5 million bonus was the first sign his life was about to change, this was the second. A nickname — The Martian, for his otherworldly skills — soon followed.
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That follower count has continued to ascend skyward, sitting now at 148,000, but it is just one measure of the incredible hype that has surrounded the 19-year-old since he entered pro ball three years ago. Before the switch-hitting Dominguez had seen a professional pitch, anonymous evaluators were comparing him to Mickey Mantle and Mike Trout. A New York Post headline declared him a “super-prospect.” He was heralded as a five-tool wonder, a 16-year-old wunderkind in a fully developed body with fully developed exit velocities to match.
Add the fact that he plays for the Yankees — and that he received the biggest bonus the storied franchise has ever lavished on an international amateur — and the scrutiny is close to overwhelming. “We have first-rounders every year and we have somebody who signs for a couple million dollars coming out of the international market,” said Kevin Reese, New York’s vice president of player development, “but this is a completely different level of hype and expectation.” The Mick didn’t have to contend with the magnifying effect of social media.
Yet, despite it all, Domínguez miraculously appears to have remained a normal person. One day in mid-November, after his last game with the Mesa Solar Sox in the Arizona Fall League, Domínguez relaxed on a dugout bench and reflected on what has been an incredibly closely watched journey through the minors. He signed and then disappeared from the public eye for a year as the COVID-19 pandemic canceled what would have been his first minor-league season. Pedestrian results at Low A in 2021 tanked his prospect stock, as did a slow start to 2022 at the same level. But a torrid recovery, followed by promotions to High A and then Double A, has more than resuscitated it. He is two levels away from the majors, and he won’t turn 20 until February.
As fans and prospect aficionados have hopped off the bandwagon and back on, settling perhaps on a more realistic projection for Domínguez’s career in pinstripes, the young outfielder has remained steady and unbothered. Talk to anyone with the Yankees about Domínguez, and that person quickly will point out how unfair it is to publicly compare a 16-year-old to some of the greatest players ever to grip a bat. Everyone but Domínguez, that is. He may have had to bone up on Mantle’s accomplishments — kids worship different baseball heroes in the D.R. — but Dominguez doesn’t consider it a burden to be mentioned alongside the Commerce Comet.
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He considers it a privilege.
“It’s an honor to be compared to these big names,” he said, sitting in a dirt-covered Yankees jersey, a braces-filled smile underscoring his youthfulness, “and I hope to one day reach and surpass them.”
Tired: Living up to the impossible hype placed on you as a teen.
Wired: Living with it.
Jasson Domínguez shining in the Fall Stars Game!
The @Yankees' No. 2 prospect laces a laser RBI double. pic.twitter.com/3SgSW41OAi
— MLB Pipeline (@MLBPipeline) November 6, 2022
T.J. Rumfield remembers playing against Domínguez in 2021, when the Yankees phenom was making his Low-A debut. He’d heard about this guy, the next switch-hitting Yankees star already bound for the Hall of Fame, and Rumfield didn’t like it. “When you’re playing against him, you think he’s this co*cky, arrogant kid who just has it all,” said Rumfield, a 12th-round pick of the Phillies that same year. But after a trade to New York and a closer exposure to Domínguez, Rumfield couldn’t help but change his mind. “Then you get to play with him,” the first baseman said, “and the kid’s down to earth and he wants to have fun and play baseball.”
It’s nearly impossible to have heard about Domínguez and have withheld judgment. “Everybody has preconceived notions about him,” Rumfield said. Not even 20, Dominguez already has been the next big thing and a bust. Amateur scouts were understandably enticed by his tools, which include an arm that at least one Yankees coach says has been clocked up to 100 mph in the outfield and exit velocities to rival major-leaguers. At 16, he had a solid, muscular body of a man in his 20s, not a boy in his teens. But there’s almost no way to get a Trout or Mantle comp slapped on you and measure up.
When Domínguez made his professional debut with a .744 OPS in a half-season at Low A in 2021 — production that would be encouraging for most 18-year-olds — his stock took a hit. Domínguez dropped more than 50 slots on Baseball America’s Top 100 list and nearly 30 spots in MLB.com’s ranking. (The Athletic’s Keith Law, who initially ranked Domínguez more conservatively than those other publications, dropped him 12 spots to No. 78.) He chased out of the zone too often and his big frame suddenly looked like a liability rather than a strength. “It wasn’t the worst,” Domínguez said of his debut season. “But I definitely had room to be better.”
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Since then, he has been. Domínguez returned to Low A to start the 2022 season and began slowly, battling groundball tendencies and a habit of swinging out of the zone to the tune of a .225 average and .571 OPS in April. Reese, the team’s player development czar, thinks the latter is in part the result of the outsized expectations placed on the young outfielder. “I don’t think players think fans want to see them walk three times,” Reese said. To deflate the tension that comes with struggling, Reese joked with Domínguez that he should just stop swinging at balls. “Like making it seem like it’s really simple, like you don’t swing at pitches in the dirt,” Reese said. “All of a sudden, he started doing it.”
From May until the All-Star break, when he made his second consecutive appearance in the Futures Game, Domínguez batted .279/.410/.480. He walked in 17.5 percent of his plate appearances and trimmed his strikeout rate by nearly 10 points. A surprise promotion to High A — Tampa manager Rachel Balkovec fooled Domínguez by calling him into the room for a teammate’s promotion first — did little to slow his pace. With Hudson Valley, he batted .306/.397/.510, homering from both sides of the plate in one game late in the season. The hype was back.
When Hudson Valley had an autograph signing for fans, the rest of the team had tables clustered together. “And then they had Jasson’s table,” Rumfield said, “and Jasson’s line was out of the ballpark.” Renegades players generally park in the same lot as fans, but the crowds surrounding Dominguez’s car would be so suffocating that the team had to find him a spot behind a gate next to the clubhouse. “We all understood it,” said Rumfield.
Though Domínguez admits to practicing his signature as a young child, he’s still getting used to deploying it so often. The key, he says, is to not pay it so much mind. The same is true when it comes to what the prospect prognosticators say about him. Domínguez has a theory about that. “Whether it’s good or bad,” he said, “they’re going to go where the show is happening.”
That tends to be wherever he is.
It is easy to forget that Domínguez is still very much a kid.
Teammates and coaches describe him as goofy and funny. During a recent batting practice in Mesa, Domínguez stopped to wrap a teammate in a burly hug from behind. He has a wry sense of humor, snatching a protective sliding glove from a pocket and tossing it over his shoulder when asked if he uses it when running the bases. He also admits that, until earlier this year, he was scared as hell to slide headfirst. He finally pushed himself to attempt it during a game with Tampa this season. Was he safe? “Sí,” he said in a mock-serious tone, as if the questioner shouldn’t have even needed to ask.
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If Domínguez doesn’t seem like a kid, it’s because he sure doesn’t look like one. He’s listed at 5-foot-10 and 190 pounds, but he’s pushing two bills easily. His physique isn’t chiseled so much as it’s thick and solid like a rock formation, and his face has the angular fullness of a weightlifter. Yes, he has always been big, including when he was just an amateur, but he has managed to get even bigger and stronger since he entered pro ball.
(But not as big as he once was. Not invited to the alternate site, Domínguez spent 2020 at an aunt’s home in New Jersey, occasionally hitting and working Door Dash with his cousin. That, and posting old videos of a sculpted version of himself in the batting cage, without the crucial #latergram disclosure. “Somebody commented, ‘During COVID, Jasson Dominguez turned into the Hulk!’” he said. “But really, I’d gained weight.”)
It’s that physique, once such a point in his favor as an amateur, that causes scouts to continue to cast a skeptical eye. Teenagers tend to fill out as they enter their 20s, and while that may promise added muscle to most of the gangly wisps that sign deals with big-league clubs at 16, Domínguez’s frame doesn’t leave much room for any more good weight. And while the outfielder has a reputation for speed — indeed, he stole 42 bases between the regular season and the fall league — even his highest-effort runs out of the box looked sluggish late in the fall.
Then again, it was a long season. The Yankees pushed Domínguez this hard, up to Double A for a playoff run at the end of the year and to the fall league for a final six weeks of baseball, because the pandemic had robbed him of important reps at the plate and in the outfield. Domínguez handled it well physically — though his fall numbers were poor, he routinely hit the ball hard — but also felt the grind for the very first time. “I’m going to work on having a better diet,” he said, “and being able to have that endurance.”
He’ll start next year at Double A, with an eventual big-league debut at least a possibility. Though Reese admits that the Yankees have the reputation of being “slow-movers of prospects,” they just jumped Domínguez two levels in the span of one year. If he proves he’s better than the competition once more, they won’t be shy about promoting him. Including to the majors. “We tell all these guys to put pressure on us,” Reese said. Domínguez has heard the message.
“I’m doing to work hard and do the best I can,” he said, “so when it comes time to make the decision, the people who do make the decision are going to make it.”
As for the hype, it’s an inescapable fact that the closer Domínguez gets to the major leagues, the more intense the attention. The question of “Will he be good?” will be elbowed out by “When will he get here?” (A third option: “Will he get traded?” According to one baseball source, the Yankees unsuccessfully dangled Domínguez as part of a package for Reds starter Luis Castillo at this year’s deadline.) New York’s top two affiliates are both a day trip’s distance from the Bronx, and fans will flock to Somerset or Scranton to get a glimpse of the Martian. Domínguez welcomes it. Stitched onto his glove is the sobriquet, along with a cartoon alien.
Domínguez’s glove. (Zach Buchanan / The Athletic)
He’s the Martian who fell to Earth, in more ways than one. He’s young and incredibly gifted, yet he’s already felt the glare of fame and what it’s like to struggle underneath it. “There was a lot of excitement” after he signed, more than a 16-year-old should be asked to manage, and he admits he “had to learn to calm myself down.” The hype is more appropriate now — plenty of praise from scouts, but no absurd Mantle comps — and Domínguez is practiced at handling it. No self-calming required.
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“Not right now,” he said. “No pressure.”
(Photo: Mark J. Rebilas / USA Today)
