Taking a closer look at SS prospect José Tena

I’m so excited to write about one of my favorite prospects in the Guardians’ system today. I’ve been watching José Tena play since he debuted in Lake County in 2021. His swing and the way he plays defense has always been so fun to watch for me. When you watch him hit, you can see that he hits the ball hard, but before he reached AAA, I didn’t know just how hard he really does hit the ball. Just yesterday he hit a home run with an exit velocity of 112.1 mph, that would be the hardest hit ball by any Guardians player this season.

I looked up all the AAA statcast data from the last two seasons, and it’s pretty shocking just how impressive José Tena has been. By no means is he a perfect prospect, he has his clear flaws and there are definitely red flags, but we’ll get into those later. Right now let’s just focus on what has had me so intrigued about Tena for the last year or so.

The Production:

If you go to fangraphs and take a look at Tena’s stats this season, they aren’t going to blow you away. He’s slashing .280/.327/.435 with a .762 OPS and a 95 WRC+, very pedestrian numbers. However, Tena has always been a slow starter. In April, he slashed .200/.253/.318 with a .571 OPS. In April of 2023, he slashed .115/.233/.154 for a very poor OPS of .387. April of 2022? .263/.296/.355 for a .651 OPS. So we’ve established that he typically always gets off to slow starts.

Since the calendar turned to May, Tena is slashing .366/.410/.570 with an OPS of .980, with 5 home runs, 4 doubles, and 19 RBIs. He’s been on an absolute heater this month, but it’s been more than just this month. Since June 2nd of 2023, Tena is slashing .306/.370/.476 with a 123 WRC+, but that also comes with a 28.3% K rate. Now that isn’t ELITE production, but it’s pretty close considering the defensive value that he brings at SS.

The Underlying Metrics:

OK, we talked about what Tena has done from a results perspective over the last year, now I’m going to get into what REALLY has me intrigued and excited about him. I mentioned earlier that I had been looking at the statcast data from AAA over the last two seasons, and I found some very impressive and interesting numbers. Exit velocities are not everything, but as long as baseball has been a sport, hitting the ball hard has been the goal for every single hitter, so it absolutely matters to a certain extent. If you hit the ball harder, you simply are going to have more success the majority of the time. Now, let’s get into the data.

The first graphic here is of every hitter at AAA Columbus from the last two seasons that have seen a minimum of 400 pitches. They are all ranked using an advanced metric called Expected Weighted On-base Average, also knows as xWOBA. This is my personal favorite overall advanced metric to determine how well a player is performing. Similarly to expected batting average, it takes the exit velocity and the launch angle, and it determines what the expected WOBA should have been.

Tena hasn’t been the best hitter in AAA Columbus over the past two seasons, but he has been pretty close, and most importantly, assuming the Guardians don’t want to move Tyler Freeman out of CF, Tena has been better than all of the current potential Guardians’ starting SS’s. There’s no shame in being behind the guys that he is behind on this list, as they are all fantastic hitters. I know you all remember the legend of Roman Quinn in spring training last year.

The first graphic shows the leaders in HardHit% over the last two seasons in Columbus, and the second graphic shows the leaders in Average Exit Velocity in that same time span. A hard hit ball is considered any ball that is hit with an exit velocity of 95 mph or higher.

Now, you may be looking at these and thinking, “maybe the Guardians just don’t have that many prospects that hit the ball hard, and that is why Tena is leading in all these exit velocity categories.” While the former may not be completely wrong, the latter certainly is. Here is how Tena stacks up amongst the entirety of AAA hitters this season.

There are some familiar names here on these lists. It’s never bad to be in the same company of top 10 prospects in all of baseball like James Wood and (*cries a little bit*) Junior Caminero, along with some other legit top prospects like Coby Mayo. We also have to remember that Tena is 5’9, 160 pounds, and has a legit chance to be a really good defensive shortstop. It is absolutely insane to me that someone at his size generates the power that he is able to generate.

Now after seeing this, you may be asking yourselves, “how is this kid not one of the best prospects in baseball?” As much as I love to ignore the flaws and only focus on the positives when it comes to Guardians’ prospects, it is important to add context to why Tena hasn’t had consistent results throughout his entire minor league career, and why he isn’t viewed as a top 100 type prospect. He has some big red flags, most glaring is the fact that he swings and misses...a lot.

Here is a list of the whiff rates of the AAA Columbus hitters over the last two seasons. The good news is that he’s around the same level as guys like Rodriguez, Valera, and Schneemann, who a lot of us think can succeed at the MLB level. Typically you don’t want to see a 5’9 160 pound SS with a whiff rate that high, but as we saw above, Tena isn’t your typical undersized middle infielder. He is going to swing and miss, and he is going to strike out. Can he limit the strikeouts enough to be an everyday player? It’s a similar question that will have to be answered by the other guys around him on this list as well.

The other big red flag with Tena is the fact that he really struggles to lift the ball consistently, it’s been a huge issue this season in particular. This year he is hitting the ball on the ground 55% of the time, which is a really rough number.

This graphic shows the lowest launch angles of every hitter in AAA this season, and while Tena’s isn’t the worst, it is still very bad. Hitting the ball hard is very important, but when most of your hard contact is going into the ground, you aren’t going to get the results that you would get if you were lifting the ball more consistently.

Another one of my favorite advanced metrics is barrel rate. This graphic shows the best barrel rates among AAA Columbus hitters the last two seasons. A barrel is any batted ball with an exit velocity of 98 mph or higher, and a launch angle between 26-30 degrees. For every mph over 98, the range of the launch angle expands to be classified as a barrel. So for example, a batted ball that is hit with a 102 mph exit velocity has to have a launch angle between 22-34 degrees to be classified as a barrel. A batter’s barrel rate is determined by how many of his batted balls are classified as barrels, so if a batter has 10 barrels in 100 batted balls, he has a 10% barrel rate.

Despite Tena’s launch angle issues, he has still been able to maintain a pretty good barrel rate over the last two seasons, and while the GB% numbers have been very rough this season, they weren’t this bad last season in a larger sample size. In 2023, in AA he hit groundballs 44.4% of the time, then in AAA, he lowered that number to 33.3% of the time. He is likely always going to hit the ball on the ground more than you would like, and it ultimately could keep him from ever maximizing the raw power that he has.

So we went over some of the good and some of the bad of José Tena. I hope you can understand why I have been so intrigued and so excited about him over the last year. He certainly has his flaws, and I do not view him as a can’t miss prospect. In all likelihood, one of the red flags that I mentioned will keep him from being an everyday player. Baseball is HARD, especially at the MLB level, but he certainly has the traits to make it. The power potential is very real, he has some of the best raw power in the entire organization, and he also has the potential to be a plus defensive SS, there aren’t many guys that you can say that about. Do you believe that he deserves a shot to be the Guardians’ everyday SS? I think that we should give Brayan Rocchio more time to figure it out, but I also believe that Tena is the better prospect, and I would love to see him get that opportunity very soon.