Peaking back behind the corner we usually peak around
Gabriel Arias showed signs of promise like this before. I’ve never quite believed in him long-term because he never quite seems to sustain the form.
Let’s reset before we move forward. Nothing about the above is meant to be an insult to his abilities, his approach to the game, his demeanor, his overall quality and value as a human being, all that stuff.
Brian and I covered him on Around the Corner for quite a while and this is where it’s funny to have a bunch of old notes scattered around a google drive. It’s not a perfect dataset but here is our Top Ten Prospects as voted by then-Let’s Go Tribe readers from May 12th, 2021.
1. Nolan Jones
2. Tyler Freeman
3. Bo Naylor
4. George Valera
5. Gabriel Arias
6. Daniel Espino
7. Brayan Rocchio
8. Aaron Bracho
9. Ethan Hankins
10. Josh Wolf
Four of those guys are on the team four years later! Incredibly, number one and number were just got traded for each other. Espino and Hankins were absolute studs at the time, though Hankins had just scheduled Tommy John Surgery.
And this was the Top Ten after we adjusted it due to Triston McKenzie graduating.
There are a couple of reasons why this is interesting to me. First, again, look at all of the talent on this list. These are just a bunch of guys we voted on based on national consensus and a little dash of our own hunches as a community. In one system! We talked, at the time, about how it felt like the overall quality of Cleveland’s system might not be understood. You will recall how arms such as Shane Bieber flew through without much prospect buzz despite posting literally hilarious statistics the entire time. This isn’t a dig or a dunk on anybody—plenty of prospects fly under the radar and two guys doing the numbers every couple of weeks are bound to notice something eventually.
Man of the moment, Gabriel Arias, sat at number five in the summer of 2021. Here is what he produced the two weeks prior, which I believe is what we would have presented on the podcast: .243/.378/.351, good for a 107 wRC+ at Triple-A. He finished that season with a .284/.348/.454 slash at age 21, playing the entire year in Columbus.
I return to you today because the same slice of numbers—about two weeks—is now available from 2025 Gabriel Arias: .286/.354/.524, good for a 154 wRC+ in Major League Baseball. When Ben Clemens asked us to dream on him in March this is very much the kind of thing he had in mind.
As we know, two weeks of baseball is only two weeks of baseball but an interesting finding from four or five years of co-hosting Around the Corner? There really aren’t that many guys who are capable of having a hot two-week stretch like that at a premium defensive position at all. Yeah, random guys will pop off here and there because output from a baseball player is incredibly noisy in the short run. Still, over time, not many players end up having that kind of burst at all. And the ones who do it a lot tend to put up better numbers, you get it.
It would be cool if everybody was Eddie Murray or Hank Aaron and calmly slugged baseballs before nodding and jogging the bases for twenty years, but baseball is really hard. Gabriel Arias looks like he’s going to be pretty good at it, and I’m rooting for him to keep the fire of this hot streak stoked.
With teammate Angel Martinez’s hot start also catalogued by Quincy this morning maybe the off-season help that this team needed was a little bit of patience and development time. A more consistent and confident Gabriel Arias represents a middle infielder that pretty much any team would love to have.
And to think—I had Ernie Clement in the Corner Cupboard at the time instead.