Prospect Buys for 2025: Demetrio Crisantes, ARI

Diamond in the desert

Demetrio Crisantes, 2B, Arizona Diamondbacks

Buy: Where you can acquire for less than a top-60 prospect.

Run DMC (his middle name is Miguel, I’m not totally remixing here) was a prep standout in southern Arizona near the Mexico border with a strong commitment to the University of Arizona before being lured away by a $425K bonus in the 7th round of the 2022 draft. The Diamondbacks had a similar appeal to UA – he could stay close to home – but were able to offer him more financial weight. His decision to forego collegiate competition looks like a good one thus far.

The strength of Crisantes’ profile is evident immediately on his Baseball Reference page – he owns a career .342 batting average through his first two seasons as a professional (554 plate appearances), which is admittedly buoyed by an unsustainable .425 BABIP in 2023 and .397 in 2024. He makes fantastic swing decisions that undergird the entire operation. He balances aggression and passivity with a 43.3% swing rate (around 45% is generally regarded as ideal), and he gets to that figure by swinging when he should (73% rate on pitches in the heart of the zone) while avoiding pitches he can’t damage (23% chase rate). The shape of his production is extremely encouraging, too; he puts the ball in the air or on a line just under 63% of the time and pulls the ball with regularity.

He doesn’t project as a plus athlete but moves well enough to handle second base and is savvy enough to take a bag here or there even as competition improves. His frame doesn’t portend a ton of future projection (at least not as much as we might anticipate if he had an extra inch or two and was a smidge younger), though he’s getting to solid power – both surface output and underlying – and the hope is that the 23 doubles he collected in 2024 will eventually alchemize into over-the-fence outcomes.

h/t Geoff Pontes (@GeoffPontesBA) for the underlying data.