Prospect Buys for 2025: Jesus Made, MIL

Whether it's destiny or data, he's a good one

Jesus Made, SS, Milwaukee Brewers

Buy: Where you can acquire for less than a top-40 prospect.

The anglicized pronunciation of his name – that is, the way you might say it if you were from Green Bay or Sheboygan – sounds awfully prophetic. A Milwaukee Brewer tearing up the DSL at age 17, turning heads and generating outstanding underlying data in the process feels faintly prophetic, too. Made signed for $950,000 eight months ago (almost to the day) and celebrated his seventeenth birthday just 26 days ahead of the DSL season. He went on to finish sixth in wRC+ and slugging, eighth in on-base percentage and stolen bases, and 11th in swinging strike rate among Dominican Summer Leaguers aged 17 or younger.

That’s all fine and well. Baseball card stats from the lowest level of affiliated professional baseball are blurry and ultimately lack utility when it comes to projection, and the objective is to ascertain what a player’s production might look like when they make it to MLB. Underlying data – the metrics available to us via Trackman or Hawkeye – can make the picture a little clearer, akin to putting on glasses that aren’t quite the right prescription. Made’s data pops and is why I prefer him to other facially impressive DSLer’s this year. His EV90 of 104.2 mph is roughly league average for a big league hitter; in other words, when Made is squaring it up, he’s doing damage commensurate with players that are 11 years his senior on average. He combines that ferocity with a measured approach and excellent bat-to-ball, three ingredients that manifest in an intriguing all-around package when combined.

The top DSLer in any given season is a good player to have on your roster, whether they ultimately return value at the big league level or not. I don’t think the public has caught up to where major league organizations and well-regarded publications are on him. I suspect that will change as we transition to the off-season and there’s nothing but time for analysts to dig into his profile.

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