CIN

Brandon Marsh, OF

Edit player ✎
Baseball Reference → FanGraphs → MLB →

Scouting report

After long-struggling to generate impact game power despite obvious raw juice, Marsh appeared to make a swing change that first became evident to me during the 2019 Fall League, though we've yet to have a sufficiently large sample of results to see if that's true and if so, exactly how meaningful it will be. In the AFL, Marsh's hands loaded a little farther out from his body and he had what some scouts called a "wrap" or "power tip," where the bat head is angled toward the mound a bit, setting up more of a loop than a direct path to the ball. I thought he lifted the ball better during that six week stretch and did so without compromising his strong feel for contact. But the lost 2020 season (even if I sourced launch angle data from the alt site, guys were facing the same pitchers over and over again, so I just don't think it's meaningful) and Marsh's ongoing shoulder issues (he had a labrum injury in 2020 that barked at him again early this year) have prevented us from getting a clear idea of this change's impact because his contact quality has been poor this year. Marsh has a great first step in center and has fantastic gap-to-gap range. He has struggled to close the deal on fly balls approaching the wall this year, dropping several catchable though not routine balls (they're only catchable because his range is so good). All of this has occurred amid off-field adversity (Marsh's father recently passed away; Fabian Ardaya of The Athletic wrote about Marsh's dad, their relationship, and his father's several bouts with cancer late in 2019) and a nagging injury. I suppose one could argue that the persistence of the injury itself is value-altering but for now I'm not inclined to come off of Marsh at all. I worry that this year will be a struggle because of the chaotic nature of his world for the past couple of years, but ultimately I see a well-rounded player who's going to reach base and hit for power at above-average rates while also playing plus defense at a premium position. There are All-Star-level tools here and a contact/OBP performance foundation to fall back on even if I'm wrong about the swing finally being dialed in.