A few seasons ago, Frederick Bencosme had some serious juice in the Orioles system. In 2022, just two years after signing for $10,000 out of the Dominican Republic, Bencosme was getting people’s attention. He played at three different levels that year, spending most of his time in Delmarva. There he posted a nice .842 OPS while being nearly two years younger than the average player at the level. It seemed the Orioles may have struck gold with this under-the-radar signing.
Bencosme, now 21 years old, has continued to climb up the minor league ladder in the years since. He spent all of 2023 in High-A Aberdeen, and he just wrapped a full season with Double-A Bowie.
Over 125 games in 2024, Bencosme posted a .240/.318/.348 slash line, which worked out to a 94 wRC+. He did hit eight home runs, more than he had hit in the entirety of his career coming into the season (seven), and he swiped 28 bases on 33 attempts. There is some good stuff here, but it is never ideal to be a below-average player with the bat.
Bencosme’s growth at the plate has been slow. A FanGraphs scouting report from June describes him as a “skills-over-tools” prospect with a “precocious feel for contact.” In short, he gets the bat on the ball, but does not hit it particularly hard.
That is backed up by a few of Bencosme’s numbers from this past season. His .277 BABIP was the lowest full-season number of his career, an unfortunate reality of facing better competition while making weaker contact. But it does seem like he is making adjustments. In 2024, his walk rate dipped just below 10% and his strikeout rate climbed more than two points to 16.3%, markers of someone getting more aggressive. That resulted in a .348 slugging percentage, a sub-par number but his best work since he broke out with Delmarva in mid-2022.
The caveat here is that Bencosme is still young. Baseball Reference puts him at 2.6 years younger than the average player in Double-A. That is significant, and serves to put the performance into perspective. The upper crust prospects tend to overcome those age gaps with little issue. Bencosme is not considered to be part of that class, but that’s not an indictment on his future. Plenty of productive big leagues have followed a more traditional, linear path that allowed them to grow into their skill set.
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