Angels top prospect bust serves as a cautionary tale for young standout

At one point, Kyren Paris was one of the Angels' top prospects. FanGraphs had him ranked 14th in the organization in 2023 while Baseball America was more bullish with him as the Halos' fourth-best prospect heading into 2024.

While Paris was an extremely young but highly-touted prospect upon being selected in the second round in 2019, his two big-league stints in 2023 and 2024 have made him a prime DFA candidate should the team need to free up space on the 40-man roster.

While the sample is small, just 36 games across two seasons, Paris' putrid slash line of .110/.214/.165 with a wRC+ of 10 and a -0.8 fWAR has all but confirmed that he's not a major-league caliber player despite superb athleticism, speed, and flashy tools.

What caused his downfall? Simply put he could not stop whiffing, which led to an extremely high strikeout rate. His other modest offensive tools could not overcome this glaring weakness. Paris' strikeout rate has hovered at or above the 30% mark throughout his minor league career, which is simply too high to maintain any sort of offensive relevance without prodigious power to offset it.

Paris may be on his way out the door, but his downfall provides a cautionary tale for the soon-to-be 21-year-old Denzer Guzman.

Denzer Guzman will have to cut down on his strikeouts to have a future with the Angels

The prospect pundits are high on Guzman, just as they were on Paris in the past. Currently, Baseball America ranks him eighth in the Angels' system. Same goes for FanGraphs, as their site also ranks him no. eight.

While he doesn't have the same elite speed as Paris, Guzman is similar in that he also is a glove-first shortstop with exceptional athleticism. Guzman likely won't ever be an offensive powerhouse, but he doesn't need to in order to be a quality player at the major league level as a potentially elite defensive shortstop.

Guzman has shown enough promise for the Angels to be aggressive with him. The front office winded up promoting him to AA last season and saw some solid initial results. However, with nearly every jump in level, he's seen a corresponding jump in strikeout rate.

Starting out as a 17-year-old in the Dominican Summer League in 2021 he struck out a respectable 14.6% of the time. The following year that number rose to 23.1%, followed by a jump to 27.8% in A ball in 2023. Last year, there was a small improvement as he struck out a combined 27.7% between Hi-A and AA, with his AA mark being a bit better at 26.3%.

Scouts note that he has a tendency to get long with his swing path leading to these elevated strikeout numbers. That's fine if you have elite power, but Guzman put up a minuscule .091 ISO last season to go along with his .224/.302/.315 line.

While you can possibly excuse some of that to his youth relative to AA competition it doesn't change the fact that his strikeout rate has been rising for a few years now. In order for him to realize his big-league dreams he's going to have to embrace a shortened stroke that emphasizes contact to fit his profile and prove he can be a quality big leaguer.

2025 will be a crucial year for the youngster, and if he fails at cutting down the K's he could find himself quickly following Paris's path from promise to irrelevance.

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