"If He Grows Into Power"

There are many hypothetical players that Bowman people love to chase after but I’m personally a big fan of the “if he grows into power” bat. The logic is easy for me - it’s much, much easier for a hitter with great contact skills and approach to get stronger than it is for guys with elite raw power but massive swing-and-miss to improve their contact ability. Of course there are examples of guys with big power improving their strikeout rates by 10% from the year prior, Joshua Baez of the Cardinals is a recent one that comes to mind, but they are few and far between compared to the number of great bat-to-ball hitters who increase their ISO by 100+ points in one season.

Kevin McGonigle is perhaps one of the best examples of this. When I did my rankings for 2025 Bowman I could have flipped a coin for the #1 chase between Jesus Made and McGonigle, saying they were more of a 1A and 1B than anything. However, a few weeks after the release of that product Made’s base autograph was selling for over $250 and McGonigle’s was around $75 which I reiterated multiple times was a huge miss by the market. What caused much of this discrepancy was the fact that despite showing arguably the best hitting approach I’ve seen in the minors over the past five years McGonigle hadn’t shown much HR power, and without homers it’s tough for your cards to pop. Although he missed a portion of that season with a sprained ankle he returned to hit 19 HRs in 88 games after going deep just 5 times the year prior, nearly doubling his ISO from .143 to .278. Obviously the goal is to buy players before this happens so let’s take a look some of Kevin McGonigle’s numbers from before that breakout and see if we can’t predict a similar path for current prospects.