Unless they’re top draft picks, many players who are not even a full season into professional baseball go unnoticed by many fans. Every once in a while, there are exceptions to this rule. Enter Twins prospect Payton Eeles.
His story has become well known to baseball fans across the States this off-season following an interview with JustBaseball’s Aram Leighton and Jack McMullen and Foolish Bailey’s breakdown of his baseball career dating back to high school. But here’s a quick recap of his timeline over the last two years.
Who is Payton Eeles?
2024 Stats (A/A+/Triple-A): 469 PA, .307 AVG/.435 OBP/.497 SLG, 12 HR, 60 RBI, 41 SB
After going undrafted in his super senior year at Coastal Carolina in 2023, Eeles spent the rest of the summer playing with the American Association’s Chicago Dogs. Eeles impressed Dogs’ manager and former Red Sox skipper Butch Hobson quickly upon arrival and began reaching out to Major League scouts to see what Eeles was made of.
Hobson likened Eeles to a modern-day ‘Charlie Hustle,’ and former Minnesota Twins scout, who went out to scout him that summer, Billy Milos, saw that energy in his game. While Milos left the Twins in the 2023-24 offseason and is now with the Colorado Rockies, the Twins held onto Milos’s scouting report on Eeles from his time with the organization.
The Twins still monitored Eeles as he began the 2024 season with the Southern Maryland Blue Crabs of the Atlantic League. He only needed to play six games to convince the Twins he was their guy to sign, and the rest is history.
After playing 111 games between Low-A Ft. Myers, High-A Cedar Rapids, and Triple-A St. Paul, Eeles quickly proved he belonged in the ranks of Minor League Baseball. Standing at only 5’5″, Eeles has drawn considerable comparisons to a younger Jose Altuve as well, and his numbers from his first season of pro ball back it up.
Eeles will likely pick up his 2025 season where it left off in St. Paul with the Saints. He is eager to prove he’s ready to make his Major League debut this season.
The Hit and Power Tools
The upside for Eeles is his hit tool. He is a hitter who can hit the ball to all corners of the field, pulling the ball to right field 39.1%, up the middle to center 23.4%, and getting a lot of opposite-field contact 37.5%. There also isn’t too much separation between his batting average and how often he puts the ball in play as his .341 BABIP translated into a .307 batting average for the season.
He’s still developing with his power at the plate with a 13.3% home run to flyball rate, but with what looks to be the majority of his season in the hitter-friendly International League, he’ll likely see those home run numbers creep up closer to 20 on the year. Aside from the lack of power, Eeles is a well-rounded hitter, drawing almost as many walks (67) as strikeouts (68), driving in runs by hitting the ball to the gap, and stealing bases almost every time he gets on.
Like a red-hot rookie in the major leagues entering their sophomore season, pitchers in the minors will also be looking to exploit the weaknesses of Eeles’ approach at the plate. But so far, most pitchers have not been able to find any weaknesses as his numbers between Low-A, High-A, and Triple-A remained consistent. If there is any glaring weakness, it’s his exit velocity on hits, which averaged 86.6 and maxed out at 107 in 2024.
An 86.6 average exit velo would have put Eeles at 223rd in MLB last season, right ahead of Altuve, who sat at 86.5 in 2024. Altuve maxed out his exit velocity at 108.4, which was a double off of Garrett Crochet that hit Minute Maid Park’s left field scoreboard just below the Crawford boxes. If Eeles had that exact same hit at CHS Field, it would have cleared the left field fence for a home run, which goes to show if Eeles can improve upon his power and bring up his exit velocity this season, he’ll be a much better all-around hitter.
Eeles’s Fantasy Outlook
Eeles has found his way onto Twins Top 30 Prospect lists by national outlets going into the 2025 season, sitting anywhere from their 11th best prospect (per Leighton for Just Baseball) or as low as their 23rd best prospect (per MLB Pipeline).
On the surface, Eeles has everything a dynasty fantasy team wants in a Minor League player they can stash on their roster for the future. He can get on base frequently via hits or walks and steal bases consistently. The power will grow with an increase in exit velocity in his swing speed. He isn’t quite the player for fantasy managers to build around, but he’s the right guy to have in a dynasty league for depth. He’s also an incredible person who’s overcome much adversity thrown his way in the game, showing he belongs to play at each level despite his 5’5 height.
His limited experience in the minors has kept him generally lower on the Twins’ top prospect lists because he hasn’t had a full season. Despite the lack of experience, his 2024 stats across three levels of the minors show he is worth the pick-up for any fantasy baseball manager looking for a prospect ranking anywhere between 15-30 in a team’s rankings to bet on their upside.
On Thursday, Bobby Nightengale Jr. of the Minnesota Star Tribune reported that Eeles would miss the start of the 2025 season due to a minor knee procedure addressing a cartilage issue that Eeles underwent during the off-season. There is no ETA on when Eeles will return, but according to Nightengale’s reporting, the Twins’ sources claimed they do not expect him to miss significant time as he continues to recover from the injury.
The knee procedure is the first time Eeles will be missing a portion of the season due to injury. That being said, it’s not a clear picture of what his outlook could mean going forward. However, given it’s an issue Eeles may have been playing through in 2024 and still performed well with, it is likely the surgery may help him play even better going forward.
Eeles is no stranger to overcoming the expectations levied on him that put up more obstacles than uplift him. Each time this has happened, he finds a way to overcome those expectations, looking down on him and proving to be ‘Charlie Hustle’. If you’re someone who believes in the upside of his stock playing out in the majors, Eeles is worth the pick-up.
