With their postseason hopes fading, the Tampa Bay Rays will use the rest of the season to get a look at one of the top prospects in baseball. The Rays will call up infielder Junior Caminero on Tuesday, reports the Tampa Bay Times. The team has not yet confirmed the roster move.
Caminero, 21, briefly made his MLB debut last season, going 8 for 34 (.235) with a home run in seven games in September. Tampa carried him on their postseason roster as well. Caminero went 0 for 2 with a strikeout in two pinch-hitting appearances in the club’s two-game Wild Card Series sweep against the eventual World Series champion Texas Rangers.
A quad strain has limited Caminero to 53 Triple-A games this season, during which he’s slashed .277/.331/.498 with with 13 home runs. Our R.J. Anderson ranked Caminero the second best prospect in baseball entering 2024. Here’s his write-up:
Caminero is already the answer to a fun trivia question: what player did the Rays obtain when they traded right-hander Tobias Myers to the Guardians in November 2021? OK, so folks are more likely to ask the inverse of that question. Caminero has an incredibly fast bat. It doesn’t matter that he wraps the barrel; he’s able to generate big-time exit velocities and easy power. (His first big-league home run demonstrated how the ball sails off his bat.) He does have an overaggressive approach at the plate, and he was pounding the ball into the sand more than 50% of the time at Double-A before the Rays skipped him to the majors. (To be clear: he was still on a 40-homer pace despite that grounder rate.) Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Jordan Walker are just two players who have faced questions about maximizing their strength by adding lift. They’ve worked out just fine. The difference between Camerino and those lads is that he has the athleticism and arm to stick at the hot corner. It’s unfair to compare any prospect to Austin Riley, but a more polished Caminero could get close.
The Rays traded incumbent third baseman Isaac Paredes at the trade deadline, clearing a path for Caminero to take over as the long-term solution at the hot corner. Curtis Mead had gotten the majority of the playing time at third base following the Paredes trade, though he was always a stopgap. The job was always going to Caminero and now his time has come.
Monday night’s loss (HOU 6, TB 1) dropped the Rays to 59-59 on the season. They’ve lost five of their last seven games and are 5.5 games behind the third and final wild-card spot. FanGraphs puts their postseason odds at 4.6%.
