Brandon Wood and Kendry Morales put up these numbers in AAA last year:

Wood: .296 / .375 / .595
K-mo: .341 / .375 / .543

Wood also hit 31 HR and Kendry hit 15. If neither player improves at all, they would be expected to put up these numbers in MLB next year:

Wood: .245 / .321 / .488
K-mo: .269 / .305 / .434

Wood would hit 18 HR and Morales would hit 13. These numbers are normalized to a league with a league of an average OPS of .750, so Wood comes in a little above average at .809 and Morales comes in a little below at .739. That’s not so bad; although corner infield spots are expected to produce more, so they’d be below average at their respective positions.

While most of us might be happy with those numbers next year, I’d rather see them improve. Brandon was 23 last year and Kendry was 25. If you adjust for their ages, the peak numbers at age 27 look like this:

Wood: .287 / .369 / .590
K-Mo: .275 / .311 / .444

Also 33 HR for Wood and 14 for Morales. That’s a sick .959 OPS for Brandon in a league that hits .750, but Kendry is almost exactly average at .755.

So the statistics speak very highly of Brandon Wood. Those numbers are what you might expect a breakout season to look like, and Wood could conceivably compete for MVP with that slash-line. Things don’t look as good for Kendry, though.

It’s hard to put too much faith in those numbers. They’re very crude figures that don’t account for things like batting tendencies. I tried to think of some other young guys with plate approaches similar to what I’ve seen from Wood and K-Mo. If I wanted to get a sense of how they’ll perform, I’d look at some comparable hitters.

Wood looks a lot like another Kevin Kouzmanoff or Hunter Pence—a pull-happy, flyball-hitter with big-time power but abysmal plate discipline. He has quick hands, and can get a hold of a fastball when he sits on it. He can also take a mistake pitch and ride it a long way, but he’s almost helpless against a good breaking ball because of his long, single-plane swing. Pitchers hesitate to throw hittable pitches to someone with his power, and he’ll never have the contact rate to be very useful without taking pitches. If he doesn’t develop a good eye or keep the count in mind, he won’t be very useful. I like Hunter Pence (he was just 25 last year), but Kouzmanoff is just awful.

Morales has very similar walk and strikeout rates as Robinson Cano and Alexei Ramirez, also line-drive hitters with middling power. He does the double-tap with his front foot when he swings, so timing is especially important to him. He might sustain an offensive tear when his swing is in rhythm. He also has impressive opposite-field power, and he’ll make contact with anything in a way that reminds me of Garret Anderson. That also means he’ll swing at just about anything, so I expect a lot of weakly hit balls when he reaches too far for a pitch. He should hit for a high average if he improves when hitting right-handed, but I would anticipate his average to fluctuate quite a bit from year to year. He puts a lot of balls in play, and some years they’ll find more holes than others. Witness Robinson Cano: a not-very-good ballplayer who almost won a batting title. Hopefully we’ll get better from Kendry, although I’m not convinced that Alexei Ramirez is the goal to have in mind, even if they are both Cubans.