Carlos Virahonda’s rise has turned him into one of the brightest stories in the D-backs system, and Tuesday night gave him another jolt of proof. The 20-year-old catcher, once starting the year in Single-A Visalia, homered in Amarillo’s 4-0 win over Springfield in Game 2 of the Texas League Championship Series at Route 66 Stadium.
Virahonda was hit by a pitch from right-hander Yhoiker Fajardo in the first inning, then answered in the second by crushing a hanging offspeed pitch over the left-field berm. He also homered in Game 1 on Sunday, and through his first five playoff games as a pro he’s now hitting .333/.545/.800.
That’s been the story of his season: steady climb, loud results. Virahonda played his way out of Single-A by mid-June, needed only 50 games at High-A Hillsboro, where he posted an .862 OPS and 127 wRC+, and then earned a late-season promotion to Double-A. Along the way, he shot all the way up to No. 5 on the D-backs’ Top 30 Prospects list.
What makes the breakout even more striking is how it’s happened. Virahonda, who came up through the Rookie-level Dominican Summer League as a swing-happy hitter, has become far more selective as the competition has gotten tougher.
In 2023, he swung at more than three-fourths of the pitches he saw. The next year that dropped to 69.3 percent, though he was still missing at a 26.5 percent clip.
This season, across three levels, he offered at just 44.5 percent of pitches and whiffed only 8.7 percent of the time, seventh-best among all qualified D-backs prospects who played stateside this year.
The improved approach has come with harder contact, too. Virahonda posted a career-high 23.6 percent line-drive rate and trimmed his ground-ball rate to 33.4 percent, down from 38.9 percent last year. The result: 19 homers in the regular season and a system-leading 94 RBIs, the first time a catcher has led the D-backs system in at least three decades.
He also did damage with runners in scoring position, hitting .364 with a 1.058 OPS in those spots. For context, Tampa Bay’s Yandy Diaz leads the Majors with a .365 average with RISP, and only three big league hitters - Yordan Alvarez, Andy Pages, Pete Crow-Armstrong - had a higher OPS in the same situation than Virahonda.
The D-backs trusted him enough to bring him up for the playoff run and start him behind the plate in an elimination game, and he rewarded that confidence by handling a staff that kept Springfield off the board. Brian Curley, the D-backs’ No. 20 prospect, worked five scoreless innings before Joe Ariola took over and added three more shutout frames.
Ariola posted the best K percentage mark among all Minor Leaguers to work 30-plus innings this year at 45.7 percent. Ryan Thompson, still on the 60-day injured list, finished the job with a 1-2-3 ninth as he continued his rehab.
Amarillo now heads into Wednesday’s winner-take-all Game 3 against Springfield. The club is trying to win its third league title since 2019 and its first under manager Javier Colina, who had previously guided Hillsboro to a Northwest League championship in 2019.
D-backs manager Torey Lovullo praised the broader impact of the organization’s player development success, saying, “Any time player development has success on that level, it’s a great moment for the group that puts the team together, that runs that team, that helps those players get better and just touches lives,” said D-backs manager Torey Lovullo. “You win baseball games, there’s nothing more enjoyable from a teaching standpoint. I’ve reached out via text and congratulated the guys.”
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Dbacks Kept Their Season Alive But The Real Pressure Starts Now
A fast start and a steady night on the mound gave the Diamondbacks exactly what they needed against the Rockies, with three first-inning runs setting the tone and keeping Arizona in control the rest of the way. Michael Soroka did the rest, working seven strong innings while allowing just one earned run and striking out nine, the kind of outing that can settle a team when the margin for error keeps shrinking.
Nolan Arenado still managed to make things interesting late, driving a three-run homer in the seventh for his 28th of the season and his third hit of the game. But for Arizona, the bigger picture now gets sharper by the day, because wins like this only matter if they can be followed by more of them, and the pressure around every remaining game is only going to rise. [Read more 🡒]