A few hours before first pitch Friday, Paul O’Neill was already laying out the case for Spencer Jones.
On the YES Network booth, the Yankees legend zeroed in on the trait that makes the rookie so tough to game plan for: Jones is not just a one-note power bat. O’Neill pointed out that roughly half of Jones’ home runs have gone the other way, and that he is “not a dead pull hitter.”
For a player with Jones’ size and raw strength, that matters. A lot.
Then Jones stepped in and backed up the scouting report with a swing of his own.
In the second inning, he turned on an 89-mph cutter from Toronto starter Spencer Arrighetti and launched a two-run homer down the right-field line. The shot gave the Yankees a 2-0 lead in a 3-1 win over the Blue Jays, and it served as the perfect answer to O’Neill’s point. One night after showing the opposite field in Baltimore, Jones showed he can do damage the other way, too.
That’s the difference between a prospect with power and a hitter pitchers have to fear everywhere.
The contrast between Thursday and Friday told the story as cleanly as any scouting report could. In Baltimore, Jones drove a ball to left-center.
Against Toronto, he got a pitch he could turn on and punished it to right. The 385-foot drive nearly hooked foul before first base umpire Dan Iassogna signaled fair.
Toronto challenged, but the call stood, and Jones had his seventh home run of the season and second in as many games.
O’Neill had also flagged another detail that makes Jones dangerous: pitchers are already trying to climb the zone against him. That’s where his long swing is most vulnerable. But when the ball is down, O’Neill said, Jones can do plenty of damage.
“Well, he’s getting some time now and half of his home runs have been the other way. So he’s not a dead pull hitter.
He’s got so much power,” O’Neill said. “If you watch what happened, guys are throwing him up in the strike zone.
That is the ball that he’s going to have to work to stay away from. I mean, when he gets the ball down, he can do a lot of things with his power.”
Aaron Boone made a similar point after Jones’ opposite-field homer in Baltimore, saying the left-handed hitter has the ability to “leave any part of the ballpark.”
Friday’s game showed exactly what that looks like in practice. Jones accounted for two of the Yankees’ three runs, and New York needed every bit of it. The team went 1-for-8 with runners in scoring position and didn’t produce much else offensively.
The homer also kept Jones’ recent surge rolling. Thursday’s blast ended a 15-game homer drought, and he followed it up immediately.
Since his July 26 recall, Jones has five home runs, all in his last 21 games. Friday was his first back-to-back homer game.
In 55 games overall, he is hitting .229/.306/.425 with seven home runs, 21 RBIs and a 104 wRC+.
The power profile is what makes the whole thing so interesting. Jones’ natural pull side is left and left-center, which plays deep in Yankee Stadium’s Death Valley.
He doesn’t need the short porch in right to matter. That’s part of what makes him different from the typical left-handed slugger.
And it’s also why the two homers this week carried so much weight. One went the opposite way.
One got yanked down the line. Put them together, and the message is clear: Jones can beat a pitcher to either field.
That’s a big development for a Yankees club that has won five straight, its longest streak since Aaron Judge went down. Jones has been right in the middle of the last two wins. He was brought up because Cody Bellinger got hurt, and now he’s making the Yankees think twice about sending him back down when Bellinger returns.
The roster decision is getting tighter by the day. Bellinger could be activated as soon as Sunday after a month out, which would require a corresponding move.
After what Jones did over the last two nights, the question is no longer whether he can fill in. It’s how the Yankees can justify taking him out of the lineup.
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