I’m trying to be electric’: George Valera might be the best Cleveland outfield prospect since Manny Ramírez
GOODYEAR, AZ - MARCH 22: George Valera #76 of the Cleveland Guardians poses for a photo during the Cleveland Guardians Photo Day at Goodyear Ballpark on Tuesday, March 22, 2022 in Goodyear, Arizona. (Photo by Daniel Shirey/MLB Photos via Getty Images)
By Zach Buchanan 5h ago 20
GOODYEAR, Ariz. — Give him a couple swings.
To George Valera, this situation had become sickeningly familiar. There he was, a 13-year-old baseball obsessive, standing aside his father on a baseball field in the Dominican Republic city of San Pedro de Macorís. Standing was just about all he’d been able to do so far. Weeks earlier, he’d been a notably talented baseball player in New York City, a ringer recruited to several travel ball teams and the recipient of generous scholarships to prestigious high schools. Now, he was in the D.R., the country of his parents’ birth, and nobody would let him play baseball.
Baseball is different in the Caribbean, less a pastime than a passion. By the time they’re preteens, the Dominican stars of tomorrow have latched onto an academy to hone their skills full-time. But Valera, new to the island, couldn’t catch on anywhere. He was too short, trainers told him. Come back when you’re older, they said. We train only future pros. “They didn’t even see me hit or anything,” Valera says. The memory still smarts.
The visit to this latest academy wasn’t shaping up any better. Valera arrived directly from class, not in baseball gear but his school uniform, cutting anything but a dashing baseball figure. Another rejection was coming his way — he could see it like a telegraphed curveball — but then his dad spoke up. “Just a couple swings,” Valera’s father pleaded, thrusting forward a handful of pesos from his wallet. The trainer relented.
To see Valera now is to know immediately what happened next. That day, he stepped to the plate in his school clothes and parked pitch after pitch over the outfield wall. Now, eight years after that tryout, he is one of the best prospects in baseball. The undersized 13-year-old who couldn’t get an audition signed as a 16-year-old with the Guardians for a $1.3 million bonus. By the time he was 20, he was in Double A, where he faced competition nearly four years older than him on average.
No longer a scrawny kid, he is a future big-league outfielder, one who matches preternatural plate discipline with tremendous natural power. That makes his arrival in Cleveland all the more hotly anticipated. The same way toddlers know that a stove is hot, Guardians fans know that outfielders are hard to come by in Cleveland — because the pain of the lesson ensures they’ll never forget. Since 2019, the year Michael Brantley left for Houston, Cleveland outfielders have had the second-worst offensive output in baseball as measured by wRC+.
But the drought goes back even further. The Guardians have had highly regarded outfield prospects before — Bradley Zimmer, Clint Frazier and Nick Weglarz are among the Cleveland outfielders to grace top-100 lists in the last two decades — but none of them ever panned out. The last All-Star outfielder signed and developed exclusively by the Guardians was Manny Ramírez, and he was drafted in 1991.
If Valera is to be the first to pick up where Ramírez left off — assuming Steven Kwan doesn’t do it first — it would be fitting. The symmetry between the two is too enticing to ignore. When Ramirez was 13, he moved from the Dominican Republic to New York and became a top prospect. Valera has done the same, just moving in the opposite direction. The 21-year-old aims for nothing less than what his predecessor accomplished: a resume worthy of consideration for Cooperstown.
Even back then, as he bounced around academies in San Pedro hoping to find someone who would train him, that was the goal. “I wanted to be in the Hall of Fame,” Valera says. “That’s what my plan was.” It’s the plan still, only now he knows the road to take. It’s long and entirely uphill, but the Guardians have helped him map it. “I like when things get hard,” he says. “It helps me prove myself.”
Just give him a couple swings.
It’s an overused trope to rewind a subject’s story all the way back to birth. But Valera’s tale cannot be accurately told without doing just that. In fact, his story goes back to gestation.
The 21-year-old is not only the youngest of three children, he’s the youngest by far. His older siblings are in their late 30s. His mother, Nina, was in her 40s when he was born. His arrival was one nobody saw coming, not even Nina’s first doctor.
Nina had assumed she was ill, not pregnant, and a doctor confirmed as much with terrifying news. She had a tumor in her belly. An injection would take care of it, he added, but it would cost $600. To the Valeras, it might as well have been a fortune. Immigrants to the U.S. who spoke mostly Spanish, they made just enough to scrape by in the Bronx. They lived in a basement, not a penthouse. They faced an unthinkable decision.
“It was either my mom’s health,” Valera says, “or paying the rent.”
But Valera’s father Jorge — Valera bears the Anglicized version of his name — rejected that choice. They would seek a second opinion, consulting with a doctor across the East River, in Queens. “They checked again, and it was me,” Valera says. Instead of having an injection that would have ended George’s life before it began, Nina was having a baby boy. If you want to know why Valera was born in Queens and not the Bronx, where he was raised, that’s the answer.
“I’ve never told that story to anybody,” he says.
The story of how he wound up in the Dominican Republic has been better chronicled, but it’s still worth revisiting. Before he was born, Valera’s father was working as a cab driver when he was severely injured in a collision with a truck. Jorge had metal rods placed throughout his body and was confined to a wheelchair for years. He ultimately taught himself to walk again, but the cold New York winters caused him extreme discomfort. So, Jorge packed up and moved with his wife and youngest son to the warmer climes of the D.R.
It was quite the shock for Valera. He’d been enjoying his life in New York. He played in various club tournaments as a middle schooler — his public school, which he called “a little dangerous,” did not have a baseball team — and was so good that other club teams often asked to borrow his services for future contests. “Those guys took care of us,” Valera says. They paid for his hotels and picked him up from his home. “That’s how I played baseball.”
Leaving New York was hard — what teenager likes being ripped away from his friends? — but perhaps it should be no surprise that Valera took to the hustle of the academy scene quickly. A little more than a year after he arrived on the island, his was one of the names to know across the industry. Cleveland got onto him a few months before his 15th birthday, more than a year before Valera was eligible to sign. They got to know him extensively, arranging more workouts with the young outfielder than any other team. There was a lot to like.
Valera was 15 but already displayed an advanced approach at the plate and a pretty swing poised to generate power. But just as impressive were the qualities that defy measurement. The Guardians noticed how respectful and close Valera was with his parents. Paul Gillispie, Cleveland’s senior vice president of scouting, remembers the young outfielder asking questions after showcases that he hadn’t heard other young prospects ask. How, Valera would ask after a workout, could he get better? What type of things should he work on? “He even then had a great, tremendous growth mindset,” Gillispie says. “He was really curious.”
On July 2, 2017, the opening of the international signing period, Valera signed and became the jewel of Cleveland’s international class. He did it all while still attending school full-time, unlike a lot of his peers in the academy. “If it was up to me, I would have just done baseball,” Valera says, but finishing school was a promise he kept to his mother. Less than a year later, he was in extended spring training in Arizona — except for a five-day sojourn back home.
He had to take his final exams.
It’s an odd thing to say about a player whose prospect stock has only risen since he entered pro ball, but Valera hasn’t actually played much baseball since he signed. His 2018 debut in rookie ball was cut short after six games by a broken hamate. The pandemic wiped out what would have been his third minor-league season, and an oblique injury cost him a month last year. In four years in Cleveland’s system entering this year, Valera had accumulated only 609 plate appearances, slightly more than a full season’s complement.
He also reached Double A before turning 21.
Valera’s development may have come in fits and starts, but it has nonetheless progressed apace. He entered pro ball advanced in a couple of areas at the plate. Valera has always displayed good pitch recognition and strike zone control. “Really tough to make him chase,” says Cleveland farm director Rob Cerfolio. The outfielder also has long shown he can punish a baseball. Cerfolio said the Guardians have seen maximum exit velocities from Valera in the 112-115 mph range. When Valera wallops one, “it’s not a one-off,” the farm director says. Over the last four years, the Guardians have set about helping Valera sharpen those skills to the point of major-league readiness.
George Valera reached Double A before turning 21. (Tony Dejak / Associated Press)
Valera posted decent, if unspectacular, offensive numbers in the short-season New York-Pennsylvania League as an 18-year-old, batting .236/.356/.446, but his first real spurt of baseball growth came in 2020 when there was no minor-league season at all. Valera was one of the youngest players invited to Cleveland’s alternate site — the Guardians seemingly are one of the only organizations that didn’t use that term, calling it instead “Site Two” — putting him in “an environment where he almost had to grow,” Cerfolio says. There, Valera faced older pitchers daily. But the setting and lack of stakes also allowed him and his coaches to work on his swing in more detail. It’s easier to tune up a car in the shop than on the side of the road.
The Guardians believe in making practice hard and game-like — “There’s velo aspects, there’s timing aspects, there’s sequencing aspects,” Cerfolio says — so that’s how Valera trained. Working with hitting coordinator Grant Fink, Valera began to transform his natural feel for the strike zone into a more mature approach. He looks for a pitch in a specific zone that he wants. He takes the pitches, even those in the zone, that he doesn’t. Fink calls it “a patient approach with a purpose.”
He’s also worked to get the ball in the air more often. Valera historically has been a pull-heavy hitter, but he also has hit the ball on the ground more often than he lofts it. By doing so, he was leaving extra bases on the table. “If I could put the ball in the air a little more,” Valera says, “I’m going to hit the ball pretty hard and pretty far.” Dating back to the Site Two days, everything Valera has done in the cage has been attuned to improving his ball flight. “Whether he was doing a flip routine in the cage or doing a replicated fastball machine on the field,” Fink says, “he was very disciplined with, ‘If I hit a groundball, the next one is going to be a line drive.’”
In the New York-Penn League in 2019, Valera had a fly-ball rate of 31.7 percent. Last year at High-A Lake County, his fly-ball rate jumped to 38.4 percent. Notably, Valera hit 16 home runs in 63 games at the level, posting a .977 OPS and walking nearly as much as he struck out.
That earned him a late-season jump to Double-A Akron, where he started hot, hit a three-game hitless skid and then recovered to bat .328/.379/.517 in his final 15 games. His success didn’t surprise his coaches — “There’s no moment that’s too big for him,” Fink says — yet it simultaneously wowed them. “He’s hit a few home runs, especially last year, that were pretty special,” Fink says. “I’ve coached for a good amount of years and I’ll be like, ‘Ooh, I haven’t seen a lot like that.’”
Soon it will be seen in Cleveland.
It’s true that Valera carries himself like a player who belongs in the big leagues. His confidence isn’t overly showy, but it’s palpable. He’ll flip a bat after a home run and will show emotion in a big moment. Even his swing, which features a pronounced bat waggle in his set-up, has some flavor to it. Keith Law of The Athletic described Valera’s style as “swaggy.” “I would agree with the word ‘swaggy,’” Cerfolio laughs.
Whether it’s the New York in him or the D.R. in him, it’s who Valera is. “I like playing with energy,” he says. Baseball is a game, he points out. “Little kids play this. I’ve been playing this since I was a kid and I’m going to continue to play it like I’m a little kid.” Where’s the fun in coming through in a big moment if you can’t celebrate it? Who wants this to feel like a job? “I like talking and going at it back and forth and competing with guys,” he says. “Why not? Why would you just be quiet and boring? You can’t just be boring.”
That will make him a fan favorite when he reaches Cleveland, but there are a few developmental steps to reach before then. He’s a left-handed hitter, and scouts mention his vulnerabilities against same-handed pitchers. Last year, Valera posted a .946 OPS against righties and a .751 mark against lefties. Hardly hopeless, but worse enough to perhaps make him a platoon candidate if he doesn’t show improvements. There are also questions about Valera’s defensive home.
Valera entered the Cleveland system as a center fielder — and continued to play there this spring — but last year he spent more time on the outfield corners. At 5-foot-11 and 185 pounds, he’s hardly lumbering, but opposing scouts question his speed on the grass and on the bases. They don’t question his arm, which draws some 60 grades on the 20-to-80 scale. Given the presence of rangy outfielders like Kwan and Myles Straw already in the majors with Cleveland, Valera might be looking at a career in right field.
Playing right wouldn’t bother him, but Valera is aiming higher than that. “People sleep on my defense,” he says. “I can play all three.” He has worked on his routes and technique with Guardians outfield and base-running coordinator JT Maguire, and his battles with injury have taught him lessons about how to take care of his body. “I’m trying to be electric,” he says, so he’s changed his diet and drinks more water and knows he can’t roll out of bed and hit the field for first pitch. He wants to make one thing clear about his defense: “I’m not going to be a left fielder.”
That’s not a declaration he shouts. He says it calmly and evenly, like he’s sharing a fact rather than trying to win an argument. This is why the Guardians rave about his makeup. Valera may exude confidence, but he also does the work to back it up. Even when the outfielder was hurt, Fink remembers, Valera would sit at the end of the bench with the coaches and pick their brains. Idle time doesn’t have to be idle.
On his Twitter profile page, there is a photo of Valera sitting next to a waterfall, shirt off and cross-legged as if meditating. It’s in San Cristóbal in the Dominican Republic, and he found the spot on a guided hike with a few friends. “We went to two waterfalls,” he says, but he felt spurred to trek onward. They stumbled upon a third waterfall, and then a fourth and a fifth. That picture was snapped at the final one. “Nobody’s been there,” he says.
Unlike that excursion, Valera’s path toward the major leagues has been well-traveled, albeit not by future Guardians outfielders. But his approach remains the same. The backdrop might look great now, but keep pushing forward. There may be another waterfall, and contrary to the TLC song, it can be good to chase them.
“I have so much fun playing baseball. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t do it,” Valera says. “But if I’m going to do it, might as well be really good at it and be one of the best at it.
“And that’s my plan, to be someone who can leave a legacy.”
