He began 2021 as top-5 draft prospect. Now Del Castillo will slide — and maybe be a steal
Any time Manny Crespo Jr. gets asked about Adrian Del Castillo’s underwhelming 2021 season for the Miami Hurricanes — and he gets MLB people asking quite a bit — he can think back to the first day he ever saw the boy who would eventually became an all-Atlantic Coast Conference star.
Del Castillo must have been about 4 the first time Crespo saw him swing a bat. The coach was working at All Sports Academy and Christian Del Castillo, the all-conference catcher’s older brother by two years, was one of his pupils. Del Castillo tended to tag along, just to get in some hacks while his older brother was practicing.
It was, Crespo said, impossible to miss the pint-sized future pro lugging his father’s bat out to the corner of the outfield where he could get some space to swing at soft-tossed balls from his mother.
“You see that little kid, he’s dragging his bat and you’re just like, What is that? And he’d just kind of lug it up over his shoulder,” said Crespo, who later coached Del Castillo for three years at Miami Gulliver Prep in Pinecrest. “You couldn’t take your eye off of him because you were like, Damn, that boy can hit.”
Since then, Del Castillo basically never stopped hitting. He built a reputation as one of South Florida’s best young hitters while he was in middle school, batted .300 as a freshman at Miami Sports Leadership & Management, then emerged as an all-county performer for three years at Gulliver Prep. After getting picked in the 2018 MLB draft, Del Castillo still signed with the Hurricanes and earned all-ACC honors in all three years in Coral Gables.
There’s still a good chance he’ll be a first-round pick in the 2021 MLB draft Sunday, although it’s not the sure thing it seemed to be just five months ago, when he began the 2021 college baseball season as the No. 4 prospect in the MLB draft, according to MLB.com’s rankings. After posting an on-base-plus-slugging percentage of .995 as a freshman and 1.025 in 16 games as a sophomore, Del Castillo graded out as one of the draft’s best hitting prospects and he did it while primarily playing catcher.
It made his junior season stunning. For the first time in his life, Del Castillo was struggling at the plate. His slugging percentage was just .395 and he struck out more frequently than he connected for extra-base hits. Now Del Castillo is only the No. 42 prospect in the draft after sliding throughout his final season at Miami.
The question every Major League team in the back end of the first round will face is whether this was just an aberration or a more concerning development about how Del Castillo will fare when opponents can really game plan against him.
“Being in the spotlight, you’re going to be approached very different and the reality of it is that, after taking a year off, this year seemed to be a little off,” Crespo said, “but if he had to come back next year, I’m pretty sure that the story would be very different. That’s one of the reasons we play this game so consistently. It’s very easy to hit when no one knows who you are.”
While Del Castillo declined interviews ahead of he draft through a team spokesperson, coach Gino DiMare said his star catcher’s 2021 struggles were mostly due to mechanics. Miami spotted “a mechanical flaw in his hands” this year and weren’t able to correct in time for Del Castillo to get on track by the end of the season. The result were a batting average and on-base percentage 30 points worse than his career average, and a slugging percentage more than 100 points worse.
DiMare said it started to develop in 2020, even though Del Castillo put up monster numbers in a season shortened because of the COVID-19 pandemic. With a spring and summer away from baseball, it worsened and became more noticeable last season.
It’s “something that can be corrected,” DiMare said, “but it’s something that got away from us a little bit and we weren’t able to correct it in enough time to get him back to where he was, especially his freshman year. ... We should’ve picked it up and seen it, and made the adjustments, but when we did, it was too late and he just created a little too much, in my opinion, movement in his hands.”
The feeling he can be fixed is why Del Castillo will probably still get picked on the first day of the draft Sunday or, at worst, early in the second Monday.
Whether he sticks at catcher is a more open question. As a freshman, Del Castillo played more games in the outfield and put together his best college season. Crespo likened it to the situation Bryce Harper faced when the Washington Nationals took him No. 1 in the 2010 MLB draft: Harper was always a catcher, but the Nationals drafted him as an outfielder to emphasize his bat and not have him worry about balancing hitting with catching responsibilities.
The ability for Del Castillo to fix his swing doesn’t concern his coaches.
When Del Castillo was at Gulliver, he used to ask Crespo to borrow the team’s pitching machine for the entire summer. As long as Crespo has known him, Del Castillo has hit. One year doesn’t change his expectations.
“He’s that kind of guy who’s going to go out and hit every day,” Crespo said, “and if he can’t figure it out, he’s going to go hit some more.”
More Miami Hurricanes draft buzz
▪ Pitcher Jake Smith is climbing up draft boards after an up-and-down 2021 season for the Hurricanes. The right-handed pitcher, who previously starred at a pair of Florida junior colleges, posted a 3.45 ERA last season, but is thriving in the Cape Cod Baseball League (CCBL) with 10 shutout innings for the Cotuit Ketleers. DiMare expects him to go in the first five rounds, and maybe even as high as the second or third.
▪ Miami is operating under the assumption both first baseman Alex Toral and pitcher Daniel Federman will sign, “and that’s OK,” DiMare said. “We didn’t expect these guys to be back for their fourth year.” Federman is also pitching well in the CCBL with a 0.93 ERA in 9 2/3 innings. Neither rank among the top 250 prospects in the draft.
▪ DiMare expects relief pitcher JP Gates to be back for another season after he lost most of his 2021 season because of Tommy John surgery. After posting a 0.82 ERA in 11 innings as a two-way player in 2020, Gates played in only six games this year.
This story was originally published July 9, 2021 at 3:19 PM.
