On Monday, in two separate announcements, Baltimore Orioles minor league players received awards for their recent on-field performance.
The Baltimore Orioles, as well as their Triple-A affiliate Norfolk Tides and Double-A affiliate Bowie Baysox, are enjoying their respective All-Star breaks, but the news does not stop despite the respite from the daily grind of games.
On Monday, both the Eastern League (AA) and the Carolina League (A-Adv.), announced their Player of the Week honors and both were Baltimore Orioles farmhands. Bowie CF Ryan McKenna and Frederick 3B Jomar Reyes were named Players of the Week for the week of July 1st through 7th.
McKenna, the Baltimore Orioles 2015 fourth-round draft pick out of St. Thomas Aquinas High School in New Hampshire, is currently hitting .237/ .315/ .393/ .707 with nine home runs and 40 RBI for the Baysox. He is the Orioles seventh-ranked organizational prospect according to MLB Pipeline and leads the Baysox in runs (52), RBI (40), total bases (126) and stolen bases (11), while sitting tied for the lead in games played (84).
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The award was won based on a week that saw McKenna bat .346 (9 for 25) with two doubles, three home runs, eight RBI, seven runs scored, three walks and two stolen bases. McKenna reached base in five games last week and put in four multi-hit performances.
Reyes, a 22-year-old international signee (2014) out of Santo Domingo Centro in the Dominican Republic, is currently hitting .263/ .307/ .365/ .672 with five home runs and 32 RBI for the Keys. He leads Frederick in at-bats (285), hits (75) and doubles (14). As recently as 2017, Reyes was ranked among the Orioles top prospects but for various reasons he has been unable to fulfill his potential and meet the expectations of him. We recently explored his rise and fall as a prospect here at Birds Watcher.
In what is hoped to be a sign of good things to come, Reyes earned the POW award based on a week where he went 11-22 with one double, one home run, five RBI and two runs scored; his slash line for the week was .500/ .522/. 682/ 1.204. He capped of the week with back-to-back multi-hit games against the Carolina Mudcats (Milwaukee affiliate) and Winston-Salem Dash (White Sox affiliate) on July 6th and 7th, respectively.
These announcements come on the heels of an exceptional performance by top Baltimore prospects LHP DL Hall and RHP Grayson Rodriguez in the Sirius XM Futures Game and bode well for the organization. Superior performances such as these illustrate that the Baltimore Orioles minor league system is on the right path and is rising from the long-term doldrums.