The Road to The Show™: Orioles’ Basallo

Each week, MiLB.com profiles an elite prospect by chronicling the steps he's taken toward achieving his Major League dream. Here's a look at second-ranked Orioles prospect Samuel Basallo. For more stories about players on The Road to The Show, click here.

Samuel Basallo represents something both uncommon and familiar for the Orioles.

MLB Pipeline’s No. 17 overall prospect is yet another elite young talent to come up through Baltimore’s system and possibly challenge for the No. 1 overall prospect spot by season’s end. But unlike the Orioles’ other top prospects, including the current No. 1 overall prospect Jackson Holliday and recent graduates like Adley Rutschman and Gunnar Henderson, Basallo was brought into the system through the club’s re-investment in the international market.

Despite graduating some of the game’s top prospects in recent years, the Orioles have maintained the best farm system in baseball in each of MLB Pipeline’s past six rankings. Although most of that talent has come from the Draft, Baltimore’s recent international investments, after years of dormancy in that market, have deepened the system. In 2024, nine players among the club’s Top 30 prospects were acquired on the international market. The leader among them is Basallo, a 6-foot-3, 19-year-old backstop who finished his first full season at Double-A Bowie last year.

Basallo opened his 2023 breakout season as the Orioles’ No. 12 prospect. He proceeded to lead the organization in wRC+ (162) while finishing second with a .313 batting average, .953 OPS and .551 slugging percentage across three levels of the Minors. His wRC+ and OPS ranked third among all Minor Leaguers with more than 400 plate appearances.

The lefty slugger does not sacrifice contact for power and still consistently produces impressive exit velocities. Scouts believe that his first 20-homer season in 2023 will certainly not be his last. Defensively, he may soon see a permanent shift to first base, where he played 28 games last season. He’s blocked behind the plate at the Major League level by Rutschman, but he has 60-grade arm strength and threw out nearly a third of would-be base stealers in 2023. So, he should certainly get some more runway at the position.

“There’s a catch-up process to learning how to call a game behind the plate,” Orioles general manager Mike Elias told the Baltimore Banner last week. “He’s doing that, but his bat is even more advanced. I think that’s going to be an interesting theme this year. He’s a very, very special talent. He’s one of the very best minor league players in all of baseball right now.”

The Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, native was a restless kid who got into baseball just to get out of the house. By the time he was eligible to sign, he’d generated plenty of interest from a number of different clubs. The Orioles were attempting to re-establish a foothold in the international market, which was a primary directive for Elias when he took over the GM role in 2018. Elias himself oversaw the $1.3 million deal that landed Basallo with the Orioles in 2020, the announcement of which was pushed back to the following January due to the pandemic.

Basallo and Venezuelan shortstop Maikol Hernandez were the headliners of a 17-player class that cost the Orioles $5.75 million and signaled that the club was finally ready to be players in the Latin American market.

Basallo stayed local for his professional debut later that summer in the Rookie-level Dominican Summer League. He batted .239 with a .748 OPS while registering five homers, eight doubles and 19 RBIs. He mostly stayed behind the plate but got into 13 games at first base as well.

The following season, Basallo came stateside but remained in Rookie ball in the Florida Complex League. Over 43 games, he batted .278/.350/.424 with six homers and 32 RBIs while continuing to split time defensively as both a backstop and a first baseman.

During his breakout season in 2023, Basallo seemed to get better as the season progressed. He spent the bulk of the year with Single-A Delmarva and was named the MVP of the Carolina League. Basallo batted .299 with an .887 OPS and collected 35 extra-base hits, including 12 homers, and 60 RBIs in 83 games.

On Aug. 1, he was promoted to High-A Aberdeen and continued to crush the ball, eventually being named the South Atlantic League Player of the Month in September. Over 27 games with the IronBirds, Basallo batted .333/.443/.688 with eight homers, six doubles and 24 RBIs.

He was promoted again for the final four games of Bowie’s season and had a ridiculous series in Harrisburg during which he collected seven hits in 15 at-bats. For his tremendous season, Basallo was named to the All-MiLB Prospect First Team at the inaugural MiLB Awards Show.

The Orioles rewarded Basallo with a non-roster invite to big league Spring Training. But he has been limited to just four at-bats, two of which came during the club’s Spring Breakout game, as a designated hitter as he was recovering from a right elbow stress fracture. He is expected to be able to resume playing the field again in late April.

Despite opening the year with some limitations, Basallo, who turns 20 in August, is well-positioned to be the leader of the deepest, most talented prospect group in the league by season’s end. He should return to Bowie to open the season, where he could conceivably be just one call from the Majors.