It was February of 2020, not long before baseball and the rest of the world shut down because of COVID, when early spring training talk in Tampa turned to the Yankees’ top prospect at the time, Jasson Dominguez.
After hyping up the player nicknamed “The Martian” following his signing out of the Dominican Republic for a whopping $5.1 million, the organization was hoping to take some pressure off the outfielder who had recently turned 17.
“People have heard about this kid since he’s 16,’’ Donny Rowland, the team’s director of international scouting, said at the time. “In five years, if he’s not in the majors, people will say, ‘What happened to him?’ But he’ll still only be 21. I think he’s got the makeup and toughness to deal with it.”
The Yankees are about to find out.
