Jackson Merrill has Adrián González’s special knack for hunting pitches.
But the best comparison as a ballplayer and competitor — and hear me out here — is a young Derek Jeter.
In Merrill, who signed a nine-year contract extension with the club on Wednesday, the Padres have themselves a mature young dude and gifted baseball rat who’s more concerned about winning the day or night’s game than anything else relating to his job.
“I’m obsessed with it,” he said Wednesday after the Padres beat Cleveland 5-2 to improve to 7-0 on the season. “There’s no better feeling. There’s no better feeling than winning.”
There’s more to the Jeter comparison. See also the identical 6-foot-3 height, the shortstop background and the pro career that began as a first-round selection out of high school. Note also the enthusiasm for teammates and the knack for swatting pitches the other way or pulling them far.
Jeter was 20 years and 337 days young when he debuted with the Yankees, going 0-for-5.
Merrill was 20 years and 336 days old when he started with the Padres, going 0-for-3.
It would be absurd at this early stage to forecast Merrill will have a Hall of Fame career. But the extension means Merrill seems a fair bet to match Jeter’s feat of spending his whole career with only one franchise.
Merrill, who’ll turn 22 this month, stands to be a Padre through 2034, giving the team a left-handed-hitting, build-around young star to go with right-handed slugger Fernando Tatis, 26. Unlike other young, well-regarded Padres who were traded in recent years, such as James Wood, MacKenzie Gore and CJ Abrams, Merrill will remain with the team that drafted him.
Remarkably, for Padres president of baseball operations A.J. Preller, the decision to sign Merrill through ’34 had to be an easy one. Preller knows him well, and had already seen at least three big bets on him pay off.
Trusting Padres scouts Jake Koenig and Danny Sader, Preller and staff drafted Merrill with the 27th overall pick four years ago, then signed him for under the MLB-recommended slot so the club could devote more money to other gs.
A year later, Washington Nationals general manager Mike Rizzo sought Merrill in a package for star Juan Soto. Preller included Wood instead as part of a package headed by Abrams and Gore.
The 2023-24 offseason brought another show of faith. It didn’t faze Preller that Merrill had played relatively little professional baseball or that, to play for the Padres, he would have to move off shortstop.
Preller believed Merrill’s ball-to-bat skills, ability to adjust to pitching and athleticism would flatten his learning curve. So he and manager Mike Shildt had the 20-year-old start the season with the big-league team. The confidence in the rookie was such that Preller dealt away four minor-league center fielders. Those trades improved the Padres’ 2024 lineup, rotation and bullpen.
Now, the Padres have Merrill locked in for the next decade. And given how well-regarded Merrill is by scouts, Padres rivals will dislike that Preller was able to secure him for a sum — $135 million — that the industry will judge as very team-friendly.
“I love him, he’s a superstar,” a non-Padres scout told me last week. “The sky is the limit for him. A lot of his underlying metrics would what he did last year as a rookie. I don’t think he was a fluke. He’s an absolute stud. He’s a franchise-type player. He’s incredibly talented.”
While Merrill was a boy in Maryland, Jeter was near the end of his 20-year career with the Yankees. Merrill, who also excelled at soccer and basketball, paid some attention to the Yankees leader, known as Captain.
“I looked up to him not as much as a player role model, but his mindset,” Merrill said after hitting a two-run home run and beating out a force-out attempt on Wednesday. “It’s all about winning. It’s huge. That’s what I want to do, is win games.”
Drafted sixth overall out of Kalamazoo, Michigan, after the Astros infamously opted not to heed one of their top scout’s pleas to take him with the first pick, Jeter ed a Yankees franchise well-equipped to feed his hunger for team success. He would win five World Series titles. He played nearly a full-season equivalent of 158 postseason games.
Merrill counts it as attractive that the pinstriped franchise he ed has no World Series trophies, bringing up that fact.
“Personal goals are cool, personal achievements are cool,” he said. “Milestones are great. To be the first team that’s ever won a World Series in San Diego, there’s literally nothing better than that.
“That’s the goal. Win the World Series. It’s all or nothing.”
Jeter, who celebrated in the Gaslamp Quarter after the Yankees swept the Padres 27 years ago, would approve.
