It's not going to get him back to being the top trade commodity in all of baseball (he's still not far off from that, by the way) and it won't set the baseball world on fire, but 20-year-old Texas Rangers prospect Jurickson Profar is off to a red-hot start in the Dominican Winter League.
After a season which saw him spend most of the year in the bigs after starting in the minors and play a utility role for the Rangers — not what they really had envisioned for him — Profar is looking to gain some confidence heading into the 2014 season.
Profar went 3-for-5 last Wednesday to push his league-leading average up to .579 in the first week of the season. He finished the 2013 season with a .234 batting average, six homers and 26 RBIs, as well as being the subject of a hot debate of "to play or not to play."
It was hard for Profar to get in any kind of rhythm or settle in at the plate when he was playing once or twice a week. His final at-bat of the 2013 season was a pinch-hit, walk-off home run against the Los Angeles Angels to help push the Rangers to a spot in the AL Wild Card tiebreaker game.
One of the biggest questions this offseason will be what to do with Profar, who is part of an overcrowded infield, and even though it's just winter ball and he's not facing much in the way of big-league pitching, a good winter could propel him into the spring.
