Exclusive interview: Yankees prospect Jasson Dominguez talks meteoric rise, 'Martian' hype

BRIDGEWATER – On the field, things have finally turned around for Jasson Dominguez.

The reigning Double-A Eastern League Player of the Week leads the league since July 7 with 55 hits, 12 doubles, 29 runs and 84 total bases and was tied for the league lead with 15 stolen bases, while also ranking in the top five in RBI (29), batting average (.350), OPS (.950), OBP (.415) and extra-base hits (18) during that stretch.

The 20-year-old outfielder, ranked the Yankees’ No. 2 prospect by MLB Pipeline, has raised his season batting average 56 points to .254 to go along with 15 homers, 66 RBI and 37 steals for Somerset, having already helped the club win its first title as an affiliated franchise last season with an unforgettable performance in the Championship Series thanks to a late-season promotion that he says was “huge” for his development. It's also earned him a promotion to Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, which the Yankees announced Tuesday.

Off the field, it’s the foundation he’s created that’s made the turnaround possible.

“He’s a very special kid off the field,” said Somerset’s gregarious manager Raul Dominguez, who occasionally jokes that Jasson is his son, but is of no relation to the switch-hitting slugger.

“It’s been a really special year just to create that relationship with him off the field, and to know more about Jasson Dominguez off the field. He comes from a good family, has a good foundation, and is really respectful. I don’t see anything bad off the field. It seems like he’s a really smart kid. Young player, but very mature off the field.”

Jasson Dominguez and his Dominican roots

Jasson Dominguez grew up in Esperanza, a smaller town of roughly 70,000 people tucked away near the northern coast of the Dominican Republic, perhaps best known for producing big leaguers like Hector Noesi and Jhoan Duran.

“It’s a normal town, there’s not many things you can do over there. A basic small, small town,” Dominguez said. “My father is in the town still, and my brother. Maybe a week or every couple days, they tell me what’s happening there, what’s going on. They keep me informed.”

His father, Felix, is a former baseball player, and the first gift Jasson says he can recall receiving from him as a child was a bat and a ball.

It’s turned into a gift that’s kept on giving, as Dominguez emerged as one of the top amateur talents in his home country, generating interest from multiple big-league clubs before he could sign in the 2019-20 international free agent class.

“There was a lot of teams,” Dominguez recalls. “They came to see me play, and they were interested in my talent. It wasn’t only the Yankees.”

Ultimately, however, it was the Yankees who swooped in with a $5.1 million deal in 2019, a life-changing amount not only on the financial side, but also with the expectations that would follow.

“That day that happened, I went to the Yankees complex, I signed the contract and then we went to a restaurant to do a celebration,” Dominguez said. “That was good. I saw all the attention on my Instagram. I had like 1,500 followers the day before, and then the day after, I had 10,000.”

Mickey Mantle, Mike Trout ... Jasson Dominguez?

Now at more than 157,000 followers on his @jassondominguez_7 account, one in which he embraces his “The Martian” nickname, a seemingly unmatchable amount of hype has followed ever since, with comparisons from Mickey Mantle to Mike Trout.

“I know there’s expectations when people talk about me,” Dominguez said. “But when I was in the Academy back in the DR, I have friends who had played baseball and had been through my journey before me. (Former highly touted Mets outfielder) Fernando Martinez, he’s close to me, and he had a couple tips on how to handle expectations.”

Has it been hard to handle?

“It’s definitely not difficult, not now,” he said. “The first moment I got into the United States, yes. The first time I saw people waiting for me, and asking me for photos and autographs, that was kind of different, you know? It was, ‘wow.’ With time, it’s normal.”

Long-since swarmed for a signature, a photo or just some well-wishes at every stop of his journey, it’s not uncommon to see fans lined up rows deep wherever he goes, with collectors and fans alike angling for so much as a glance of a player whose 2020 Bowman superfractor autograph – considered to be his best trading card – sold for a reported $474,000 in February 2022 before he’d even reached domestic full-season professional baseball.

To be clear, Dominguez understands his prospect status and just how high the ceiling can be but has remained humble in his meteoric rise in often granting those fan requests, with Somerset manager Raul Dominguez saying it’s been the conversations he’s had with his young outfielder over the course of the season that have helped him see the exceptional level of maturity that Jasson Dominguez carries with him in the clubhouse extend onto the field.

“Even sometimes when he doesn’t get a result – and everybody wants to see a result from Jasson Dominguez, because everybody knows the tools that he has – I’ll feel frustrated, but then I see Jasson, and he didn’t show any emotion,” Raul Dominguez said. “Strikeout, or he doesn’t have a good at-bat, he’ll walk back out there, play catch between innings. I (jokingly) told him, sometimes you have to be mad. You have to hit your helmet, something. He said, ‘No, I know I’m going to get another at-bat. And if I don’t, I know tomorrow is another day.’ He’s very mature with that part. He doesn’t lose control of himself.”

'The Martian' is in fact human

That isn’t to say that Jasson Dominguez doesn’t need to blow off steam sometimes just like the rest of us. “Martian” nickname aside, he is human, after all.

So, how does he do it?

The same way a lot of kids his age do.

“I play video games, and I like to watch movies a lot,” said Dominguez, who credited fellow Yankees farmhand Antonio Gomez for also getting him into anime, with “Attack On Titan” serving as a current favorite.

“Mario,” “Fast and the Furious,” “John Wick” – every movie that’s come out in the last three years, I’ve probably watched it. I still play Fortnite, I like to play some baseball (on PlayStation) too.”

Dominguez isn’t just doing all that for fun, though. Having agreed to do this entire rare one-on-one interview in English, he says that his choices in entertainment also helped him take to his newfound comfort in his second language.

“I would usually see the movies in English and TV shows, and that helped me with understanding when people are talking a little bit better, and to speak too,” he said. “It was hard early. I got lucky when I first came here, because I met (former Yankees farmhand and Dominican Republic native) Saul Torres, and he helped me a lot when I first came to the United States. Without him, it would be much more difficult.”

Raul Dominguez has been impressed with Jasson’s willingness to interact with fans and media in English more as the season has gone on.

“I remember when we started the season here in Somerset, he always was asking for help,” Raul Dominguez said. “He’d say, ‘Raul, can you help me with this,’ but then he started getting more confident with people, with fans, with interviews. I remember a couple days ago, he asked me again, ‘Raul, can you help me, are you busy,’ and I told him I’ll be there, just let me know, but he did it by himself. For me, just overall the personality that he has, and not just in baseball, he’s a special kid.”

All of that, aside from the obvious tools he possesses on the field, leaves many in the Yankees organization convinced that, while it may be impossible to ever live up to the hype of being compared to Mike Trout, they still have a future franchise cornerstone coming up.

For Jasson Dominguez himself, he knows he’s finally starting to show what he can really do after going through the arduous process of learning how to utilize the tools he’d crafted back home in real games.

“Before I started in pro baseball, it was a lot of practice in the DR,” he said. “When the games started, it wasn’t difficult, it wasn’t hard, but it was learning how to play the game, taking at-bats and that kind of stuff. It was a process how a game feels. But after that, what happened was understanding the game better. There were a couple adjustments I had to make in that journey, things I had to change with swing decisions that were very bad at that time that helped me a lot. … I’m working on missing less pitches. I’ve definitely been good with my decisions at the plate, I don’t go after many bad pitches, but I’d been missing the ball a lot when I get in the zone. I know I can do it now.”

This article originally appeared on MyCentralJersey.com: Jasson Dominguez interview: Yankees prospect talks 'Martian' hype