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Inside The Pinstripes

Yankees Have Chandler Simpson Clone Rising Through Minor League Ranks

An unheralded prospect throughout his minor league career, Luis Durango is turning heads by playing a very old-school style of baseball.
Michael Zeno|
Apr 12, 2026; St. Petersburg, Florida, USA; Tampa Bay Rays left fielder Chandler Simpson (14) steals second base past New York Yankees second baseman Jazz Chisholm Jr. (13) in the second inning at Tropicana Field. Mandatory Credit: Nathan Ray Seebeck-Imagn Images
Apr 12, 2026; St. Petersburg, Florida, USA; Tampa Bay Rays left fielder Chandler Simpson (14) steals second base past New York Yankees second baseman Jazz Chisholm Jr. (13) in the second inning at Tropicana Field. Mandatory Credit: Nathan Ray Seebeck-Imagn Images | IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect

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New York Yankees

Nothing is more infuriating as a fan of baseball than a player on an opposing team who makes his entire personality being a pest, whether it's slapping the ball around the field, beating out slow ground balls, stealing bases, and playing an old-school style of the game that's not prevalent in baseball in 2026.

The Yankees' acquisition of José Caballero seemingly took away a player who fit that to a tee, but the Tampa Bay Rays found a player who takes it to the extreme in outfielder Chandler Simpson, whom the Yankees have the displeasure of playing 13 times a year. Despite hitting the ball on the ground more than any player in the majors with nonexistent power, Simpson is second in the American League with a .309 batting average, making a name for himself by reaching base on any non-routine ground ball.

For better or worse, players like Simpson have fans across baseball, particularly some Yankees fans who've long wanted an old-school bat that puts the ball in play and does the little things. While Simpson is mostly an enigma in the modern game, there are imitators existing in the minor leagues, including one who's rising in the Yankees' farm system and making a name for himself.

Meet Luis Durango: The Super Chandler Simpson.

Luis Durango's unlikely path to notoriety

Durango's journey in professional baseball began without fanfare, signing at 16 years old out of Panama with the Cleveland Guardians in July 2019 for a very small undisclosed signing bonus.

He did not make his professional debut and lost an entire season due to the COVID-19 pandemic, as did many of his fellow classmates. Durango did not make his debut until 2021.

The missed season of games prompted Cleveland to move him stateside, where he debuted for the ACL Indians in 2021, hitting .308 with three home runs (his only pro homers, mind you) and 28 stolen bases across 46 games, prompting a promotion to Single-A Lynchburg, but what Durango and most MLB organizations learned the hard way in the aftermath of the minor league contraction in 2020 is the jump from rookie ball to A-ball is much harder than it seems.

Durango spent three consecutive seasons in Single-A, slowly losing playing time as his bat failed to catch up. Battling injuries and underperformance, he slashed .238/.339/.282 across 158 games from 2022-24. He reached the point in his minor league career where most are usually released, but he was given a new lease on life when the Yankees took a flier on him in the minor league portion of the 2024 Rule 5 Draft.

Injuries limited him to just 45 games in his first year with the organization in 2025. He mostly served as a pinch-runner, defensive replacement, and backup outfielder for High-A Hudson Valley and got 130 total plate appearances. There was no reason to suspect anything noteworthy from the 23-year-old in 2026, but something seemed to click in the offseason.

After missing most of April with a Spring Training injury, Durango opened the season on a rehab assignment in Single-A Tampa, where he hit .313 and recorded 18 stolen bases in 75 games. He stayed down in Tampa for an extra month after it expired before returning to Hudson Valley in early June, where things really started to click.

His ensuing 32-game stint with the Renegades was the best stretch of his entire professional career, slashing .347/.388/.442 with 18 stolen bases and striking out a measly 13 times across 107 plate appearances. It was enough to earn him yet another promotion to Double-A Somerset in late July, where he's continued to hit with his rather unconventional approach.

Durango's unconventional style is turning heads on the farm

I took the trip up to Somerset for a game in late July for a few reasons. Rising pitching prospect Rory Fox was making his Double-A debut; Mickey Mantle's two sons were in attendance and spoke about their legendary father in an on-field interview; and it was overall a nice night at the ballpark, but out of everything that could've caught my eye, it was Durango's approach at the plate that particularly stood out.

The best way I can describe it is that he's a track athlete playing full-speed slow-pitch softball. There are times when he quite literally takes a running approach to the ball to get a head start on a 90-foot scamper. Even when he does stand in the batter's box, he doesn't seem to want to really drive the ball. We don't have concrete batted-ball data at these levels, but it's pretty rare to see this guy really drive the ball. The grip he has on the bat is truly a sight to see:

The approach is centered around his speed. His swing path is extremely flat, so much so that he seems to be even more of a ground-ball extraordinaire than Simpson, hitting a ridiculous 65.6 percent of his batted balls on the ground, the fourth-highest rate of any player in the minors (min. 250 PA).

The ideal at-bat for him goes as you see below: a running start out of the box, a ball chopped hard into the dirt in front of him, and beating it out for an infield single, where he can leverage his 80-grade speed, where he's stolen 43 bags in 54 tries this season.

Also, similar to Simpson, Durango has an extremely low strikeout rate. He has reduced it to 11.5 percent this year after hovering around 20 percent in years past. While he's always been a soft-contact bat, the truly alien rate at which he's making contact in the zone has allowed him to break out in 2026, where he's now hitting .338 in 75 total games, and he seems to get better with every level.

Despite being unlucky enough to see one of his four multi-strikeout games this season that night in Somerset, I saw enough to truly show how unique he is as a prospect.

Is Durango's approach built for big league success?

It's hard to say whether this approach can work in the big leagues. After all, a lot of what he does is just not replicated by anyone in the bigs, even Simpson - the most drastic version of this archetype the league has seen in a long time - but he's our only comparison point, so let's compare Simpson's and Durango's minor league careers to see if we can find a parallel.

Unlike Durango, who has been in professional baseball since he was 16, Simpson grew up in the United States and played high school and Division I college baseball, and was selected in the second round by Tampa out of Georgia Tech in 2022. Both of these guys had extremely similar numbers and approaches at the same ages and levels; look at what they both did in their age-23 seasons:

Chandler Simpson (2024, A+/AA): .355/.410/.397, 0 HR, 104 SB (17 CS), 8.5 K%, 53.3 GB%, .388 BABIP (110 G)

Luis Durango (2026, A/A+/AA): .338/.396/.411, 0 HR, 43 SB (11 CS), 11.5 K%, 65.6 GB%, .386 BABIP (75 G)

Simpson has the edge, especially in the stolen-base department, but overall, these are two similar players who both have low strikeout rates, high BABIP and ground-ball rates, and are blazing fast. Durango's relatively new to Double-A, but he's hit .375 through 47 plate appearances there, so if the trend holds, he might have a chance to drag the average closer to Simpson's impressive figure in 2024.

They are still different players, as Simpson has never posted such an extreme ground-ball rate, which would be the highest by a big leaguer since Raimel Tapia in 2021 (67.5), but if there's any blueprint for Durango and a future in MLB, it's the man on the Yankees' biggest postseason threat.

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Michael Zeno
MICHAEL ZENO