Jason Schiavone: 30 Home Runs From an 11th-Round Catcher
An 11th-round catcher out of James Madison now leads the Astros system in home runs. He got there by changing one thing.
The catchers who become prospects usually go early. The position is hard to fill and harder to teach, so teams tend to reach for the ones they believe in. Jason Schiavone went in the 11th round.
Last week he hit .360 with 5 home runs and 11 RBI in 6 games. MLB Pipeline named him to its Prospect Team of the Week. He has 30 home runs on the season now. Nobody else in the Houston system has more.
Houston drafted him out of James Madison and waited two years
Schiavone is 23. As a junior at James Madison University he started all 61 games behind the plate. That is a full season of squatting without a night off. He hit .284 there with 18 home runs.
That season also put him on the watch list for the Buster Posey Award. The award goes to the best catcher in Division I college baseball. The Astros took him in the summer of 2024, and he now ranks 6th among their prospects.
Then his first full pro season stalled at .180
He hit .180 across 78 games in 2025, most of them at Low-A Fayetteville. For a catcher one year out of the draft, that is the season where an organization starts asking quiet questions.
He rebuilt the swing around one idea
Schiavone simplified. No new stance, no new leg kick. Instead he narrowed the whole thing down to one instruction he could carry into every at-bat: get in the box and swing at pitches over the heart of the plate.
Notice what that instruction does not say. It does not say swing more. Even through the worst of 2025 he was still drawing walks, and he kept drawing them once the power arrived.
It worked immediately at High-A
He opened 2026 at High-A Asheville and hit 17 home runs in his first 33 games. That is a home run every other game, from a hitter who had batted .180 the year before. He also walked 36 times in those 33 games and got on base at a .459 clip.
By the middle of May it made him the leader in home runs and OPS across all of Minor League Baseball. Every level, every organization. Houston named him its Minor League Player of the Month, then named him again. The club moved him up to Double-A Corpus Christi on May 19.
The last week of August was the loudest of his career
He hit two home runs on August 25. The next night he hit two more. The first of those cleared the 411-foot marker and the 12-foot center field wall at Amarillo.
The second went out down the right-field line in the fourth inning for his 29th of the year. He hit his 30th on August 29 and finished the week with 5 home runs in 6 games.
That same week brought 11 strikeouts against 1 walk. Schiavone strikes out a lot, and one loud week did not fix it.
But he had picked one thing to change, and the one thing is still what he is doing at the plate. A hitter in a slump usually reaches for five fixes at once, and five fixes at once is the same as none.
His 30 home runs are the second-most in the minor leagues among primary catchers, according to MLB Pipeline. The only catcher ahead of him is Boston Smith, a Mariners catching prospect we wrote about in August.
The number that did not make the headline
Runners who tried to steal on Schiavone at Double-A were thrown out 47 percent of the time. His throws to second base have been measured as hard as 88 miles an hour.
That number matters more than the home runs do. A catcher who hits 30 home runs and cannot control the running game is a first baseman waiting to be told so. But Schiavone held the position while he was still repairing the bat. Holding it is why the 30 home runs belong to a catcher at all.
Ten rounds went by in 2024 before Houston said his name. Two years later he leads the organization in home runs, and at Double-A he throws out nearly half the runners who try him. So pick the one thing you are going to fix this week, and fix only that.
Try this at your next practice
- The one-fix rule. Before the week starts, write down the single thing you are changing and nothing else. Tape it inside your helmet if you have to. Schiavone’s was “swing at pitches over the heart of the plate,” and it is still the instruction he is running months later. A hitter who changes five things at once cannot tell which one worked.
- Middle-middle tee round. Set the tee at the heart of the plate and take 20 swings there before you move it anywhere else. Most players spend their tee work chasing the pitches they struggle with. Groove the swing for the pitch you should be hitting first, then go find the hard ones.
- Pop-time ladder. Ten throws to second from the crouch. Have someone time each one from the moment the ball hits your mitt to the moment it reaches the bag, and write down all 10. You are hunting the same number every time, not your single fastest one. Consistency is what turns into a 47 percent caught-stealing rate over a full season.
Sources: MiLB’s home run leader headlines latest Prospect Team of the Week (MLB.com) · Astros prospect Jason Schiavone hits 2 home runs in consecutive games (MLB.com) · Schiavone Authors Second Straight Two-Homer Game (Corpus Christi Hooks) · Astros Prospect Jason Schiavone’s Breakout Has Him on the Rise (Astros Future) · Unknown Astros Catching Prospect Leading Minor Leagues in Power Numbers (Sports Illustrated) · Schiavone Named to Catcher of the Year Award Watch List (James Madison Athletics)