Padres minors: Catching prospect Ethan Salas cleared for baseball activity

The Padres insist this isn’t a lost season for Ethan Salas.

But he will have to make up ground one way or another.

The 19-year-old catcher has been cleared to get back into baseball activity after visiting with a back specialist and team physician Bryan Leek the past two days in San Diego.

Salas has been asymptomatic for about a month, said A.J. Preller, the Padres president of baseball operations. The question is whether the minor league season has enough runway left for Salas to return from the stress reaction in the lower right side of his back this year or if he’ll have wait to make up for lost time in the Arizona Fall League or in winter ball.

The top prospect left in the system, Salas has been sidelined since April and played in just 10 games for Double-A San Antonio this season.

“He’s going to be able to catch up in at-bats,” Preller said. “We would have loved for Ethan to have had a minor league season, but we’ll do our best to get him those at-bats this offseason against real competition, so he can still look up in the 2025 season and he’s going to have gained something from it.”

San Antonio’s regular season ends Sept. 14. The Triple-A El Paso season is a week longer and can’t be ruled out as a potential landing spot if Salas can get up to speed physically after more than three months of inactivity while waiting for a wear-and-tear injury to heal.

In other words, Salas is essentially easing back into a spring training of sorts, although the Padres have done what they can to challenge him away from the field mentally. That includes work with former big-league catchers A.J. Ellis and Scott Servais, among others, while he spent most of his downtime at the Padres’ spring training facility in Peoria, Ariz.

Salas is ranked No. 19 in MLB.com’s top-100 prospects, higher than all but one other catcher in minor league baseball (Baltimore’s Samuel Basallo is No. 8).

Salas signed for $5.6 million as the top prospect in the 2023 international class. He went on to become the rare 16-year-old to play for a full-season affiliate that year and hit nine home runs in 48 games for low Single-A Lake Elsinore (.837 OPS)>

The Padres have continued to challenge him in the upper levels, where he’s been among the youngest players in his league, but Salas has not replicated that early success at either high Single-A Fort Wayne (.589 OPS in 122 games) or Double-A San Antonio (.532 OPS in 19 games).