Josue De Paula, top Dodgers prospect, displays athleticism, casual confidence

PHOENIX — The Dodgers’ No. 1 prospect scrolled through the camera roll on his phone until he landed on the photograph he wanted to share.

The picture was from two years ago, showing Josue De Paula with Stephon Marbury, the former All-NBA point guard. The image wasn’t from a meet-and-greet but from a family reunion in New Jersey. De Paula’s mother, Joy Sanders, is Marbury’s cousin.

“I saw him a lot when I was younger,” said De Paula, who was born and raised in Brooklyn.

De Paula’s expansive family includes another former New York basketball phenom, Sebastian Telfair.

“It was cool knowing that I have some NBA genes in the family,” De Paula said.

The 20-year-old corner outfielder inherited more than athleticism from his basketball-playing relatives. He also inherited their casual confidence, which can be observed everywhere from the way he steps into the batter’s box to how he interacts with teammates in the clubhouse at the Dodgers’ spring training facility.

Does he think he can reach the majors this year?

“I think it’s highly likely,” De Paula said. “I just gotta have fun on the field, do my thing and the rest will take care of itself.”

Something to note: De Paula has played in only four games above Class A.

A consensus top-25 prospect in the sport, the 6-foot-3 De Paula is a natural hitter with an advanced approach and fluid left-handed swing. He has a warm smile and an infectious laugh. He is bilingual, with a Brooklyn accent when speaking English and a Dominican one when communicating in Spanish.

De Paula has qualities that figure to make him beloved in Los Angeles whenever the Dodgers call him up, but he will first have to clean up his defense. 

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“Like really stressing the importance of defense,” president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman said. “Really, it’s one thing to stress it, it’s another to have deliberate work and being consistent with it.”

Friedman believes his time in major-league camp will be instructive.

“I think he’s seeing that (consistency) with some of our guys, and you really don’t know what that means until you see it and experience it. So we’ve challenged him with that.”

De Paula certainly isn’t afraid to be challenged.

Influenced by his Dominican father, De Paula pursued baseball instead of basketball, which was the preferred pastime of his mother’s side of the family. De Paula was at Benjamin Cardozo High in Bayside when the world shut down because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I wanted to play ball,” he said. “There was no shot of playing ball in New York, so my dad was like, ‘You want to go play ball? I’m going to send you down there.’”

De Paula was 15 years old when he enrolled in the El Niche Baseball Academy in Santo Domingo, which previously developed players such as Juan Soto and Elly De La Cruz. He moved into a two-story house with about 35 other prospects.

“Each (room) had like three bunk beds in it, some of them had four,” he said.

He became homesick. His parents visited him once, on his birthday.

But his confidence never wavered. If only a handful of prospects from the academy would be signed, he thought, “I always knew I was going to be one of them.”

On Jan. 15, 2022, De Paula signed with the Dodgers for $397,000.

He quickly established himself as one of their best hitters. He is now part of a collection of prospects in the Dodgers’ system that Friedman calls “far and away the most talented group of prospect outfielders I’ve ever seen.”

The group includes Zyhir Hope, Eduardo Quintero, James Tibbs III, Zach Ehrhard, Mike Sirota and speedster Kendall George.

De Paula was the MVP of the Futures Game in 2025. Offensively, the Dodgers want him to learn how to elevate the ball more so that he can take advantage of his top-tier exit velocities. In 102 games between high-A and Double-A last year, De Paula hit 12 home runs.

“Just angle adjustments, putting my body in a better position to swing and lift the ball in the air because the power is there,” De Paula said.

In the first days of camp, De Paula faced a number of MLB pitchers in live batting practice, from Tyler Glasnow to Alex Vesia. He said he didn’t feel overmatched.

“I have no thoughts when I go up there,” he said. “I just let everything flow. I feel like the less I think up there and let everything happen, the better it gets.”

De Paula said he doesn’t feel the burden of being labeled a future star.

“I trust in my abilities and experience that I’ve gained over the minor leagues,” he said. “So when I go up there, nothing changes.

“Same thing, different place.”

Or in the context of his extended family, same thing, different sport.