PEORIA, Ariz. — There is a mold.

Jackson Merrill fit it. Five years before him, Fernando Tatis Jr. fit it.

For about twice as long as they have been a playoff contender, the Padres have been prospect producers. Name after name has enticed visions of future stardom.

Mostly, those young minor-league players have been shipped off before getting to San Diego, used as capital to acquire major league talent.

Just a few have stayed around long enough for Padres fans to get to know.

Fewer still — just two, really — have had the talent and makeup to fly through the minors and make an immediate impact in the big leagues at a young age.

All along, for whatever external expectations have been, there is usually a fairly good read internally regarding which players were the definite keepers.

Now there are two more. At the same time. And they might make it to the highest level at a younger age than even Merrill or Tatis, who were 20 years old when they debuted.

Shortstop Leo De Vries and catcher Ethan Salas appear to fit that mold.

The Padres’ top two prospects, both 18, are playing in the Arizona Fall League. They are the youngest players in the league by several months, and their progress to date as professionals has people within the organization and on the outside speculating that both might still be teenagers when they make their Padres debuts.

“I dont control that,” De Vries said one recent morning, a couple hours before he and Salas played an AFL game as members of the Peoria Javelinas. “I just come out here and play and have fun, and then San Diego will make the decision when I need to be there.”

True. And sort of not the whole picture.

De Vries and Salas play for an organization that has demonstrated it is willing to take its cues from players, with relatively few limitations placed on how fast they might be promoted through the system.

“The players, they tell you when theyre ready,” Padres President of Baseball Operations A.J. Preller said recently. “ The talented guys that have great makeup, yeah, were not scared to challenge players like that. But its really like an individual-type deal, you know, based on their age or development, their skill set and their maturity.”

It doesn’t take more than a few seconds to deduce that De Vries and Salas have the latter trait, which is no small thing when a kid is being asked to play against men in a game replete with failure.

They are mature beyond their years and have grown quite a bit in 2024, but thats about all that can be definitively said at this point.

The rest is projection.

Salas is the 19th-ranked prospect by MLB.com and 28th according to ESPN. De Vries is ranked 28th by MLB.com and 23rd by ESPN. Baseball America has Salas 17th and De Vries 31st. It’s close to a toss-up, given Salas plays catcher, where defense is paramount, but the Padres consider De Vries’ upside higher and value him as their top prospect.

The club believes both can produce at a high level while playing two of the most important positions on the field.

In Salas, scouts see a rare defensive ability behind the plate — receiving and blocking and controlling the game, arm strength and smooth, minimal movement. There is confidence he will grow into his frame and become a consistent power threat who hits from the left side.

The organization sees De Vries as capable of being equally powerful from both sides of the plate to the tune of 30-plus homers a season, while playing plus defense. He, too, has plenty of filling out to do but already has a command of the strike zone that belies his experience.

Both have demonstrated flashes of why they were the most coveted players on the international market the past two years — Salas in January 2023 and De Vries this past January.

But the numbers so far are what the numbers are, and minor-league numbers don’t add up to tell much of a story.

Salas, who turned 18 in June, struggled for much of his second professional season. He finished with a .206 batting average and .599 OPS at Single-A Fort Wayne in 2024.

“It has definitely come with some adjusting and learning,” Salas said.

Padres catching prospect Ethan Salas has been playing for the Peoria Javelinas in the Arizona Fall League. (Jordan Toczynski, MLB)

Salas traveled to San Diego for a week in July to work with Padres assistant hitting coach Mike McCoy, and over 29 games from July 27 through Aug. 30, a week before the season ended, he batted .255 with a .754 OPS.

“I just wanted to carry on what I had going at the end of the season,” Salas said. “I just stopped really caring, stopped putting so much pressure on myself and just played freely. I think Ive carried that over here (to the Fall League), just going out having fun, playing ball, being me.”

Through Friday, Salas was batting .283 with an .838 OPS in 15 AFL games (78 plate appearances). In a league where the average age of position players is 22 and most of those players have been identified as on a major league track, Salas is thriving. One thought within the organization is that he rises to the challenge of competition.

“When they told me I was coming, I was super excited,” Salas said. “I was definitely wanting to keep playing after the last two months of the season I had. I was just really, really pumped to come out here. … It’s the most fun I’ve had playing ball in a while. I think it’s (being) around a bunch of guys who know they belong here, and theyre good and theyre coming out to play every day. I think thats contagious.”

As he moves on, he and the Padres believe he is better equipped for what happened in 24.

“How to turn the page, how to not let everything affect you so much,” Salas said of his learning experience in Fort Wayne. “ I was reading something I saw, and it was like, ‘Overthinking is overrated.’ And I was like, ‘Damn, thats true.’ Like stop overthinking and just go out and play and have fun with it. That — how to play every day, how to struggle, how to get punched in the face and not roll over and not just say, ‘All right, Im getting beat, and Im gonna keep gonna beat.’ Just like, ‘How do I come out of that?’ And just keep playing ball and put your head down and work.

“Ive heard a lot about how youre gonna struggle. But it’s different once you go through it and once it actually happens to you and you feel like the worlds crashing down on you. But thats not the reality. Reality is whatever you make of it, I think. That was where I went wrong in the beginning of my year. I was making it like the world was ending. Nothing was going well, not having fun.”

De Vries, who turned 18 two days after playing his first AFL game, is batting just .225 with a .708 OPS in 11 games (48 plate appearances). Two scouts from other teams observed that he appears to be dragging at the end of his first professional season. That is not uncommon to see from young players in the AFL.

Merrill, who just finished a rookie season in which he was arguably the Padres’ most valuable player, hit .261 with a .669 OPS in the AFL (22 games, 90 plate appearances) in 2022.

This is about the experience moreso than the results.

“There are a lot of veteran players and a lot of players with a lot of talents,” De Vries said through interpreter Juan Peña. “I definitely think that I can learn from them, and hopefully that helps my game.”

De Vries spent his season at low-A Lake Elsinore, where he batted .238 with an .803 OPS in 75 games. He hit .288 with a .989 OPS over his final 36 games.

“I learned a lot about myself, especially what I need to work on in the offseason, the good things that I did throughout the season,” he said. “Obviously, I had very good month during the season and some that were not that good. But I learned how to approach those situations and improve from there. … I learned how to be a professional baseball player. Obviously, the fact of coming from a (Dominican Republic) academy to professional baseball, theres a lot of stuff that comes with it, and just learning how to be professional on the field and off the field. I just enjoyed playing professional baseball.”

De Vries lost weight at the start of the season before gaining much of it back. Putting on even more is a big part of his development, as is improved defense and consistency at the plate.

“Discipline is a big part of being a professional baseball player,” he said. “It’s a game that youre playing every single day, back-to-back games. Youre going to learn how to take care of your body. The mental aspect of the game is very important — just to stay focused every day. So thats the biggest takeaway for me from this year.”

Salas is the more polished of the two. His brother, Jose, is an infielder in the Twins system, and his father, Jose Antonio, was a Braves minor leaguer. De Vries is the more naturally gregarious of the two.

Salas has developed a relationship with Merrill, and the two frequently exchange texts. De Vries has only met Merrill briefly, but he sounds a bit like him.

“I just bring the best energy possible to the field,” De Vries said. “I think the fans, whenever theyre paying for a ticket, you gotta be able to share that moment that you have with them. And I just try to do my best to show them what we got.”

The Padres plan for both of them to be able to show that in the Major Leagues by 2026, though both have been mentioned as potential September call-ups in ‘25.

“Its good to see that theyre not scared to move you up and let you see different levels of baseball,” De Vries said. “Its very exciting to move that fast.”