Groover powers Reno surge, earns Pacific Coast League Player of the Week

LuJames Groover turned one week at home against Salt Lake into a message that traveled well beyond Reno. The 23-year-old infielder was named Pacific Coast League Player of the Week after batting .476 with a .571 on-base percentage, a .762 slugging mark and a 1.333 OPS, while driving in 13 runs, the most in all of Triple-A.

That production came in the middle of a series the Aces needed, and Groover was the reason the middle of the order kept breaking the Bees. He finished the week with 10 hits, four extra-base hits, six walks and four runs scored, the kind of line that shows more than just timing. It showed strike-zone control, damage to the gaps and the ability to cash in traffic. No other player in Triple-A reached double-digit RBIs that week.

The biggest swing came in Game 2, when Groover hit his first Triple-A home run, a grand slam in the eighth inning, and finished 3 for 5 with six RBIs. For a player already seen as part of Arizona’s next wave, that is the kind of single-game burst that changes the conversation. Groover is not forcing the Diamondbacks to guess what the upside might be anymore. He is showing it in innings that matter.

His week only sharpened an early season line that already stood out in the Pacific Coast League. One season snapshot had him at .377 with 18 RBIs, 23 hits and a .451 on-base percentage, and another current view listed him at .375/.435/.917 with 16 RBIs in 56 at-bats. However the sample is sliced, the trend is the same: Groover has been one of the league’s most productive hitters. His 18 RBIs through Reno’s first 15 games tied for third-most in franchise history, trailing only Willy Mo Peña’s 19 in 2011 and Kyle Garlick’s 19 in 2024.

That matters for Arizona because Groover is not just racking up numbers in a vacuum. The Diamondbacks took him in the second round of the 2023 MLB Draft out of North Carolina State, and he arrived in Reno from Amarillo on March 26. At 6-foot-2 and 212 pounds, batting and throwing right-handed, he has the profile of a player whose bat can move quickly if the production keeps coming. Reno was 9-6 as it moved into a home series against the Las Vegas Aviators at Greater Nevada Field, and Groover’s week made the Aces look like a club with a legitimate middle-order anchor.