THE CALLS GET louder by the day. In Boston, where the Red Sox have stumbled to a 27-31 start, the caterwauling for the promotion of the best prospect in baseball, outfielder Roman Anthony, is pointed and shrill. In Kansas City, where Royals outfielders have combined for seven home runs in more than 600 plate appearances, the pleas for the arrival of the best power hitter in the minor leagues, Jac Caglianone, are about to enter their third month.
So, why isn’t Anthony patrolling the outfield at Fenway Park? And why isn’t Caglianone in the middle of a Royals lineup starving for offense? And if not now, when will they arrive?
While the answers are likely to be dissatisfactory to those awaiting push notifications announcing the game’s most eagerly anticipated promotions, the reasons reflect how executives approach the great unknowns inherent in baseball — and the rarity with which a rookie instantaneously changes the fortunes of a franchise.
The Red Sox are seeing the vagaries of trusting a rookie in real time. Along with Anthony, shortstop Marcelo Mayer and infielder/outfielder Kristian Campbell formed the greatest position-playing prospect trio in a decade coming into the 2025 season. Campbell broke camp with Boston and after the season’s first month looked the part of a star. Since then, he has gone 9-for-79 and posted the worst OPS of any hitter in Major League Baseball.
Editor’s Picks2 Related”It’s really difficult to predict that someone is going to be successful out of the gate,” Red Sox chief baseball officer Craig Breslow told ESPN this week. “You’re making these long-term, probabilistic bets that guys who perform the way Kristian and Marcelo and Roman have tend to be productive big leaguers. But does that happen in Week 1, Month 1, Season 1? You don’t know. You try to round out their development as well as possible. It’s really important that communication between our major league staff and player-development group is seamless so we know exactly what their training, game-planning and routines look like so we can control as many of those variables as possible knowing what we can’t control.”What Breslow and Royals general manager J.J. Picollo do control is the debuts of Anthony and Caglianone. And despite being the two most impressive hitters in the minor leagues this season, they’re still waiting.![]()
Chris Bernacchi/Getty ImagesEARLY IN SPRING training, a Royals official laid out a potential timeline for Caglianone’s ascent to the big leagues. Fortune had struck the previous July when the 6-foot-5, 250-pound, power-hitting, gas-throwing two-way player slipped to them with the sixth pick in the 2024 draft. Caglianone, the official said, would start at Double-A, ditch pitching and get most of his reps at first base — where he had played at the University of Florida — before transitioning to Triple-A and spending most of his time in right field to prepare for where he could be needed most in the majors.The fear over Kansas City’s outfield depth was acute. The Royals made the 2024 postseason in spite of their outfield, and they returned a similar group this season with similar results so far: a combined .236/.285/.332 line. Caglianone himself has twice as many home runs as all the Royals’ outfielders put together. In a four-game stretch last week following his promotion to Triple-A, he hit five home runs, nearly as many as Kansas City’s outfield collective has hit all season.With every towering drive, Caglianone has strengthened his case to get the call to Kansas City and rescue a Royals team with otherworldly pitching and the inverse offensively. And that only hardened Picollo’s stance that both Caglianone and the organization would benefit from the young slugger getting more seasoning in the minor leagues.”The hardest part about this for us is we’re trying to do what’s best for the player,” Picollo said this week. “That’s ultimately what this is. You want the player to be as prepared as he can when he comes in the major leagues. It’s not fair to any player, whether it’s Jac Caglianone or whoever, when a team may be scuffling offensively to try to put it on him and hope he’s going to come save the day.”Top 10 prospect lists for every MLB team![]()
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Not only is Kansas City sticking to the plan it mapped out before the season, it’s doing so with a purpose. For all of his power — he hit a ground ball nearly 121 mph earlier this year and his 111.6-mph, 90th-percentile exit velocity would top current major league leaderboards — Caglianone’s propensity to swing at pitches outside the strike zone remains a flaw in his game.
Caglianone dropped to the sixth pick last summer almost entirely on account of fear over his chase rate. Nearly everything else about his game screamed star, but in his final season at Florida, he offered at 41.6% of pitches out of the strike zone — a number exceeded by only five qualified big league players this season. For a man of his size and strength, Caglianone possessed uncommon bat-to-ball skills, but his swing decisions needed fixing.
The improvements he has made are tangible. By no means did Caglianone turn overnight into Juan Soto, who swings at the fewest pitches out of the zone in MLB. Caglianone’s chase rate is down to 34.2%, though, and that’s facing competition in the upper minor leagues whose talent and stuff dwarf the vast majority of SEC pitching.
“We just want him to face more advanced pitching in Triple-A, see how they game-plan for him, how he adapts and makes adjustments,” Picollo said. “Not just game-to-game but at-bat-to-at-bat. Is he learning how better, more skilled pitchers can execute a game plan? Is he learning from that and is he making those adjustments?”
For the most part, yes. Before his promotion to Triple-A, the Royals impressed upon the 22-year-old Caglianone the importance of swinging at the right pitches. Caglianone is so talented, so dexterous in his bat-to-ball skills and, above all, so capable of performing at elite levels in spite of them that there’s a compelling argument that he belongs in the big leagues regardless of his flaws. The counterargument — that not only is Caglianone chasing too much still, but his two-strike chase rate this year has jumped to 49.2%, the sort of thing major league pitchers will happily exploit — is one the Royals believe worth addressing before any promotion.
Picollo doesn’t know if that’s the proper call. He loves Caglianone, wants him in Kansas City sooner rather than later. Already Caglianone is taking to right field — “For having only done it for a couple weeks,” Picollo said, “it’s been pretty positive” — and the reasons for him not supplanting one of Kansas City’s outfielders dwindle by the day.
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The Royals’ Triple-A team is in the midst of a two-week homestand, and if Caglianone continues his solid outfield play and further cuts into his chase rate, he could debut soon thereafter, according to a source familiar with Kansas City’s plans.
“I don’t want to put a timetable on it, but we want to see it for a little bit,” Picollo said. “I mean, this first week was great, but we certainly weren’t saying when he went to Double-A, ‘Have a good first week and bring him to Kansas City.'”
Royals fans were. And that’s to be expected. No other sport has the buildup to a debut quite like baseball. Even on an accelerated path like Caglianone’s, it’s an ever-present consideration. In the case of Anthony, it has been years in the making.
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Nick Cammett/Getty ImagesSOON AFTER THE Red Sox chose Roman Anthony out of Stoneman Douglas High with the 79th pick in the 2022 draft, members of the front office would tell one another in hushed tones: We stole him. A tweak to his swing unleashed the full extent of his power and with the elite swing decisions he had shown during his amateur career, Anthony quickly became an arrow-up prospect.At 6-foot-3 and 200 pounds, he cut the figure of a middle-of-the-order bat, and in his first full season, Anthony did more than look the part, jumping from Low-A to Double-A at 19. He kept hitting last year, finishing the season on a hot streak at Triple-A and picking right back up this year, hitting .320/.452/.529 with eight home runs and as many walks as strikeouts in 48 games.The chorus pleading for Anthony to make the 45-mile drive from Worcester, Massachusetts, to Boston has likewise grown. Breslow hears it. Not just from fans but also from officials inside the organization who believe Anthony should be in the big leagues today.30 years of Coors Field horror stories![]()
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“You try to make these decisions as unemotionally as possible, which is really, really difficult because the rest of the organization and I are incredibly invested in the success of this team,” Breslow said. “You try to build out the best process you can when emotions aren’t high so you can approach it as rationally as possible.”
The rational case for keeping Anthony in the minor leagues is twofold. The first involves similar markers to Kansas City’s for Caglianone. While Anthony doesn’t struggle with chase — his 17.6% rate would rank fifth in MLB, behind Soto, Gleyber Torres, Trent Grisham and Kyle Tucker — his propensity to hit the ball on the ground gives Boston pause. Plenty of good players have ground ball rates in the same neighborhood as Anthony’s 52% — among them: Elly De La Cruz, Jacob Wilson, Fernando Tatis Jr., James Wood, Gunnar Henderson, Soto — but combine that with a low number of balls pulled in the air and it suggests Anthony has even more to unlock.
The second is because, unlike in Kansas City, Boston’s lineup is packed with strong performers including an outfield seemingly with no spot for Anthony. Left fielder Jarren Duran last year put up the most Wins Above Replacement from a Red Sox player since Mookie Betts’ departure. Multiple teams’ internal defensive metrics suggest Ceddanne Rafaela is the best defensive center fielder in baseball. Right fielder Wilyer Abreu is hitting 30% better than league average. Boston’s best bat, Rafael Devers, is a full-time designated hitter.
Options do exist. The Red Sox could shift Rafaela to second base, slide Campbell to first and free up a spot for Anthony. They could sit shortstop Trevor Story — like Campbell, he’s in a monthlong swoon — and move Rafaela there. But these sorts of permutations remove an elite defensive center fielder from his best position, and that’s something other organizations wouldn’t even consider, even if Rafaela’s offense has been paltry.
“We have to be willing to react and pivot to all the variables in front of us,” Breslow said. “Things change. Guys get hurt. The lineup doesn’t look exactly the same as we thought it would on Opening Day. We try to balance all these things.”
Striking that balance isn’t easy. Anthony has been so good and is so polished for a player who just turned 21 that the Red Sox, mired in mediocrity and without slugging third baseman Alex Bregman for an extended period, are potentially wasting an opportunity for Anthony to help turn their season around.
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That sort of thinking, Breslow said, looks past the prospect of lending too much credence to a handful of games and acting out of desperation to remedy ills that go well beyond what one player can do. So even as Anthony whacks home runs that leave the bat at 116 mph at Triple-A, Boston is sticking with its development plan, lest it promote Anthony and watch him spiral like the last No. 1 overall prospect to arrive in the American League East, Baltimore second baseman Jackson Holliday.
Following his ballyhooed debut, Holliday lasted 10 games in the big leagues before returning to Triple-A. He went 2-for-34 with 18 strikeouts and reminded that regardless of one’s minor league numbers, the relentlessness of the big leagues eats at even the most talented players. Even so, there will come a point at which Anthony’s advancement will be undeniable. It could be weeks. It could be days. He’s training to better attack in-zone fastballs, which he should punish more regularly. He’s spending more time in left field, in case Boston opts to use him there. He’s tapping into his power by focusing on elevating more.
These areas to improve are all nitpicks, a fact acknowledged by Breslow. Like Picollo with Caglianone, he has reverence for Anthony: the skills, the personality, the maturity. Breslow, who spent parts of 12 seasons in the big leagues, knows as well as anyone the challenges major league pitchers present and wants to ensure the organization handles Anthony with the utmost care, even if it’s sacrificing an unknown future for a grim present.
“We think,” Breslow said, “he’s going to be a heck of a big league player.”
IT’S SUPER 2 cutoff season. Around this time of year, first-year players arrive in the big leagues and become part of the so-called Super 2s, a group of players whose time on a major league roster is in the top 22% of their service class. Being a Super 2 comes with a privilege: an extra year of arbitration beyond the standard three, giving about a quarter of players a golden ticket to earn more than the major league minimum before their third full season.
Because Super 2 players can make millions more in the arbitration system than their peers who don’t qualify, some teams have held back their best prospects. But Picollo and Breslow insist service time has nothing to do with their decisions on Caglianone and Anthony, and considering both organizations have recently started the season with a highly touted prospect in the big leagues — Bobby Witt Jr. in 2022 and Campbell this year — neither organization is afraid to look past service-time considerations. By keeping Caglianone and Anthony down, both teams also gave up the opportunity to collect an extra draft pick as Kansas City did this year with Witt through the Prospect Promotion Incentive program, which awards teams for starting top prospects in the big leagues at the beginning of a season.
Still, the optics of keeping both in minor league systems they’ve come close to conquering while their major league offenses struggle only inflames their fan bases. The public’s view of Caglianone and Anthony is not in the moments where they’re vulnerable or still learning but rather social media clips of balls traveling unthinkable distances at silly speeds that leave teammates breathlessly recounting their exploits.
“The whole dugout feels something different when he connects,” said Royals outfielder John Rave, who spent time with Caglianone at Triple-A. “Obviously he’s a physical specimen, but, yeah, he had a couple balls this past week where you kind of put your head down and laugh. You’re like, this is a little bit ridiculous. They might have to start moving the fences back on some of these fields.”
The fences at Kauffman Stadium are plenty deep. And that’s where Caglianone is headed next. He’ll almost certainly be with the Royals when they face the Red Sox at Fenway on Aug. 4. And if everything goes according to plan, Anthony will be in the middle of the Red Sox’s starting lineup, too.
The next generation of baseball is on deck, just waiting for its time. What’s right, what’s wrong, when that is — no one really knows. But that doesn’t stop people from blaming the Royals and Red Sox anyway. Caglianone and Anthony are an inevitability, here sooner rather than later, ready to reward those anxiously awaiting their arrival.
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