This dude’s got quite the story.
Who is he and where did he come from?
He’s Cam Booser, and he’s your new favorite player. Really.
Booser, at 31-years-old, is on the cusp of finally making his Major League debut. His road to get here has not been easy, and not in the sense that no tenure in the minors is easy.
Booser comes to us out of Fife, Washington. I’m not an expert on the greater Seattle area (that would be Maura). But from what I can tell, Fife appears to be little more than an overgrown logistics and distribution center for the port of Tacoma that just happens to have a city council attached to it. Seriously, just look at this place:
Booser played baseball for Fife High School (Go, Trojans! Beat White River!) but the word “played” is doing a lot of work here. Booser suffered two serious injuries in high school, breaking his femur while playing football as a sophomore, and then his vertebrae while weight-lifting as a senior. But in between injuries he showed enough promise to earn league MVP honors as a junior and earned a spot on the Oregon State baseball team. He got there just in time to tear his UCL as a freshman, (if you’re doing the math, that’s three major surgeries before he even turned 20) and then washed up at Central Arizona Community College (Vamos, Vaquero!) where he barely played, as he struggled to recover from Tommy John surgery.
So Booser’s amateur baseball career didn’t amount to much. But here’s the thing: he was a left-handed pitcher who could throw 95 MPH, and if you can do that, there will always be an MLB organization willing to give you a chance. In Booser’s case, that was the Minnesota Twins, who signed him as a 21-year-old free agent, despite the fact that he’d thrown all of 11 innings in D1 college ball.
You’re not going to believe this, but Booser’s time with the Twins did not go well. After his first stint in rookie ball, his surgically repaired elbow was still barking, requiring a scoping procedure to clean up bone fragments. The next year, 2015, looked to be the first healthy baseball season of his life, and he responded by striking out 64 hitters in his first 46.1 innings of relief work at the Single-A level . . . only to tear his labrum and go under the knife again. But hey, things could’ve been worse, right? It’s not like he got hit by a car.
A few months later, he got hit by a car.
This brings us to 2017. Booser missed most of the first half of the season as he recovered from the second broken back of his life (thanks, autocentric infrastructure!) and, as he worked out in extended Spring Training in preparation for yet another year of rookie ball, he received a 50-game suspension after testing positive for marijuana use. (Which, come the fuck on, Rob Manfred, the man had been through enough, let him relax!)
After six major surgeries and a suspension, it seemed pretty clear to Booser that the universe was telling him he wasn’t going to play Major League Baseball. He listened, went home to Fife, and worked in construction, getting a job installing acoustical ceilings.
But Booser missed baseball, because baseball is undeniably the best. And after a few years ensconced in the world of ceiling tiles, he started picking up some work as coach at a friend’s training facility on the side. It was at this point in 2020, three years since he quit the game, that Booser began throwing again and realized that, huh, he still had some gas in his arm. (Note: if this story sounds familiar, it’s because it’s eerily similar to the journey that Chris Martin took, just swap out Booser’s ceiling construction company for Martin’s refrigerator warehouse.)
Twitter try-out videos and two different stints in Indy ball followed and then, finally, in February 2023, the Red Sox signed him to a minor league deal.
What position does he play?
He’s a left-handed relief pitcher.
Is he any good?
Well as we’ve seen, he’s really good at trying to play baseball. At actually playing, though, the results had been decidedly mixed until recently.
Booser’s always had a lively fastball. His primary issue during his time in the Twins’ system was control. Remember those 64 strikeouts in 46.1 innings in 2015 I mentioned above? They were accompanied by 40 walks. That’s not good! But he was able to cut the walks down significantly last season in Worcester. And while an extreme small sample size warning applies to his performance in 2024, he has been absolutely lights-out so far. Booser faced 25 batters with the WooSox this year, striking out 15 of them, walking only 1, and giving up only 3 hits, none of which left the ballpark. He’s even shown the ability to stretch out a bit, throwing two innings on two different occasions already.
He’s more or less your standard “95 and a slider guy,” but he can dial it up all the way to 99 when he needs to. The bottom line is that the stuff has been working, particularly against lefties.
What’s he doing in his picture up there?
Smirking at the idea that there’s anything else the universe can throw at him to keep him off a big league diamond.
Show me a cool highlight.
I could show you him striking out dudes with a 98 MPH heater, or I could show you him giving tips to an adorable 5-year-old fan during Twins spring training 8 years ago. What would you rather see?
What’s his role on the 2024 Red Sox?
For now, expect him to get some low-leverage appearances against lefties. You can also expect him to get an entire episode dedicated to him in the upcoming Netflix series.