Meet The New Guy: Roman Anthony

He’s here and he’s spectacular.

Who is he and where did he come from?

He’s Roman Joseph Anthony, and the Red Sox drafted him in the second round of the 2022 draft, via a pick they earned as compensation for losing Eduardo Rodriguez in free agency. Anthony came out of Marjorie Stoneman Douglass High School in Parkland, Florida which, yes, is that Marjorie Stoneman Douglass High School in that Parkland, Florida. Anthony was not yet a student there when the school became the site of a gruesome shooting that galvanized a massive wave of advocacy for stricter gun control laws which has somehow had absolutely no effect whatsoever on actually implementing stricter gun control laws.

Anthony was arguably the best high schooler in Florida as a senior, when he hit .520 with 10 homers and committed to paying baseball at Ole Miss. A $2.5 million signing bonus from the Sox convinced him to go pro instead.

Entering his first full season of pro ball in 2023, Anthony didn’t appear on a single top-100 prospect list. In Baseball America’s preseason rankings, he was judged just the eighth-best prospect in the Red Sox organization. On SoxProspects.com, he began the year outside the top-10 at #11. But just three-and-a-half months later, he’d established himself as the hottest prospect in the game, climbing up three minor league levels and cracking Baseball Prospectus’s top-10 list by mid-July. It was a meteoric rise reminiscent of Mookie Betts and, by the end of the 2024 season, he was the consensus top prospect in all of baseball.

What position does he play?

He’s an outfielder. While he’s probably not going to be exceptional out there, he has enough speed and a strong enough of an arm to play all three positions, though he’d likely be below average as a center fielder and may struggle to learn how to play Fenway’s giant right field.

Ideally, he’ll eventually find a home in left field, following in the footsteps of Ted Williams, Carl Yastrzemski, Jim Rice, and Manny Ramirez in playing one of baseball’s historic glamour positions for the next 15 years. But given the logjam that currently exists in the Red Sox outfield, he’ll likely bounce around and may DH a little until the Sox front office makes some personnel moves.

Is he any good?

You don’t get to be the top prospect in all of baseball if you’re not.

The conversation about Anthony almost always centers around one of two things: his massive power and his advanced approach at the plate. Over the course of the 93 games he played in AAA, Anthony hit 13 homers and 21 doubles, slashing .309/.438/.501. Many of those homers were absolute moonshots, with one of them being potentially the single biggest homer ever hit in the Statcast era, in either the majors or the minors. Anthony hits the ball really, really hard. In fact, the line drive he hit off Shane Baz in fourth inning of his MLB debut last night was the hardest hit ball of the game at 111.2 MPH.

His approach is just as impressive, and he finished AAA with nearly as many walks as strikeouts (82 of the former, 87 of the later). In the modern game, a player walking as much as he strikes out is almost unheard of, especially amongst power hitters. In 2024, only three players managed to do it: Juan Soto, Mookie Betts, and Steven Kwan. Soto and Luis Arraez are currently the only active players with more walks than strikeouts over the course of their career. The only player to retire with more walks than strikeouts in the last 10 years was Albert Pujols. If you can walk about as much as you strikeout while hitting with power, you are pretty much the best hitter in the game. That’s Roman Anthony’s ceiling.

Show me a cool highlight.

I mean, I just told you that he hit what may have been the single biggest homer ever hit in the Statcast era. Obviously I’m going to show you that:

What’s he doing his picture up there?

Would you look at that, we already answered that question for you!

What’s his role on the 2025 Red Sox?

That’s an interesting question!

It’s quite possible, if not probable, that Anthony will immediately be one of the best hitters on the team. So why hasn’t one of the best hitters on the team been on the team all year? Service time manipulation probably played a small role, as the Red Sox could lose a full year of contract control over Anthony if he finishes in the top-two of the Rookie of the Year voting. But I think the more likely explanation is simply that, with three young, dynamic, and cheap players already in the outfield, there was no easy and obvious way to get Anthony in the lineup, and when faced with a difficult roster problem, Craig Breslow failed to solve it.

Unfortunately, the problem still persists. Anthony was called up to replace the injured Wilyer Abreu. But Abreu is suffering only a minor oblique strain and likely won’t miss much time. Sooooo, what happens when Abreu is ready to come off the IL, possibly as early as nine days from now? I have absolutely no idea.

You don’t call up the number one prospect in baseball to serve merely as a short-term injury replacement. For the last eight months, Craig Breslow has procrastinated on the question of how to get Anthony in the lineup. But he’s run out of time. Roman Anthony is here, he’s earned his way up here, and the Sox now need to figure out how to keep him here.