In fact, he’s already the best hitter in the Red Sox lineup.
It’s only been a couple of weeks, but I’m ready to make it official: with Alex Bregman on the shelf and Rafael Devers having traded chowder for cioppino, Roman Anthony is currently the best hitter on the Red Sox.
The surface-level results aren’t there yet — not even close. But there’s a saying that one should never scout the stat line, and that saying appears to have been coined with Anthony in mind.
It was 2023 when Anthony first blew up on the prospect scene like a Roman candle (Ed. Note: Ha ha!). But if you merely looked at the surface-level stats he put up in low-A Salem to begin the year, you wouldn’t have been all that impressed. He hit just one homer in his 42 games here, while putting up one of those bizarre slash lines with a lower slugging percentage than on-base percentage: .278/.376/.316.
But despite the poor numbers, Anthony was the talk of the Carolina League amongst scouts and sabermatricians alike. He was absolutely pounding the ball down there, putting up competitive at-bats, finding good pitches to hit, and hitting the ball hard. He just wasn’t finding the gaps, in part because he wasn’t getting the ball in the air quite enough.
The Red Sox, wisely, promoted him anyway, realizing that the back-of-the-baseball-card stats don’t always tell the truth. And, sure enough, he immediately exploded in high-A Greenville, hitting 8 homers and 6 doubles in his first 21 games and establishing himself has one of the game’s hottest prospects.
One look at his Savant page shows us that that is exactly what’s happening with Anthony again this year — he even has the unbalanced slash line again at .126/.306./256! — only this time it’s happening at the big league level:
His .381 xwOBA would be good for 30th in all of baseball if he qualified. His barrel percentage would rank even higher, right around where Vlad Guerrero, Jr. sits. His 18.4% walk rate would be tied for first in all of baseball — with Juan Freaking Soto.
And you don’t need to go to the spreadsheets and pretty charts to see how good he is. Just watch the games! He consistently puts up the best at-bats of any hitter currently in the Red Sox lineup, spitting on nasty pitches designed to get him to chase and forcing pitchers to put the ball in the zone, where he almost never swings and misses.
Since his debut on June 9, Anthony not only leads the team in walk rate, but he’s put up the third-lowest strikeout rate and the lowest swinging strike rate, while simultaneously making the most contact on pitches in the strike zone. The only thing holding him back is his .154 BABIP, a number that is obviously unsustainably low, even accounting for the fact that, as was the case down in Salem, he does need to get the ball in the air a bit more. I’m confident he’ll get there.
Roman Anthony is doing just about everything right in the batters box — he’s just not seeing the results yet. But be patient; it’s only a matter of time. After all, Rome wasn’t built in a day. (Ed. Note: Okay, that’s enough.)