At least if you take recent history as a guide.
Roman Anthony began this season as the number one hitting prospect in the game according to Baseball Prospectus. Nothing guarantees success at the MLB Level, but the list of players who have recently held that title is, uhh, really, really impressive.
With the exception of Jackson Holliday — who, after a difficult rookie campaign last year, now has a 124 OPS+ — each of the last ten players who was named the top hitting prospect by BP has subsequently made an All-Star team. In fact, every single player on that list except for Holliday and Wander Franco has received MVP votes (Holliday is still adjusting to the game, while Wander Franco never adjusted to the human condition).
Moreover, many of these players were good — real good! — almost immediately upon promotion. Adley Rutschman put up an OPS+ of 131 in his rookie campaign. Gunnar Henderson finished eighth in the MVP voting as a rookie while Ronald Acuña finished twelfth. Wander Franco compiled 3.5 bWAR in the first 70 games of his career. If you are named the number one hitting prospect by Baseball Prospectus, you are not only likely to turn into a star, but you’re likely to turn into a star very, very quickly.
We all know the reasons why Anthony has not yet been promoted (and if you don’t agree with them, feel free to call them justifications instead). Rather than simply rehash that argument, I wanted to find out just how unusual it is that a prospect of his pedigree is still in the minors at this point in his development.
I took a look at every player who (1) was named the top position player prospect by either Baseball Prospectus or Baseball America at the start of the season like Anthony, and (2) began that season at the AAA level or above like Anthony. Here’s that list, along with the number of plate appearances each player made in AAA before making their MLB debuts. I started with Holliday last year and worked back to 2012, at which point I got bored and moved on with my life:
Note: the top prospects of 2014 and 2023 began the season in high-A and AA, respectively.
* Demoted April 23, 2024
** Demoted August 2017
*** Promoted from AA to MLB in 2012, demoted to AAA at start of 2013
Right away we can already see that Anthony is an outlier in terms of how much time he’s spent in AAA. Only three other players even reached the 300 plate appearance mark: Kris Bryant, Corey Seager, and Ronald Acuña. Bryant was a college player who didn’t debut as a minor league professional until he was 21, so looking at his development compared to Anthony’s isn’t very helpful. But Seager and Acuña both had relatively similar development timelines
Both Seager and Anthony were drafted out of high school as 18-year-olds and have spring birthdays (Seager was born on April 27, Anthony on May 13). Anthony beat Seager to AA, reaching it at the very end of his second professional season, while Seager didn’t get there until half-way through his third. Anthony beat him to AAA, too, moving up to Worcester in August of his third pro season, while Seager had to wait until May of his fourth. But Seager then made his MLB debut later that same season, and not because he did better than Anthony is doing. In his 105 AAA games, Seager put up a .278/.332/.451 line with 13 homers in the notoriously hitter-friendly Pacific Coast League. Through 77 AAA games in the International League, Anthony is at .332/.456/.519 with 9 homers.
Both Anthony and Acuña jumped three levels as 19-year-olds, Acuña going from high-A to AAA, and Anthony going from low-A to AA. Even as a 19-year-old, Acuña was too good for AAA, hitting .343/.393/.548 down there to finish out the 2017 season. The Braves kept him in the minors at the start of the next season in order to manipulate his service time, promoting him as soon as they gained an extra year of contractual control. He wasn’t any better than Anthony at the time of promotion either. In fact, his 2018 AAA numbers had plummeted to an abysmal .211/.297/267, as he was clearly bored and/or frustrated. His total AAA line was .314/.387./476 with 11 homers in 87 games.
So Seager and Acuña are the two players most similar Anthony in terms of AAA service time, and Anthony has outproduced both of them during his tenure in Worcester. And they’re hardly the only guys he’s outproduced. Bobby Witt had a lower OPS, lower walk rate, and higher strikeout rate when he was promoted than Anthony has right now. Adley Rustchman was coming off an injury and hitting just .233 for the season at AAA when the Orioles called him up in 2022 (like Acuña, he’d performed well there to close out the season before).
Yes, there are cautionary tales up there on that chart. Jackson Holliday obviously wasn’t ready for big league baseball when he was promoted for the first time last year. Jurickson Profar wasn’t either, and he subsequently showed that he didn’t actually deserve his ranking at all. But they are the outliers. Most of those players were valuable contributors to their teams on day one.
For whatever reason (and, of course, money may be one of them), Craig Breslow clearly doesn’t think the current state of play justifies the promotion of Roman Anthony. That means that we’ll only see him in Boston if the current state of play changes. I can only see three ways of that happening: (1) one of the starting outfielders or Rafael Devers gets injured, which we obviously don’t want, (2) Trevor Story not only fails to get his bat going, but continues to sink to even lower depths, which we obviously don’t want, or (3) Craig Breslow acts creatively and boldly to change the state of play.
Obviously every promotion exists in the context of roster fit. I don’t deny that there’s no glaring hole for Anthony to fill. Benching Trevor Story and putting Ceddanne at short to open a position in the outfield would likely improve the offense overall, but it would weaken two defensive positions and make the lineup even more left-handed. The possibility of moving Rafael Devers to first to open up the DH is, for now at least, not only off the table, but in another room of the house where there are no tables and no one’s allowed to mention their existence. Moving Anthony from the outfield to first base shouldn’t even be considered at this point in his development.
There is no easy way to get Roman Anthony in the Red Sox lineup. But history shows that it’s possible, if not likely, that he would be one of the best players on the Red Sox right now. If there’s no space for him on the team as it’s currently built, then Craig Breslow needs to do some redecorating and make some.