How Roman Anthony became one of baseball’s brightest prospects
The 20-year-old Anthony sits atop Baseball America’s prestigious rankings list as their No. 1 prospect.
The windiest November afternoons in Stillwater, Okla. don’t greet you with a warm smile upon an unprepared arrival. A blast of chilly air saps the energy out of your skin and makes your knees tremble. Your brittle fingers feel as though they’re one gust of wind away from snapping off your palm. You’ll be at risk of losing a hat if it doesn’t sit perfectly on your head.
But Roman Anthony doesn’t need warm greetings. Any place that allows him to improve his game is warm enough to keep his passion for baseball ablaze.
That’s why the outfielder chose to spend some of his valuable offseason time in Stillwater perfecting his swing with his friend Jackson Holliday, former No. 1 prospect and current second baseman for the Baltimore Orioles. Plenty of their training (thankfully) took place inside the comfort of the batting cage that the Holliday family installed in their home sports facility. Still, the then 19-year-old had to travel over a thousand miles away from his sunny North Palm Beach home and brave the Oklahoma wind just to train with Holliday.
“Normally, 18, 19-year-old kids, they want to hang out at the beach or whatever,” said former Boston Red Sox Miami-area scout Willie Romay, Anthony’s signing scout. “And here’s Roman grinding it out in the offseason.”
All that training paid off. Now that Tampa Bay Rays third baseman Junior Caminero has graduated from prospect status, Anthony sits atop Baseball America’s prestigious rankings list as their No. 1 prospect. The most recent Red Sox prospect to achieve this honor was Andrew Benintendi in 2017. Baseball America isn’t the only evaluation site with high praise for Anthony — he’s MLB Pipeline’s No. 12 prospect and is ranked 11th on FanGraphs’ list.
Living up to those massive expectations is a lot of pressure for a 20-year-old to have to face. A lot of pressure that Anthony doesn’t feel.
“I’m just having fun,” Anthony told Boston.com. “This is what I like to do.”
It’s natural for a player to feel pressure before a game, but there are plenty of ways they relieve it. Some spend a little more time in the weight room. Others joke with teammates to put their minds at ease. Anthony does both of these things, but not often to relieve pressure; he doesn’t feel much of it. Whenever the outfielder walks from his locker to the weight room, he brings with him a sense of unbothered tranquility that most prospects his age won’t harness for several years.
“Sometimes you don’t even realize [how young he is],” Anthony’s teammate Marcelo Mayer said. “That’s how mature he is, and that’s just the way he carries himself on and off the field.”
But make no mistake: Anthony cares deeply about being a great baseball player. Romay first witnessed this passion when he came to watch one of Anthony’s practices in his sophomore year of high school. On that day, the outfielder asked the scout what areas of his game he excelled at, and for the areas of his game that needed work.
When Romay returned three weeks later, Anthony asked the scout to watch him hit in the batting cage. Almost every swing and stance contained a piece of advice Romay gave to him.
“He took [my advice] and he said, ‘You know what, I’m going to build off of this,’” Romay said. “Good players do that.”
Anthony’s desire to be great stems from an extreme competitive spirit — one that only a youngest child can have. His older siblings spent much of his childhood ordering him around, as many older siblings do. Their bossiness enkindled a competitive fire underneath Anthony that he let burn during every childhood sports game.
