Red Sox
The windiest November afternoons in Stillwater, Oklahoma. doesn't greet you with a warm smile once you arrive unprepared. A blast of cool air saps the energy out of your skin and makes your knees shake. Your brittle fingers feel like they may rip your palm off in a gust of wind. You risk losing a hat if it doesn't sit perfectly in your head.
But Roman Anthony doesn't need warm greetings. Any place that may also help him improve his game is warm enough to maintain his passion for baseball alive.
That's why the outfielder decided to spend a few of his useful offseason time in Stillwater. perfect your swing together with his friend Jackson Holliday, former No. 1 prospect and current second baseman for the Baltimore Orioles. Much of their training took place (thankfully) within the comfort of the batting cage that the Holliday family inbuilt their Home sports facilityNevertheless, the then 19-year-old needed to travel via a thousand miles away from his sunny home in North Palm Beach and brave the Oklahoma wind just to coach with Holliday.
“Usually 18- or 19-year-olds want to hang out at the beach or somewhere,” said Willie Romay, a former Boston Red Sox scout from Miami and Anthony's talent scout. “And here's Roman, struggling through the offseason.”
All the training has paid off. Now that Tampa Bay Rays third baseman Junior Caminero is not any longer only a junior player, Anthony is at the highest of the distinguished rankings as your No. 1 perspectiveThe latest Red Sox candidate This honor was bestowed by Andrew Benintendi in 2017. is just not the one review site that praises Anthony highly – he’s MLB Pipeline's Most Promising Player and is ranked eleventh on the FanGraphs list.
Living up to those enormous expectations is a big pressure for a 20-year-old. But Anthony doesn't feel this pressure.
“I’m just having fun,” said Anthony Boston.com. “This is what I like to do.”
It's natural for a player to feel pressure before a game, but there are various ways to alleviate that pressure. Some spend slightly time beyond regulation in the load room. Others joke with their teammates to calm themselves down. Anthony does each, but infrequently to alleviate pressure; he doesn't feel much of it. Whenever the outfielder walks from his locker to the load room, he exudes a way of undisturbed calm that almost all junior players his age will take several years to attain.
“Sometimes you don’t even notice [how young he is],” said Anthony's teammate Marcelo Mayer. “That's how mature he is, and that's just how he conducts himself on and off the field.”
But make no mistake: Being an amazing baseball player could be very vital to Anthony. Romay first witnessed that keenness when he got here to one among Anthony's practices during his sophomore 12 months of highschool. That day, the outfielder asked the scout what areas of his game he was particularly good at and what areas he still needed to work on.
When Romay returned three weeks later, Anthony asked the scout to observe him hit within the batting cage. Almost every swing and stance contained a chunk of recommendation that Romay gave him.
“He took [my advice] and he said, 'You know what, I'm going to build on that,'” Romay said. “Good players do that.”
Anthony's desire to be great stems from an extreme competitive spirit – one that only a young child can have. His older siblings spent much of his childhood bossing him around, as many older siblings do. Their bossiness ignited a competitive fire in Anthony that he would ignite at every childhood sports game.
That inferno still burns, setting Anthony's heart ablaze in everything he does, whether it's a round of golf, an impromptu game of basketball, or when he goes to bat in the bottom of the ninth inning.
“I hate losing,” Anthony said. “I hate losing much more than I hate winning.”
Anthony's family gave him much more than his competitive spirit. His parents, Tony and Lori Anthony, encouraged all of their children's athletic aspirations, from equipment to travel ball. They even found ways to enroll Anthony in schools where the competition was the toughest. They used all of their resources to ensure their children had an active, challenging, and sports-centered childhood.
However, they didn't always have those resources. Both parents worked throughout high school and even took on multiple jobs just to pay for college. When the Anthonys started their family, they made it a point to make sports a central part.
“We were both determined [giving] “We showed them all the possibilities and opportunities that we didn’t have,” Tony Anthony said.
So the grateful Anthony could fall asleep every night and dream of becoming an expert athlete. At first, he didn't care concerning the sport. He desired to shoot hoops with the very best within the NBA. He desired to catch passes on an NFL football field. But he at all times knew which sport he loved essentially the most.
“Baseball has at all times been my thing,” Anthony said. “When I used to be younger, I at all times had a bat and I’d at all times throw the ball against the wall, and baseball is the thing that actually stuck with me.”
It only took nine-year-old Anthony one season of playing every sport to realize that nothing gave him more joy than swinging a bat, no matter how many baskets he made or how many touchdowns he scored. His parents noticed this. They tried to convince him to continue playing three sports and take regular breaks from each, but Anthony would not hear of it. Baseball was the sport he loved and wanted to dedicate his life to.
So Anthony began to dedicate himself to becoming the best baseball player he could be. He developed into a smart hitter with a flawless swing and the ability to launch any baseball to the moon, a skill that earned him the 2022 Gatorade Player of the Year for the State of FloridaThe Red Sox saw great potential in the powerful outfielder and drafted him with their Compensation selection for the lack of starter Eduardo Rodriguez within the previous offseason.
Anthony soon proved to be alternative.
“When he arrived, [High-A] Greenville,” said Tony Anthony, “He was a different man.”
Not a single baseball was safe from his swing. In his second year in the system, he fought his way up through the Red Sox organization. His confidence grew, and so did his reputation. Fans called him one of the “Big 3” of the Red Sox's elite young players, along with Mayer and Kyle Teel. SoxProspects.com Anthony was first named the Red Sox's top prospect last November, and in August he was promoted from Double-A Portland to Triple-A Worcester before he was old enough to rent a car and get there.
These are all impressive feats for someone Anthony's age, but Anthony believes that any type of player can have talent – no matter what year they were born.
“It’s the same game [for everyone]and the game doesn’t really care about age,” Anthony said.
However, few 20-, 30-, or 40-year-old skilled baseball players can claim to have been the best talent of their sport. Anthony can, and anyone who knows him knows that this may not be the one accomplishment of his profession.
“The sky's the limit with Roman, man,” Romay said. “This guy is going to be in the game for a while, and he's going to make a lot of people – a lot of fans – happy with the Red Sox.”
image credit : www.boston.com