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.

That inferno still blazes. It ignites Anthony’s heart in everything he does, whether it’s a round of golf, a game of pickup basketball, or when he steps up to the plate in the bottom of the ninth inning.

“I hate to lose,” Anthony said. “I hate losing much more than I like winning.”

Anthony’s family gave him much more than his competitive nature. His parents, Tony and Lori Anthony, sponsored all of their children’s athletic aspirations, from equipment to travel ball. They even found ways to enroll Anthony in schools that faced the toughest possible competition. They used all of their resources to ensure that their children would have active, challenging, sports-centric childhoods.

They didn’t always have those resources though. Both of his parents worked throughout high school and even took on multiple jobs just to pay for college. When the Anthonys started their family, they prioritized making sports a core part of it.

“We were both fully committed to [giving] them all the opportunities and all the chances that we didn’t have,” Tony Anthony said.

This allowed a grateful Anthony to go to sleep every night and dream of becoming a professional athlete. At first, the sport didn’t matter. He wanted to shoot hoops with the NBA’s best. He wanted to catch passes on an NFL gridiron. But he always knew which sport he loved most.

“Baseball was always the one,” Anthony said. “I was always carrying a bat around when I was younger, always throwing the ball against the wall, and baseball was the one that really stuck for me.”

It only took one season playing each sport for nine-year-old Anthony to realize that no matter how many baskets he made or touchdowns he scored, nothing gave Anthony more joy than swinging a bat. His parents noticed. They tried to convince him to continue playing three sports and take regular breaks from each one, but Anthony wouldn’t hear it. Baseball was the sport he loved and wanted to dedicate his life to. 

So Anthony began devoting himself to becoming the best baseball player he could be. He developed into a smart hitter with a pristine swing and the ability to blast any baseball to the moon, a skill set that awarded him the 2022 Gatorade Player of the Year for the state of Florida. The Red Sox saw promise in the power hitting outfielder, so they drafted him with their compensation pick for the loss of starter Eduardo Rodriguez the offseason prior.

Anthony soon proved to be good compensation.

“Once he got to [High-A] Greenville,” Tony Anthony said, “He was a different person.”

Not a single baseball was safe from his swing. He mashed his way up the Red Sox organization in his second year in the system. His confidence rose, and so did his prestige. Fans labeled him as one of the Red Sox’ “Big 3” of elite prospects alongside Mayer and Kyle Teel. SoxProspects.com first named Anthony their No. 1 Red Sox prospect this past November. He received a promotion from Double-A Portland to Triple-A Worcester in August before he was old enough to rent a car to get there.

These are all impressive feats for someone of Anthony’s age. To Anthony, though, skill can be found in any type of player — 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.

Few 20-year-olds, 30-year-olds, or 40-year-olds playing professional baseball can say they were their sport’s top prospect though. Anthony can, and those who’ve been around him know that this won’t be the only accomplishment of his career.

“The sky’s the limit with Roman, man,” Romay said. “This guy’s gonna be around the game for a while, and he’s gonna make a lot of people happy — a lot of fans happy — with the Red Sox.”