Something strange happened during the three months Roman Anthony was sidelined with a tendon tear in his right ring finger: He became both overrated and underrated all at the same time. There’s no great way to fully quantify both ends of that statement, but work with me here as we dive into the two extremes (hand up on one of them).
In one camp, we have the people who saw Roman Anthony in April and have decided that 30 games of underwhelming results followed by an injury is enough to toss him aside.
I’ll only include three examples here from recent days, but we could have a field day with hundreds of posts echoing these sentiments from the last three months. (Maybe we’ll do that for a day during the lockout this winter.)
EL! OH! EL!
I’m extremely confident these people are going look like complete bozos in short order. Not only does Roman Anthony possess a ceiling higher than anybody else on the roster, but he’s also coming back into a completely different environment than he was in April.
At the start of the season, Anthony was in the middle of a whirlwind that in the previous ten months included getting called up to the majors, learning quickly and having success against the best in the world, getting injured and missing the end of the year with an oblique strain, watching Alex Bregman leave for the Cubs and having the leadership role dumped in his lap, trying to balance a torrent of media requests while preparing for his first full season in the majors, and then getting invited to play for Team USA in the World Baseball Classic. And all this as a 21-year-old.
Now he gets to come back to something completely different. He’s healed, well rested (physically and mentally), and coming into an environment where his presence can elevate an already established roster as the missing piece that might put them over the top.
Furthermore, Roman Anthony strikes me as the silent assassin type. There’s little doubt in my mind he’s seen and heard what the clueless continent of fans are saying about him, and I hope he’s a little angry or annoyed by it (I know I would be!). We could be on the verge of a revenge tour for the ages, and I have my popcorn ready.
Additionally — and probably most importantly — the underlying metrics are all still there. Below is Anthony’s bat speed distribution from his baseball savant bat tracking page, and when you combine velocity like that with his pitch recognition skills, there’s zero reason to be any less excited about his ceiling. I won’t go into the gory math details today, but they all scream he could still soar has high as a mountain and fast.
To put it another way: I don’t really care what Anthony did in April at this point in the proceedings. Not when he spent the previous years rising to the No. 1 prospect ranking in all of baseball, spent much of last season in the majors posting a 140 wRC+, and then followed that up with a .920 OPS in the World Baseball Classic in March. April is clearly the outlier month here.
Also, not that he’ll become this guy, but if you take Roman Anthony’s 30 games at the start of this season (career games 72 through 101), they line up remarkably well with Barry Bonds’ career games 72 through 101. Bonds just turned 22 at that time he played those game, Anthony was about to turn 22 in the spring. Bonds hit just .200 over that stretch, Anthony hit .229. Bonds posted an OBP of .336 in those games thanks to the walks, Anthony posted a .354 OBP in those games thanks to the walks. Bonds had just six extra base hits over that 30-game span, Anthony had seven. Bonds had a .646 OPS, Anthony has a .675 OPS this year. Again, the ceiling is still there.
So to reiterate, Anthony’s April doesn’t faze me at all. I’m weirdly confident we’re at the beginning of something remarkable, and I can’t wait to watch it play out. But you know what alarms me though? Anthony’s September and May. Those are the months he strained his oblique and torn a tendon in his finger, and both injuries upended his season. The only reason 2026 isn’t a total disaster is because the injury happened so early in the year, and he still has runway to do something special.
I wrote about this topic extensively in June, but the possibility of Anthony’s elite swing being the thing the might break him is the reason people like me might be overrating Anthony. Just like those posters above, we could also be made the fool in short order. It doesn’t matter how high your ceiling is if you can’t stay on the field, and even though I’m as confident in Anthony’s total package as any as player I’ve ever seen come out of the Red Sox farm system, I also spent years watching and writing about Troy Tulowitzki’s career, so I know how this can end.
The bottom line is somebody’s about to look really, really stupid really, really soon, and I’m equal parts thrilled, anxious, ecstatic, and terrified to find out what that entails.
Welcome to Roman Anthony’s comeback, where together we’re all probably about to live out a dream, or a nightmare.
