Why the Red Sox Think Kristian Campbell Is Ready

Sunday’s news that highly-ranked prospect Kristian Campbell will be breaking camp with the Red Sox, presumably as the starting second baseman, answered one of the team's most pressing questions. It also raised some big questions. It’s still somewhat surprising, both because of Campbell’s inexperience and because the Red Sox didn’t have to make this move. They had a perfectly solid placeholder in David Hamilton. Yes, Hamilton is better suited to a bench role, but he showed last year that he can absolutely fill in and provide league-average production as an everyday second baseman. This wasn’t a move made out of desperation. The team clearly thinks that Campbell is ready for a shot. So let’s talk about why.

Campbell’s batting performance during spring training was undeniably bad. He batted .167 and struck out more than 30% of the time. He ended with a wRC+ of just 59, meaning he was 41% worse than a league-average hitter. As a frame of reference, the worst wRC+ put up by a qualified hitter during the 2024 season was 10 points higher than that. A 59 wRC+ is catastrophically bad. However, there are some encouraging signs to be found; you just really have to be looking for them.

Although Campbell’s strikeout rate was ugly, he also walked an excellent 17% of the time and ran a solid 26% line drive rate. Moreover, his .233 BABIP was extremely low. In the short sample size of spring training, getting unlucky on a few balls that should’ve fallen in for hits is enough to make you look much worse than you really are. Campbell also hit well during the Spring Breakout (homering, as did Roman Anthony and Marcelo Mayer), but those games didn’t count toward official spring training stats. Most important is that Campbell looked better as the spring went on, making better swing decision and hitting the ball harder. Just ask Alex Cora, who told reporters, “I saw some underlying numbers and he’s trending in the right direction and he’s hitting the ball hard and not chasing. He’s a good hitter.” Campbell started out 1-for-17 and ended going 7-for-31. That’s still not great, but it’s definitely an improvement.

Because JetBlue Park isn’t set up for Statcast, Campbell hit just 12 balls that were tracked, but he recorded a 58% hard-hit rate and 92.4 average exit velocity on them. That’s a tiny sample size, but it’s encouraging because those are excellent numbers. Among Red Sox players with at least 10 tracked balls in play, Campell’s hard-hit rate ranked second (behind spring training god Trayce Thompson) and his exit velocity ranked third (behind Thompson and Anthony).

Lastly, Campbell’s defense was impressive throughout the spring. He made several highlight plays both at second and other stops on his grand defensive tour of JetBlue Park. Campbell doesn’t necessarily have a solid defensive position just yet, which is one of the reasons the Red Sox moved him all over the diamond. He’ll almost certainly make some ugly mistakes as the team’s everyday second basemen. He’s an athlete and he’ll improve, but it might not always be pretty because he'll be learning the finer points not in the relative anonymity of the minors but in Boston in front of a whole lot of eyeballs.

So those are the reasons for optimism. As previously mentioned, you really have to dig for them. That said, it’s important to remember that Campbell had already given the Red Sox some excellent reasons to dig. It starts with his performance over the last two seasons. Simply put, Campbell has never failed to hit at any stop in the minors. Here are the wRC+ marks he put up at each stop along the way, starting at the complex league and ending in Worcester: 189, 132, 173, 197, 139. What those very high numbers mean is that at his very worst, Campbell was still 32% better than the league-average hitter. That’s how you rack up awards and vault into a consensus top-10 prospect in the game. Moreover, keep in mind that Campbell was raking like this while in the middle of a pretty serious overhaul to his swing. The Red Sox changed his batting stance and swing path and had him undergoing training to improve hit bat speed. That’s a lot to relearn, and somehow, none of it even caused him to slow down a bit. For comparison, I’d point you to Alex Bregman, who undertook a weighted bat program last offseason and faced enormous struggles during the early months as he tried to adapt his new swing to actual game action. Here’s how Eric Longenhagen of FanGraphs, who ranked Campbell the seventh-best prospect in baseball, described Campbell’s offense:

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[Th]ere isn’t a pitch type, location, or velocity threshold where you really encounter a red flag….He crushes mistakes in the middle of the plate and squibs hard-hit contact around the diamond on pitches closer to the edges of the zone. And unlike a lot of the powerless college bat-control mavens who go on Day Two of the draft, Campbell isn’t undersized or unathletic; he’s a strapping 6-foot-3 guy with explosive rotational athleticism. This isn’t a skills-over-tools type who fails to check the physical scouting boxes; this is a projectable athlete who has only played high-level baseball for two seasons.

Campbell is going to struggle in Boston. Even after the changes the Red Sox implemented, his swing is still unorthodox, and it will likely look bad at times. Maybe he’ll struggle right away as he did in spring training, and maybe it will happen later, but there’s simply no way he won’t face serious struggles against big-league pitching. He’s 22 years old and he’s barely played at all in Triple-A. In fact, he’s played just 75 total games above Single-A! That’s not even half a season. This is an aggressive promotion, and there’s no guarantee that it will work. However, if the Red Sox really do feel that Campbell is ready, and are willing to let him figure some things out in Boston, it’s absolutely the right move.