Billy Heyen

Roman Anthony couldn't put a ring on it. For more than two months, what had to have been one of the most annoying and nagging injuries kept Anthony out of the Boston Red Sox lineup. He had partially torn a ligament in his right ring finger. It wasn't some massive, noticeable, life-changing injury. It was just an ailment that made it really hard to swing a bat. The Red Sox handled business in the meantime. They went on that franchise record-tying 15-game winning streak. They watched Ceddanne Rafaela become an All-Star. They saw Mickey Gasper temporarily turn into Ted Williams. Then, in late August, Anthony came back. He was supposed to be the final piece to the puzzle. If the Red Sox were a good baseball team without Anthony, they could potentially be a great one with him -- at least, that's how the thinking went. The problem, though, is clear: Since Anthony has been back, he hasn't been quite right. He hasn't looked like a rising star. He's looked like a hitter who is recognizing that hitting is actually really, really hard. There's not a whole lot of time for Anthony to right the ship before the postseason, but there's just enough time for Boston fans to hold out hope that he has (or will find) a solution. If he's going to make fixes, it'll have to be in his approach at the plate, where he's whiffed at a 35% rate in September, including a stretch of 17 strikeouts in 35 plate appearances. Something clearly isn't quite right here, although it may not be as bad as you think. Roman Anthony's Swing Looks Different When It Matters One quick way to figure out what might be happening with a hitter who is striking out a lot is to fast forward directly to two-strike counts and see what's happening. First, though, take a look at what Anthony looks like on the first pitch of an at-bat with two runners on base. This clip shows a wide stance that's slightly open, a strong leg kick, and Anthony's signature ability to stay through the baseball and drive it the other way: Some hitters change their approach with two strikes -- contact hitters in particular often get lower and choke up on the bat to have the best chance of putting the ball in play. But the big and strong Anthony, if he's going to do that, better at least stick to a plan. And it seems like right now he doesn't have one. So we can see the video, and we can see the basic stats, but to further figure out what's been going wrong with Anthony, we decided to take a look at the metrics behind his swing itself. Clearly, coming back from a finger injury and a long layoff could make hitting harder, but this isn't just about Anthony's .226 average and .677 OPS in September. The Red Sox need to figure out what's going on so they can address it and improve those numbers the rest of the way. Lucky for us, Statcast has just about every metric you could possibly imagine, so it's possible to compare all sorts of things about Anthony's swing inputs and batted ball outputs from each month of his rookie season through right now. Take, for example, his attack angle. That's the vertical direction the sweet spot is traveling when it hits the baseball. This month, Anthony has an attack angle of 16 degrees. When he had a .946 OPS in July of last year, it was 14 degrees. The only time it has ever been this high before was last September in a super small sample size (26 pitches seen). And while it may seem like a minor difference, it can prevent the ideal line drive from coming off Anthony's bat. That's just one metric. The rest of his bat statistics actually seem fine. Nothing is weird about his bat speed or his swing length or his attack direction. There's nothing underlying there to be totally concerned about. This is the part, Red Sox fans, where the news gets good. Roman Anthony Is Actually Just Fine Anthony's swing, while maybe a little tilted from its optimal self, doesn't seem broken. He's just whiffing a bit more than you'd want. It's also worth considering what happens when Anthony doesn't whiff. When he's made contact the ball in September, Anthony has hit it harder than ever before. His previous best average exit velocity in a month was in July 2025, at 96.9 miles per hour. Entering this week, Anthony has averaged 97.0 miles per hour of exit velocity on his batted balls in this month. He's had a hard-hit percentage of 63.6%, right about his career average, and he has the third-best single-month barrel rate of his career. The Red Sox obviously can't afford for him to keep whiffing on more than a third of the swings he takes, but we can also recognize that Anthony is oh so close to putting it back together again. View full article