FORT MYERS, Fla. -- Todd Fitz-Gerald coached Eric Hosmer as a kid. He also coached Nick Castellanos and Jesús Luzardo. As one of the most decorated high school coaches in the country, Fitz-Gerald wasn't just guessing about what big-league talent looked like at 13 years old. He knew it. He'd coached it. And he saw it in Roman Anthony.
As a middle schooler, Anthony joined Fitz-Gerald's Florida Pokers travel ball team. Not long after his 13th birthday, Anthony was the talk of an annual summer tournament in Cooperstown, N.Y. His sweet left-handed swing pummeled homers left and right, including grand slams in three straight at-bats in one game, a Cooperstown record that still stands.
That third at-bat is what Fitz-Gerald remembers most. When Anthony stepped to the plate, the pitcher called his coach to the mound and refused to pitch to Anthony. Despite a lopsided score, the opposing coach gave the OK to Fitz-Gerald to let Anthony make an attempt at Cooperstown history and convinced his pitcher to face him. Even with a large crowd watching, anticipating more heroics, the moment wasn't too big for Anthony. He slammed the first pitch he saw over the fence.
"He's just really good," Fitz-Gerald said. "And he's always been really good."
Seven years later, Anthony is baseball's No. 1 prospect, and not many in his circle are surprised by his success or how he's handled the pressure and expectations that come with the lofty title. At 20, the outfielder is likely to open this season in Triple A, but the big leagues are close. Very close.
He's on a path to be the rare major leaguer to debut during his age-21 season. But arriving early is nothing new for Anthony, who has been excelling against older competition all of his life.
Anthony grew up in West Palm Beach, the youngest of Tony and Lori's three kids. Though he played multiple sports, baseball was always his passion and he often played with older kids, young for his grade with a May 13 birthday.
"I was always playing with my brother and his friends, who were four years older. Always the young guy that kind of got pushed around with my brother," Anthony said with a laugh.
Anthony's dad coached him in youth baseball from ages 7 to 11, and even then, Anthony's talent was recognizable. His dad was an intense coach, and while well-meaning, didn't have a baseball background. Anthony needed more structure and guidance to reach his potential. That's when he met Fitz-Gerald.
"(His parents) weren't really sure what he was going to be, but I knew what he was going to be from the first time I saw him," Fitz-Gerald said. "I've seen it. I know what it looks like."
In addition to the Florida Pokers, Fitz-Gerald was head coach of a top Florida program at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland. He'd previously coached at another Florida powerhouse, American Heritage High. During his three-decade career, he guided teams to multiple state championships and was the first person ever to be named Florida Coach of the Year three consecutive times.
A coach with that much success has seen plenty of talented young ballplayers. Anthony reminded Fitz-Gerald of one of his young pupils in particular.
"When I had Eric Hosmer, the third overall pick in 2008, they're two really similar kinds of players, different positions but you can see the skill set, the hit tool, the way they went about their business, the way they did their things. They never short changed the game, they never cheated the game and always gave it their best," he said.
While Anthony played for Fitz-Gerald's Pokers through middle school, he started high school at home in West Palm Beach at Cardinal Newman. But he soon realized the less competitive league was holding him back. He begged his parents to let him play for Fitz-Gerald in Parkland, about an hour south, but his parents wanted him to focus on his education, realizing a career in baseball was a rarity.
"They said if it's pretty real by the time you're a junior, you can go down there and play and we'll make the transition work," Anthony said.
Just before his junior year, two years after the tragic shooting at Stoneman Douglas that killed 17 people and injured 17 more, Anthony transferred to the school to play for Fitz-Gerald. He and his dad, a financial advisor, moved into an apartment near the school, while his mom, a physician's assistant who owns an aesthetics practice in West Palm Beach, visited for games and on the weekends. It wasn't a cross-country move, but it was still life-altering and showed the Anthonys' commitment and trust in Fitz-Gerald.
"Todd was an old-school, old-fashioned, hard-ass guy," Tony Anthony said. "He had made some comments to us, too, that weren't salesy in nature, like 'Just bring me your kid because I want to win.' He really was invested in Roman."
"It cost me a small fortune renting a place down there," Tony Anthony joked. "But at the end of the day, he won a couple state championships, two national championships and Gatorade Florida Player of the Year. So it worked out."
Stoneman Douglas' success meant scouts were regular fixtures at all of Anthony's games before he was even draft-eligible. As he watched his older teammates go through the draft process, he promised himself he wouldn't get wrapped up in stressing about it. He'd been playing on the summer showcase circuit for Canes National, had committed to play at Mississippi and was excited about his plan for college, even taking classes the summer before his senior year in high school.
But then he met Willie Romay, a longtime South Florida amateur scout for the Red Sox who was responsible for signing Triston Casas and Kutter Crawford. Like Fitz-Gerald, Romay knew MLB-caliber talent when he saw it, but he carried himself differently than other scouts and it stood out to Anthony.
"Willie was one of the few scouts that didn't really give me a scout vibe, which sometimes can be very robotic," Anthony said. "You feel like somebody is always interviewing you, and for me, Willie was like a friend and somebody who was super honest to me from Day 1 and wasn't really blowing smoke (up) my a-. Told me what I needed to work on, told me what I could get better at, and almost felt like a coaching relationship with Willie and I loved that about him."
For Romay, the feeling was mutual. While he saw immense talent in Anthony, the high schooler was not without flaws. Sometimes, star players in big programs can think they're infallible. Not Anthony.
"A sign of a good player is they're able to get critiqued and work at it, not everybody does that," Romay said. "I remember having a conversation with Roman and he's like, 'Willie, what do I need to work on that I can be better at? What's good in my game and what needs to be better?'"
Romay was impressed and told the teenager to work on driving the ball to all parts of the field. He'd seen Anthony's pull-side power on inside pitches, but warned him that would get exposed as he advanced. A few weeks later, Romay returned and Anthony pulled him into the cage to show him drills he'd been doing to take advantage of the advice.
"You could tell he really put in the time to work on his swing and he's like 'What do you think?'" Romay said.
When the draft came around in 2022, Romay pushed hard for Anthony. He was coming off a summer where he'd shown a lot of swing-and-miss in his game, but turned that into a standout senior season, one of the best Fitz-Gerald had seen. Anthony didn't turn 18 until May and won Florida's Gatorade Player of the Year, but he wasn't on any major publications' first-round mock draft predictions.
At the start of the draft, the Red Sox had a strategy in place, thinking Anthony would fly under the radar. They selected California high school shortstops Mikey Romero and Cutter Coffey with their first two picks. The Red Sox had an additional pick after the second round at No. 79 as compensation for losing starter Eduardo Rodríguez to free agency.
With that pick, they drafted Anthony and signed him for $2.5 million, well above the $820,000 projected value for the pick and a higher signing bonus than they gave to either Romero or Coffey. They knew it would require that kind of money to pry Anthony away from Mississippi.
Five of Anthony's teammates from the Canes National showcase team were taken in the first two rounds of that draft. Another one of Anthony's closest friends, Jackson Holliday, went No. 1.
Holliday grew up in Jupiter, Fla., while his dad, Matt, played for the St. Louis Cardinals. The younger Holliday squared off against Anthony throughout his youth before his family moved to Oklahoma when he was in high school. Anthony and Holliday stayed close, often working out over the winters together at the Hollidays' facility in Oklahoma.
Though they began their pro careers at the same time, Holliday got a bit of a head start on Anthony, rocketing through the Orioles' system, entering the 2024 season as MLB's top prospect and debuting last April. But he struggled in his debut, his first stumble as a pro.
"He was so good in the minor leagues and never really struggled, and people were like, wait, why is he struggling?" Anthony said. "This is a failure game, right? So, (Holliday's experience is) really just putting things into perspective and not having expectations for myself."
Anthony took over for Holliday as baseball's No. 1 prospect this spring, but at the outset of his minor-league career, Anthony had his own struggles. In 2023, he began the year at Low-A Salem and hit .228 with a .693 OPS in 42 games. Though those numbers were underwhelming, he drew 38 walks compared to 38 strikeouts, and was working hard with hitting coach Nelson "Pepe" Paulino, so the Red Sox wanted to keep challenging him.
"Towards the end of that Low-A run, things started to click and the swing started to feel a little bit more polished," Anthony said. "I was making good swing decisions. The results on the scoreboard weren't really there, but there were a lot of good signs, and credit to the Red Sox for promoting me when a lot of people are like, how the heck did you just get promoted? They trusted what was going on behind the scenes."
Anthony rewarded their decision, tearing up High-A Greenville at 19 with a .294 average, .981 OPS and 12 homers in 54 games, earning him a promotion to Double A for the final 10 games of the season, where he collected 12 hits and posted a 1.020 OPS.
He was the first 19-year-old to reach Double A for the Red Sox since Xander Bogaerts in 2012. Anthony finished the year as Boston's Minor League Offensive Player of the Year. He had started out the 2023 season unranked by Baseball America and was their No. 19 prospect by the season's end.
"I really didn't put any expectations on myself," Anthony said. "I obviously always have confidence in myself and am pretty competitive and I wanted to do what I did in Greenville and in Double A that year, all year, but I think just not really like looking at it and just trusting in myself."
When Anthony began 2024 in Double-A Portland, he was yet again the youngest player, not just in the Eastern League but all of Double A.
"That's where I would say I definitely learned the most about myself, spending the most time there," he said. "We'd face a guy and the next week he'd be in the big leagues. That's the first level where it kind of hits you that you're real close. And for us, being in Maine, getting the fans from up north, that's the first real feeling of like, 'OK, this is closer than I think.'"
Like the previous year, he started off slow, but stuck to his routine and found his rhythm, hitting .269 with an .856 OPS and 20 doubles and 15 homers in 84 games. Manager Chad Epperson had a team loaded with prospects and implored them to watch the big-league club, in particular players like Red Sox leadoff hitter Jarren Duran and his aggressiveness out of the box, putting pressure on the defense.
"He'd say, that's how it's going to help you get to the majors the fastest, is to emulate what those guys are doing," Anthony recalled. "It made us better, and it made the transition to Triple A easier because those are the things you're expected to do, right?"
Anthony, catcher Kyle Teel and shortstop Marcelo Mayer, his roommate in Portland, represented the Red Sox at the Futures All-Star Game last summer. A few weeks later, all three were promoted to Triple-A Worcester, roughly 50 minutes west of Boston. Infielder/outfielder Kristian Campbell, who was having a monster season of his own, followed the trio to Worcester a few weeks later, turning Boston's Big Three into the Big Four. All ranked within the top 50 in baseball across most publications by season's end.
Anthony, the youngest player in Triple A, hit .344 with a .983 OPS in 35 games to close out the year.
"We're all so close. We all spend so much time together and I think when you have guys going through it with guys like Marcelo and Campbell and Teel (before he was traded this past winter for Garrett Crochet), it makes transitions a lot easier," Anthony said. "It makes going out and taking the field a lot easier. It makes blocking the noise and the expectations from everyone easier."
Though the title of "baseball's top prospect" sounds impressive, Anthony downplays his status, often pointing out he hasn't earned anything yet.
"Quite honestly with all the fanfare from the rankings and all that stuff he ignores it," Tony Anthony said. "He always says, 'It's great to be where I am and get the accolades, but I've never taken an at-bat in the big leagues so it really doesn't mean anything in the clubhouse.' I think he truly believes that and I think that motivates him."
This spring marked Roman Anthony's first as a non-roster invitee to big-league camp, meaning he had a locker in the main clubhouse, naturally alongside Campbell and Mayer, the No. 9 and No. 28 prospects in The Athletic's ranking, respectively.
"It's something at this point that I feel like I'm just like a part of this clubhouse and the goal is obviously to really be a part of this clubhouse now, as soon as I can," Anthony said.
In six spring games, he's gone 4-for-13 with a double, four walks and just one strikeout. He is tantalizingly close to the majors.
"Sometimes, you're like, 'Wow, I can't believe this kid is 20 years old,'" senior director of player development Brian Abraham said. "I don't want to say it's a surprise, but I'd say it's unique for sure. Not all 20-year-olds act that way, but also not all 20-year-olds have the talent that he has."
Anthony is realistic about what big-league life might entail, though, particularly having seen Holliday endure such a tough time in his first stretch.
"I've struggled before," Anthony said. "Obviously, I don't know what Boston's like. I haven't struggled up there. I know it's going to be different than struggling in Portland. But it's something that they do a good job here of kind of giving you a heads-up and (preparing you for)."
What's been harder to prepare for is Boston's rabid fan base. Having played on the national stage for a while, Anthony is accustomed to attention, but this will be a little different. He was in Boston earlier this winter for the team's rookie development camp and went to a Celtics game with Campbell. Fans recognized him on the streets and in the airport.
"It's kind of funny because I go home in the offseason and I'm in West Palm and it's a big city but I'm not really like anyone there, I'm a normal kid," he said. "I go and do normal things with my friends and then you kind of come here and from day one there are cameras everywhere and it's like, 'Oh wow I forgot about this.'
"But to me, that's just awesome. I'm excited to take it on. I'm excited to play for a big market. I'm excited to take the challenge and play for these fans and try to win in Boston. It's going to be fun."