Red Sox Prospect Shares Tweak That Helped Him Vault Up Rankings

Progression isn’t linear, but you wouldn’t be able to tell judging by Red Sox prospect Kristian Campbell’s early-career résumé.

The Boston prospect is preparing for his first big league camp in Fort Myers, Fla., where expectations are considerably higher for him than they were a year ago. The 2023 draft pick has impressed at every level of his professional career, a performance that sent him skyrocketing up prospect lists.

Campbell was unranked on Keith Law’s top 100 prospects for The Athletic a year ago. Entering 2025, he’s No. 9 and Law’s minor league player of the year from 2024. Baseball America gave him the same honor and placed him even higher on its rankings, with Campbell at No. 4, and MLB Pipeline’s rankings had him landing at No. 7.

The Georgia Tech product had a sensational 2024 season, hitting .330 across three separate stops. After hitting just one home run in a 22-game dip in the water in 2023, he launched 20 home runs in just 115 total games with Greenville, Portland and Worcester last season.

The power-up didn’t go unnoticed.

“Campbell looks like an entirely different hitter than he did in college, trading a bit of contact to do a lot more damage with a more aggressive right-handed stroke that allows him to hit balls harder and launch them in the air more frequently,” his MLB Pipeline capsule reads.

That power-up also wasn’t by accident, either.

“Pretty much (the Red Sox) told me what I needed to work on last year when I first got drafted. I’ve been working on it for a year, a year and a half now, and steadily I’ve been getting better and better throughout the season, specifically hitting the ball in the air,” Campbell told NESN’s Tom Caron on Wednesday at Red Sox spring training in Fort Myers.

“It’s a long process. I wouldn’t say it took a week or two to get going. It kind of took throughout the season for me to do it. There were a lot of highs and lows in some areas, but once I kind of got it together, it fell into place.

” … Hit the ball in the air as hard as possible. Try to keep it off the ground because those are outs up here.”

Campbell is having success doing that. His fly-ball rate in the limited 2023 sample size was 29%. That number largely stayed consistent in 2024 at 27%. It’s hard to make any sort of direct comparisons, especially when you’re dealing with players of various ages and levels. But that’s a fly-ball rate in the neighborhood of Toronto’s Bo Bichette, who feels like a decent comparison given his athleticism and position.

There’s certainly more work to be done. But as both Red Sox chief baseball officer Craig Breslow and manager Alex Cora noted Tuesday, Campbell will get some looks this spring, and Boston fans will know he’s progressing if he’s hitting the ball in the air.

To hear more from Campbell as well as Breslow and get all the latest from TC in the Fort, check out “Red Sox From Fort Myers” presented by MassMutual on NESN at 6:30 p.m. ET on Wednesday.