Does Boston Radio Host Have A Point About Roman Anthony’s Defense?

Nope. The answer to the question on the headline of this story is unequivocally, emphatically no. Or at least that’s what the smart people say.

Now that you’re here, if you’re a Red Sox fan who likes Boston sports radio, you probably already know what this is about. Tony Massarotti, a well-respected baseball voice for most of his career, said Thursday on his wildly popular “Felger and Mazz” program on 98.5 The Sports Hub that he has questions about Roman Anthony.

Specifically, Mazz wonders whether there’s some great cover-up to hide the fact that Anthony is some sort of butcher with a baseball glove on his hand.

“I was scouring the internet to find scouting reports on Roman Anthony, and I came across one that said Anthony ‘should’ become an above-average outfielder,” Massarotti said Thursday, as seen in an increasingly viral clip shared by The Sports Hub.

A predictably apoplectic Mazz continued: “What do you mean should? Should tells me that he’s not good, and he has to grow into it. This is the guy who’s regarded as the No. 1 prospect in the game; how is a guy the No. 1 prospect in the game if his defense sucks? Because that’s how I read that.”

That’s intense! Here’s the portion of our program where we stop to quickly acknowledge that a lot of what gets said on sports radio is, well, contrived. At the very least, it’s taking a relatively innocuous opinion and turning it up to 11. That much most of us know.

But this one is especially confounding even under those parameters. The truth about Massarotti, and quite frankly, most casual Red Sox observers, is that no one knows for sure how good — or bad — Anthony will be, in the field or at the plate. As such, we rely on the experts in this case. With all due respect to Massarotti, who has been paid very handsomely to report and opine on baseball over the years, he is not an expert when it comes to 20-year-olds playing baseball in 3,000-seat stadiums in Nowhere, U.S.A., and trying to project those skills to the major leagues.

Tim Nichols, a former professor at the U.S. Naval War College, wrote a book called “The Death of Expertise” in 2017, and this passage feels applicable here: “The fact of the matter is that experts are more often right than wrong, especially on essential matters of fact. And yet the public constantly searches for the loopholes in expert knowledge that will allow them to disregard all expert advice they don’t like.”

As that seemingly random shoehorn pertains to Anthony’s defense, the people who are experts on such matters, disagree with the assessment his glove … “sucks.”

For example(s):

Sox Prospects.com: Strong defensive instincts make up for only average foot speed. Takes efficient routes when moving laterally, but on occasion will be a step slow reading balls over his head. Has primarily played center field, but started playing corner outfield more often in July 2024. Ability to stay in center will depend on whether he can retain his athleticism as he matures. Potential above-average defensive profile.

Keith Law, The Athletic: Anthony has mostly played center in the minors, but he’s not very rangy and he’s maybe an average runner, so he’s much more likely to end up in a corner, supplanted in center by someone with plus range. He’s got a chance to be a 30-homer, high-average, high-OBP guy in right field, maybe with plus defense there, which is a “best player in the league” profile.

MLB.com Pipeline: While Anthony can flash plus run times out of the batter’s box, he projects more as an average runner once he finishes filling out his 6-foot-2 frame. His instincts allow him to steal some bases and to get the job done in the center field, though he profiles better on a corner. He earns average-to-solid grades for his arm strength but recorded just two assists in 101 outfield starts in 2024.

Kiley McDaniel, ESPN: There’s legitimate star potential here with the plus-plus raw power to potentially hit 30 homers, above-average on-base skills, and the speed, arm and instincts for real baserunning and defensive value.

Is he going to be Andruw Jones out there? It doesn’t sound like it. But he’s also not going to be Rob Deer or Jay Buhner, either.

Admittedly, it would be disingenuous for someone to see scouting reports that say Anthony has above-average or plus potential and say he’s going to be in the Gold Glove discussion for the next 15 years. It’s also slightly disingenuous, though, to read a scouting report that supposedly read he “should be average” and extrapolate that as “sucks” — especially if you haven’t actually watched him play.

But wait! Mazz says he has watched him play the outfield, presumably in the handful of spring innings he’s logged over the last week.

“After watching him play the outfield, he doesn’t exactly read the ball off the bat like Ken Griffey Jr.,” added Theo Epstein Massarotti.

Maybe Mazz took exception with the route Anthony took on this sliding catch earlier in the spring, although from what we can see in the unsurprisingly bad spring training video angle, it seems he got a pretty good jump on the ball. And if we’re cherry-picking small sample sizes, this looks like a pretty good read off the bat, no?

If someone like Massarotti is picking nits over what others are saying about Anthony’s defense, it probably bodes well for the 20-year-old. Even if the defense sucked, he’s knocking on the big league door because of his bat, and it’s hard to poke holes in that one. And if he ends up playing left field, at Fenway Park, next to Jarren Duran, will it really matter that much?

Such is life in February when there’s not much to talk about. Mazz did add one more rant, though, complaining about why he has to do “(his) own scouting” (lol), and the clip ended with a declaration: “You know what I think he is right now if you were to ask me what he’d projects to be? A DH? How do I get excited about a prospect who’s a DH?”

Which, like, whatever. The good news, though, if you’re a Red Sox fan, is Anthony sure doesn’t feel that way.

“A lot of people obviously, they look at the hitting side more than they do the defensive side,” he told the “To the Show We Go Podcast” following the 2023 season. “I think it’s just how it is in baseball now. But for me, going into the year, defense was just as important to me, and going into spring training, I was trying to learn as much as I can.

” … I just tried to take pride in being as good as I can out there and centerfield and trying to stick in center field as long as I can.”