President Donald Trump said Friday that he would pardon baseball great Pete Rose and criticized Major League Baseball for barring the all-time hit leader from the sport’s Hall of Fame for gambling.

Rose, who died last year at 83, was banned from baseball for life. He admitted in 2004 that he had bet on games, though never against his own team. Commissioner Rob Manfred in 2015 rejected Rose’s bid for reinstatement.

“Over the next few weeks I will be signing a complete pardon of Pete Rose, who shouldn’t have been gambling on baseball, but only bet on his team winning,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “He never betted against himself, or the other team. He had the most hits, by far, in baseball history, and won more games than anyone in sports history.”

Trump did not say what the pardon would cover. Rose served five months in prison after pleading guilty to tax evasion charges in 1990.

In a statement to ESPN, John Dowd, who investigated Rose for MLB in 1989 and served as Trump’s lawyer seven years ago, noted that MLB is “not in the pardon business nor does it control admission to the HOF.”

Rose, who spent most of his 1963 to 1986 career with the Cincinnati Reds, won the World Series three times and remains Major League Baseball’s career leader in hits, games played, at-bats, singles and outs.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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GLENDALE, Ariz. — As much as Shohei Ohtani relished the opposite-field home run he crushed Friday night in his first at-bat this spring, the reigning National League MVP left the Los Angeles Dodgers‘ 6-5 win over the Los Angeles Angels feeling even better about how his surgically repaired left shoulder withstood its biggest test yet.

“Regardless of the results, I think the biggest takeaway was being able to go through my three at-bats without any issues,” Ohtani said through interpreter Will Ireton. “Physically, it felt really good.”

Ohtani’s first-inning homer off countryman Yusei Kikuchi electrified the crowd at Camelback Ranch that packed the stands to see the 30-year-old in his first action since the Dodgers won the World Series. He spent the winter rehabilitating after arthroscopic surgery to repair a torn labrum in his left shoulder suffered diving into second base during Game 2.

The hope for Ohtani to be at full strength before the Dodgers and Chicago Cubs kick off the Major League Baseball season March 18 in his home country of Japan grew closer to reality Friday. When Ohtani ascended the dugout steps at 6:08 p.m. local time, fans greeted him with a cheer and watched him take three practice swings before stepping into the batter’s box accompanied by a louder ovation.

He started the at-bat from Kikuchi, who graduated from the same high school as Ohtani, by staring at a 95 mph fastball for a strike. Ohtani took a curveball for a ball, swung through another for a strike, stared at one more low and didn’t bite on an outside fastball before taking a 94 mph fastball into the Dodgers’ bullpen in left field.

“Obviously he’s fine,” Kikuchi said. “After that first home run he was able to hit that far, yeah, I’m sure he’s going to be able to put up the same numbers this year.”

Those numbers in 2024 — .310/.390/.646 with 54 home runs and 59 stolen bases — helped Ohtani win his third MVP. While the first two came in years when he served as designated hitter and starting pitcher, Ohtani did not pitch last year following Tommy John surgery.

The shoulder injury complicated a rehab that already was difficult after a second elbow reconstruction. In-game swings were a significant mile marker for Ohtani, and he said he felt “no discomfort,” a comforting feeling for him and everyone else in the clubhouse of the team hoping to be the first club this century to win back-to-back World Series.

“You would assume there’d be some residual soreness or pain or lack of strength,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said, “but he’s put in a lot of work, so it’s good to hear.”

Batting leadoff and playing DH, Ohtani popped out to shortstop in his second at-bat against Kikuchi and struck out against Chase Silseth before exiting the game following the fifth inning. Ohtani said between in-game action and simulating live arms against the Trajekt pitching robot, he would like to have 50 at-bats before the opener in Japan. For now, he said, his swing is in a good place.

“It’s a constant feedback between how I feel and how the swing actually looks,” Ohtani said. “So today was pretty good. I felt like it was pretty consistent with what I felt. So as I’m doing my rehab as well, I’m going to continue to do that.”

The rehab on Ohtani’s elbow, in the meantime, will continue, as he targets returning to a big league mound sometime in May. Ohtani will sit out the Dodgers’ game Saturday, Roberts said, and is expected to be back in the lineup Sunday when a split-squad Chicago White Sox team will try to figure out what the Angels couldn’t: how to keep Ohtani in check.

“He does not cease to amaze,” Roberts said. “I was telling [Dodgers free agent signing Michael] Conforto, every time Shohei gets up to bat, you’ve got to watch because something special could happen. And obviously there was a lot of anticipation for this night, and for him to homer his first at-bat off Kikuchi was pretty special.”

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• Associated Press

Feb 28, 2025, 04:47 PM ET

TAMPA, Fla. — Yankees right-hander Luis Gil will have an MRI after the AL Rookie of the Year experienced shoulder tightness during a bullpen session Friday, manager Aaron Boone told reporters.

Boone also said right-hander JT Brubaker suffered three broken ribs when hit by a comebacker off the bat of Tampa Bay‘s Kameron Misner on Feb. 21.

Gil, 26, cut short his bullpen session early, Boone said. He was 15-7 with a 3.50 ERA in 29 starts last year, striking out 171 and walking a major league-high 77 in 151 2/3 innings.

“Feels like it’s going to cost us some time,” Boone told reporters.

He is projected to be part of a rotation that includes Gerrit Cole, Max Fried, Carlos Rodón and Clarke Schmidt.

Marcus Stroman would be likely to enter the rotation if an opening develops.

The 31-year-old Brubaker missed the last two big league seasons because of Tommy John surgery and an oblique injury. He made eight rehab appearances in the Yankees organization last year, and had a 2.70 ERA in 16 2/3 innings.

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• 

  Jesse RogersFeb 28, 2025, 07:00 AM ET

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  Jesse joined ESPN Chicago in September 2009 and covers MLB for ESPN.com.

GLENDALE, Ariz. — One team is a worldwide attraction, fresh off its eighth World Series title. The other just lost an MLB record 121 games and hasn’t won a playoff series since 2005. The one thing they have in common?

A spring training parking lot.

Both the Los Angeles Dodgers and Chicago White Sox reside at Camelback Ranch during February and March, but life couldn’t be more different as the two franchises prepare for a new season.

When Dodgers players reported to camp earlier this month, their clubhouse looked like a who’s who of MLB All-Stars, while a trip through the White Sox’s side of the building required frequent glances at the nameplates above the locker stalls to know who was who.

In the days since arriving, the Dodgers have been asked regularly about the opportunity to repeat. The White Sox are contemplating a host of other questions: How do you restore confidence in the clubhouse? What message of optimism can you deliver after a historic season of losing?

Even the Dodgers’ morning workouts, normally a mundane early spring ritual, have served as a celebration of the team that ruled baseball last October and dominated the offseason headlines again, with 1,000-plus fans showing up to get a glimpse of their favorite players. On the White Sox side of the facility, ESPN counted only 21 fans taking in one recent workout.

Still, entering a year in which their focus will be on finding the positives wherever they can, the White Sox are looking at the upside of sharing a spring home with the team certain to be the talk of baseball all season long.

“It’s a great opportunity to be matched up in a facility with a team that won the World Series, to have something to aim towards,” general manager Chris Getz said. “How do we get to beat them? How can we compete? So yeah, the Dodgers have been a very successful organization. With that being said, we know what we need to do and we’re set out to do that.”

For Chicago, the season will be measured mostly by the steps taken by young players, and despite the ups-and-downs that come with trying to integrate them into a major league roster, the on-the-field results must add up to a better record than last year’s 41-121 mark.

“I do think we’re going to win more games than we did last year,” Getz said as camp opened. “Unfortunately, there are going to be some growing pains along the way that at times is going to challenge your emotions, but that’s part of the development of some of these players.

“Last year provided a lot of clarity for a lot of people, including myself. We had a lot of work to do, a lot more changes that needed to be made and we were able to accomplish a lot of that this offseason and that started with hiring Will Venable.”

Venable is the first-time manager who checks all the boxes the front office was looking for when it set out to find someone to guide the White Sox through a fresh start. The 42-year-old former major league outfielder retired within the last decade and has since worked under some of the best managers in the business, including Joe Maddon, Alex Cora and Bruce Bochy.

“It’s really about being present and doing the things that we can control now,” Venable said of his opening message to his team.

Venable’s roster is missing last season’s best player, left-hander Garrett Crochet, who was traded to the Red Sox during the offseason. It does feature a smattering of holdovers, such as Luis Robert Jr. and Andrew Vaughn and Andrew Benintendi (although the start of the outfielder’s season will come later after suffering a broken hand on Thursday), who are hungry for an opportunity to be remembered for something other than last season’s futility.

“When I signed here, I signed for five years knowing that there could be ups and downs, but I’m here for it and it’s my job to go out there and perform,” Benintendi said. “And last year I didn’t do that. And not only do I feel like I let the fans or team down, I think (I let) myself down. You have such high expectations going into a season and when you don’t hit them, it’s frustrating, but you just gotta keep going.”

The White Sox also added a group of journeyman free agents looking to reboot their careers — including Joey Gallo, Brandon Drury and Michael A. Taylor — who were signed to short-term deals with an opportunity to compete for the playing time they weren’t as likely to get elsewhere.

But the real excitement on Chicago’s side of Camelback Ranch this spring is about a group of prospects — six of which appear on ESPN’s Kiley McDaniel’s top 100 list, including lefties Noah Schultz and Hagen Smith, the team’s top picks in the 2022 and 2024 drafts, respectively. Both made their spring debuts last Wednesday, but won’t break camp with the big league club. Also providing promise for the future is catcher Kyle Teel, who was the centerpiece of the White Sox’s return for Crochet, and shortstop Colson Montgomery, who homered in the team’s first spring game.

“We brought in a lot of really good veterans, so it’s really cool just to talk to them, pick their brains, not even about baseball, just kind of how they go about their business, how you go about yourself as a pro,” Montgomery said. “We also have a lot of really young talent and I think that’s what the fans and everybody should be really excited for.”

Envisioning a future with Montgomery anchoring the lineup while Schultz and Hagen top the rotation has helped Getz stay the course in Chicago’s rebuild even as the losses at the major league level have piled up.

“There’s no time to complain. And there’s no one really to complain to,” Getz said. “We got our hands dirty and got to work. There honestly wasn’t a day to get away from it because we didn’t want to get away from it. We wanted to dive in and continue to build this forward.

“Physically, mentally you rid yourself of negative things, but I personally have just channeled it for motivation to get better. And I know that is a cliché, in itself, but it’s the truth of the matter.”

Across the parking lot earlier this week, after watching $325 million starter Yoshinobu Yamamoto throw a bullpen session, Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman reflected on the plight of his White Sox counterpart.

Friedman and Getz sometimes meet on the backfields at Camelback Ranch. Friedman sympathizes with Getz, despite the vast disparity between their two rosters, which includes a payroll difference of more than $300 million. L.A. enters the season with a MLB-leading payroll that’s approaching $400 million, compared to Chicago’s 29th-ranked $83 million total, a number the franchise has pared down during its rebuild.

“It’s certainly a challenge, but in a lot of ways there are a lot of fun aspects of it, building up and growing the various departments. And it’s critical for everyone to work well together,” said Friedman, who helped build winning teams in Tampa Bay without high payrolls. “And it doesn’t mean you don’t disagree, but putting those processes in place and being more innovative when you’re at this point, it’s similar to how we were in 2006 and 2007 with the Rays.

“There is a lot of strong foundation you can build during that time period that while mired in it is not fun. But when you look back, when you’ve reached a point of a steady state of success where a lot of that can be attributed to those early years, it can be very rewarding.”

While Getz can only dream of those days for now, he is using his unique spring training vantage point to soak up how a model organization is run. Asked what he admires about the Dodgers, he pointed to the detailed ground-up approach that often gets overlooked amid the franchise’s splashy offseason signings.

“Being a former farm director and being attached to a complex with the Dodgers and seeing what they do on a regular basis, having conversations, seeing the work that’s being done, it’s almost a small-market mindset in terms of really valuing the development of players,” Getz said. “I respect how they go about it. It’s not just spending, they do a lot of little things.”

Of course, it is going to take more than little things for the White Sox to make up the distance between them and the Dodgers — or even most of the rest of the other 28 major league teams — and that was apparent as soon as the curtain dropped on a new season of Cactus League games.

Last Thursday, 10,959 fans dressed primarily in Dodger blue showed up for L.A.’s opener. Four days later, the White Sox played their first home game of the spring in front of an announced crowd of 2,636. The fans who did make their way to Camelback Ranch for the Monday afternoon matchup with the Texas Rangers were greeted with a familiar sight to anyone who followed the 2024 season: Chicago promptly gave up nine runs in the top of the first inning.

“Obviously, you’re not going to meet a fan that wants to be where we’re at right now,” Getz said. “But if they’re sticking by our side, when we get there, it’s going to be a really special moment for a lot of people.”

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• Associated Press

Feb 27, 2025, 05:52 PM ET

GLENDALE, Ariz. — Chicago White Sox left fielder Andrew Benintendi will miss four to six weeks with a broken hand after being hit by a pitch in a spring training game on Thursday.

Benintendi was hit on the right hand with an 87 mph fastball by Cleveland right-hander Logan Allen in the first inning and left the game. The White Sox announced the diagnosis as a non-displaced fracture, with no surgery required.

The recovery timetable means Benintendi likely will start the season on the injured list. The White Sox open at home on March 27 against the Los Angeles Angels.

Benintendi signed a $75 million, five-year contract with the White Sox prior to the 2023 season. After debuting with Boston in 2016 and helping the Red Sox with the World Series in 2018, he was traded to Kansas City in 2021. He won a Gold Glove that year and was selected for his first All-Star team in 2022, before being traded to the New York Yankees for the stretch run.

Benintendi matched his career high in 2024 with 20 homers but batted just .229, his worst average for a full season, excluding the pandemic-shortened 2020 schedule. He has played in 286 games in two seasons with Chicago.

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Derek Bender, the former Minnesota Twins minor league catcher who is under MLB investigation for telling opposing hitters what pitches were coming, denied the allegations in an interview with The Athletic as he remains out of professional baseball.

“No,” Bender told The Athletic, in an interview published Thursday, when asked if he gave away pitches to opposing batters. “And I’ll live with this until the day I die. I never gave pitches away. I never tried to give the opposing team an advantage against my own team.”

Bender, a sixth-round draft pick out of Coastal Carolina in July, was playing for the Fort Myers Mighty Mussels, the Twins’ Single-A affiliate. In the second game of a Sept. 6 doubleheader, Bender told multiple hitters for the Lakeland Flying Tigers, a Detroit farm team, the specific pitches being thrown by starter Ross Dunn, sources told ESPN at the time.

Lakeland scored four runs in the second inning and won the game 6-0 to clinch the Florida State League West division and eliminate the Mighty Mussels from playoff contention. Fort Myers coaches were notified by Lakeland coaches about Bender’s pitch tipping after the game, sources told ESPN at the time.

Sources told ESPN that Bender had told teammates he wanted the season to be over. In his interview with The Athletic, Bender said he joked to teammates about letting a ground ball go under their glove, but said he wasn’t serious.

Major League Baseball’s investigation of the incident continues, according to The Athletic, and Bender could face a permanent ban from the league.

“I had to go dark for at least three days,” Bender told The Athletic of the reaction to the initial story. “I had to private all my social media accounts. I was getting death threats and awful, obscene things said to me.”

Bender, 22, said he is trying to get back into professional baseball. He said he’ll play for the Brockton Rox of the independent Frontier League this summer.

Meanwhile, Bender said he hasn’t heard from any of his former teammates, including Ross.

“There are a lot of times where you’re talking with people that you thought you were friends with, they just don’t look at you the same,” Bender told The Athletic. “I’ve heard my friends get questioned about me, why they’re still friends with me. That’s hard to hear.

“It’s not like I’m getting accused of committing a crime.”

Bender told The Athletic that the Twins were willing to keep him in the organization if he admitted to the accusations and apologize. He said he apologized, but he wouldn’t say what he was apologizing for.

“The only thing I had left was my character at that point,” Bender told The Athletic. “Literally, the way they put it was, ‘If you want to die by the sword, we’ll release you.’ I knew there was no bluffing involved.”

His agents at Octagon told The Athletic that they had dropped Bender as a client because they had told him not to do any interviews until the MLB investigation was closed.

“It’s about gaining control over my life,” Bender told The Athletic of why he did the interview. “And this whole situation. I’m not doing this as a last-ditch effort to get back into affiliate ball. It’s more of this is the start of me taking control of my life again. Because I’ve let this completely control me for months now.”

A catcher and first baseman selected with the 188th pick in 2024, Bender signed for $297,500, slightly below the $320,800 slot for that selection. He will keep the entirety of his bonus after playing 19 games for Fort Myers, hitting .200/.273/.333 with two home runs and eight RBIs.

In three seasons at Coastal Carolina, he hit .326/.408/.571 with 32 home runs and 153 RBIs in 144 games.

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• ESPN News Services

Feb 26, 2025, 02:32 PM ET

Houston Astros star Jose Altuve will make his spring training debut Friday — and he’ll do it in left field, manager Joe Espada told reporters Wednesday.

Following the offseason trade of All-Star outfielder Kyle Tucker to the Chicago Cubs, the Astros have an opening in left field — and Altuve, a career second baseman, has said he will play anywhere on the field that he’s needed.

Altuve, who turns 35 in May, has played 1,766 games at second base and two at shortstop, never manning the outfield during his 14 seasons in the majors. A nine-time All-Star and former American League MVP, he won the Gold Glove at second base in 2015.

Altuve’s defensive stats at second base have slipped in recent seasons, however. In the past three seasons, he has registered a minus-15 defensive runs saved and two campaigns of minus-13.

The seven-time Silver Slugger hasn’t dropped off offensively, though. The three-time AL batting champion has averages of .300, .311 and .295 during that span.

Espada told reporters Tuesday that Altuve is doing well in his transition to left field.

“He’s actually been pretty good out there,” Espada said. “One thing, it’s practice and we can control the environment and the volume, but once the game starts he’ll be tested and we’ll get a better read of where he’s at. Right now, the attitude is exactly what we’re expecting and the work has been pretty good.”

Mauricio Dubon currently sits atop the depth chart at second base, but he is being challenged by Brendan Rodgers and Luis Guillorme.

The Astros will face the St. Louis Cardinals on Friday in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Field Level Media contributed to this report.

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• ESPN News Services

Feb 26, 2025, 07:11 PM ET

TAMPA, Fla. — St. Louis Cardinals third baseman Nolan Arenado made the three-hour, cross-state drive to play in an exhibition game Wednesday against the New York Yankees, among the teams that may be open to acquiring him in a trade.

He went 0-for-3 with two strikeouts and disputed the notion the game was a “showcase” of himself to a potential suitor.

“I didn’t come here for that,” Arenado told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “Day 3 of spring training. That wouldn’t be a good day to showcase myself. I’m not ready for that.”

Arenado, on the trade market because of declining production and a contract that will pay him $74 million over the next three seasons, said he was given the option to skip the trip but wanted see friends DJ LeMahieu and Paul Goldschmidt, both Yankees infielders, and an athletic trainer he knows in the area.

He said he wanted to get three at-bats, which kept him in the game for seven innings — another February rarity for a veteran. Arenado struck out on three pitches, lined out to second and whiffed on a 1-2 count.

“My body is ready for it,” he said. “I’m ready for nine. My timing [at the plate] is not.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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• Associated Press

Feb 26, 2025, 02:57 PM ET

GLENDALE, Ariz. — Dodgers manager Dave Roberts says three-time MVP Shohei Ohtani will make his first spring training appearance of the year Friday night against his old team, the Angels.

Ohtani, 30, will be the designated hitter. Roberts has not given a timetable for Ohtani’s return to the pitcher’s mound other than to say he hopes it would be “sooner than later.” Roberts has ruled Ohtani out for the March 18-19 season-opening series in Tokyo against the Chicago Cubs.

Ohtani injured his left shoulder sliding into second base during the World Series, when the Dodgers beat the New York Yankees in five games. He did not pitch last season, his first with the Dodgers, while recovering from surgery to repair a ligament in his throwing elbow.

Playing exclusively as a batter, he hit 54 home runs with 59 stolen bases — the first person in the major league 50/50 club — and won his third unanimous MVP award.

As a pitcher, Ohtani is 38-19 with a 3.01 ERA, including a 10-5 record and 3.14 ERA in 2023 before he was injured that August.

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FORT MYERS, Fla. — Inside the batting cages at the Boston Red Sox‘s spring training complex, where the future of hitting is playing out in real time, the best trio of position prospects in a generation blossomed.

Kristian Campbell, Roman Anthony and Marcelo Meyer have spent hundreds of hours in the building, rotating around its 10 tunnels, though their best work always seems to happen in Cage 4, right inside the main entrance. When they walk through the door, underneath a sign with a Ted Williams quote in big, capital letters — “WE’RE GOING TO LEARN HOW TO DO TWO THINGS … WE’RE GOING TO HIT IT HARD AND WE’RE GOING TO HIT IT IN THE AIR” — they enter a hitting laboratory. Every cage is equipped with a HitTrax that gives them real-time batted-ball data. Trash cans house an array of training bats — overweight and underweight, long and short, skinny. A Trajekt robot, capable of replicating every pitch thrown in the major leagues over the past half-decade, is joined by a dozen other standard pitching machines. Exit-velocity leaderboards dot the walls.

Here, Campbell, Anthony and Mayer are in the middle of everything, appropriate for what their future holds. They’re learning modern hitting philosophy, applying it in an array of competitions that aim to turn their tools into skills, jamming to Bachata and Reggaeton and rap and rock, talking immense amounts of trash. On a small desk inside Cage 4 sit two binders outlining the Red Sox’s hitting philosophy: one in English and one in Spanish. These binders outline what the organization’s hitting coaches refer to as its Core Four tenets: swing decisions, bat speed, bat-to-ball skill and ball flight.

As pitchers have leveraged baseball’s sabermetric revolution into designer offerings and a sport wide velocity jump, hitting has fallen behind. Batting average and weighted on-base average (a metric that measures productivity at the plate) are at low points over the past half-century. Pitchers regularly flummox hitters. The Red Sox believe they can bridge the gap. And the new big three — a nickname that was originally given to Mayer, Anthony and Kyle Teel, the catching prospect at the heart of the trade that brought ace Garrett Crochet to Boston over the winter — are the philosophy’s beta test.

“The training environment is the biggest thing with us,” said Anthony, a 20-year-old outfielder. “We push each other so much, and it’s always that competitive — friendly, but competitive — environment we set in the cage. We talk crap to each other. We really try to get the best out of each other and really beat each other in training. And I think it makes us better when we take the field.”

There, their results are undeniable. Mayer, 22, is a smooth-fielding, left-handed-hitting shortstop who fell to the Red Sox with the No. 4 pick in the 2021 draft, weathered injuries and saw his exit velocity spike and strikeout rate dip last year. Anthony, who signed for a well-over-slot $2.5 million bonus after Boston chose him with the 79^th pick in the 2022 draft, is widely regarded as the best hitting prospect in the minor leagues. The 22-year-old Campbell, a fourth-round pick in 2023 as a draft-eligible redshirt freshman, was a revelation last season, the consensus Minor League Player of the Year who went from unheralded to a prospect coveted even more than Anthony by some teams despite an unorthodox swing.

All three will be in the major leagues sooner than later — for Campbell, perhaps by Opening Day. They’ll bring with them a shared experience they believe will transfer to the big leagues. When they eventually face Yankees ace Gerrit Cole, they’ll have a sense of what to expect, not just because they stood in against him on the Trajekt but because coaches took his best fastballs (100 mph at the top of the zone), added an extra half-foot of rise to them and challenged the kids to hit it.

“You want to be surrounded with the best,” Anthony said, “because it makes you want to become the best.”

IN SEPTEMBER 2023, after the minor league season ended, the Red Sox gathered their minor league prospects at their spring training complex for a two-month offseason camp. Boston’s staff assesses every hitter to form an action plan, and Campbell’s was clear. He made excellent swing decisions and had elite bat-to-ball ability, both of which manifested themselves as he hit .376 with 29 walks and 17 strikeouts over 217 plate appearances in his lone season at Georgia Tech. While the 6-foot-3, 210-pound Campbell swung the bat hard, the Red Sox saw room for improvement. Ball flight represented the biggest area of need after his average launch angle during 22 postdraft pro games was just 2 degrees.

Inside the complex’s cafeteria one day in camp, Campbell was surveying his options when Red Sox hitting coordinator John Soteropulos meandered by. Soteropulos had joined the team after three years as a hitting coach at Driveline Baseball, the Seattle-based think tank where philosophies have pervaded the game over the past decade. Soteropulos noticed shepherd’s pie on the cafeteria’s menu and alerted Campbell.

“You need to eat that,” Soteropulos said. “It’s got bat speed in it.”

“I hope it has ball flight, too,” Campbell said.

While Mayer entered the MLB ecosystem as a top prospect and Anthony a tooled-up could-be star, Campbell was different. Taken with the compensatory pick the Red Sox received when longtime shortstop Xander Bogaerts signed with the San Diego Padres, Campbell signed for less than $500,000. His swing was janky. He needed work. Soteropulos, director of hitting and fellow Driveline alum Jason Ochart and assistant farm director Chris Stasio were empowered by Red Sox management to implement their new systems in hopes of extracting the best version of later-round picks like Campbell — and if it worked, he would represent the proof of concept.

From the moment he arrived in the organization, Campbell impressed the staff with his desire to learn. And challenging players beyond the perfunctory repetitions hitters take — the same soft flips in the batting cage, the same 60-mph batting practice before every game — is at the heart of Boston’s philosophy.

Professional baseball players, the thinking goes, are elite problem solvers. Giving them complex problems drives them to adapt. If they train in environments that don’t take them outside of their comfort zone, improvement is negligible. Challenging hitters, whether with the Trajekt or with machine balls that fly only when struck on the sweet spot or with slim bats that emphasize barrel control or hundreds of other ways, forces that adaptation. And it’s those changes that take a nonexistent or atrophied skill and give it heft.

“I really wanted to go to a team that could develop me into a great player and that will take the time to help me because I feel like I’m really coachable and I listen,” Campbell said. “I just need the right information. And if I don’t know what I’m doing, it’s hard for me to correct and change things.”

Over those two months, the Red Sox didn’t overhaul Campbell’s swing as much as they found the best version of it. Thirty years ago, Dr. Coop DeRenne, a professor at the University of Hawaii, ran a study on overload and underload training that showed it significantly improved bat speed. The industry has mostly ignored its findings, but Driveline embraced them and brought them to the Red Sox. Campbell trained two days a week with bats that were 20% heavier and 20% lighter than standard 31-ounce bats. Though he whipped his bat through the zone with a preternatural ability to stay on plane — the angle of the bat meeting the angle at which the pitch arrived at home plate — delivering the barrel with greater force reinforced a tenet Red Sox coaches preach repeatedly: “The bats do the work for you.”

The bigger challenge was adulterating Campbell’s swing to hit the ball in the air. Williams, who wanted to be known as the greatest hitter who ever lived, long advocated for ball flight because he understood a hard-hit ground ball is typically a single while balls struck in the air produce the vast majority of extra-base hits. Pulling the ball in the air is particularly important. The longer a bat takes to make contact, the more speed it generates. Meeting a ball in front — which typically allows a hitter to pull — maximizes the capacity for damage.

Rather than overhaul Campbell’s swing, the Red Sox preferred to let his natural athleticism guide him toward a solution. Instead of moving his hand position or getting rid of his toe-tap, Campbell altered where he wanted to strike the ball, reminding himself with every rep to do something counterintuitive: Swing under it.

“For me, it’s just a feeling,” Campbell said. “You got to know where your barrel is at all times. It was in an odd spot because I was trying to get more elevation on the ball than normal. So I feel like I have to swing under the ball to hit it in the air. And I really was on plane because I’ve been so on top of it all these years.”

Campbell’s barrel aptitude improved by taking reps with a fungo bat or a slim 37-inch bat (three to four inches longer than the standard bat), which forced him to meet the ball farther in front of the plate. The skills learned in doing so eventually meld with a hitter’s’ regular bats, and variations of drills — offsetting standard pitching machines to the side, mixed-pitch Trajekt sessions — allow them to be applied in new, challenging environments. In the cages in Ft. Myers, coaches pitted Campbell and his fellow prospects against one another to see who could hit the ball hardest or most consistently. Winners gloated — “Marcelo talks s— 25/8,” Anthony said — and those who didn’t win returned the next day intent on revenge.

When last winter’s offseason sessions ended, the Red Sox were hopeful they would translate into a breakout season for Campbell. Even they could not have predicted what transpired over the ensuing months. Campbell said he came into 2024 hoping to hit five home runs — one more than in his lone college season. He started the season at High-A Greenville and hit his fifth home run May 9. Less than a month later, with three more home runs on the ledger, he ascended to Double-A, where he spent two months and whacked eight more homers. He was promoted to Triple-A for the final month and added another four, finishing the season hitting .330/.439/.558 with 20 home runs, 24 stolen bases, 74 walks and 103 strikeouts in 517 plate appearances.

“I remember the first time I saw him hit, I was like, ‘The hell is this?’ ” Mayer said. “He’s in the cage with the weirdest swing I’ve ever seen, and he’s got his long bat, and I’m like, ‘What?’ Next thing I know, he’s hitting .380.”

When Red Sox shortstop Trevor Story first saw Campbell on a rehabilitation assignment in Triple-A, he was taken by his ability “to self-organize and learn how to solve problems.”

“He has a special talent for moving the bat,” Story said. “His bat speed is just violent. When you hear it, you’re like, oh, s—.”

“It’s controlled violence,” Campbell said. “You got to make sure you see the ball. And then whenever you make a decision to swing, you got to put your fastest, hardest, best swing on it and make sure you stay somewhat under control while that ball is going on so you can hit the ball as well as possible.

“Every swing really can’t be the same. The way pitches move and how good everybody is nowadays, if you take the same swing every time and only can hit certain pitches, that’s a mistake. You’ve got to be able to adjust to different things, different pitches, different locations.”

DURING THE FIRST week of this year’s spring training, before the full Boston squad reported, Red Sox Hall of Famer Dwight Evans stood outside of Cage 4 and admired what he was seeing. Evans spent two seasons as a hitting coach, in 1994 with Colorado and 2002 with the Red Sox, and he recognizes baseball’s evolution. The game changes, and even if all the technology isn’t his cup of tea, he isn’t going to argue with the results.

In Campbell, Mayer and Anthony, he doesn’t see prospects. Without an at-bat to their names in MLB, they remind Evans — who spent 20 seasons in the major leagues, 19 with Boston — of his peers.

“It’s almost like they’ve been around 10 years in the big leagues,” Evans said. “They just have it. They know what they’re trying to do.”

The Red Sox believe this is just the beginning for Campbell, Mayer and Anthony and that their approach to hitting will create a pipeline of prospects to join a core that includes the trio alongside All-Stars Rafael Devers, Jarren Duran, Alex Bregman and Story, and the young and talented Triston Casas and Ceddanne Rafaela. Buy-in at all levels is paramount, and chief baseball officer Craig Breslow, assistant general manager Paul Toboni and farm director Brian Abraham are leaning into the work done by Ochart, Soteropulos and Stasio. Breslow hired Kyle Boddy, who founded Driveline, as a special advisor. Five other former Driveline employees dot the player development, baseball science and major league staffs, and Stasio was promoted over the winter to director of major league development, a new role in which he will apply the development philosophies to the big-league club and maintain the continuity for prospects who ascend to Fenway Park.

Campbell is in line to be the first — of many, the Red Sox hope — to crack the big-league roster. He’s in competition for the second-base job this spring, a testament to the organization’s belief in him. If he wins it, Bregman will play third and Devers — who has received MVP votes five of the past six years and signed a franchise-record $313.5 million contract — will move to designated hitter, a role he said unequivocally he doesn’t want to play.

The Red Sox see Campbell as worth the potential drama. Perhaps it’s a function of five playoff-free seasons in six years since their 2018 World Series title, but it’s likely simpler: Campbell is too good to keep down. Mayer and Anthony won’t be far behind. The competition fostered in Cage 4 — and the work ethic it demands — isn’t going anywhere.

Even before Campbell’s arrival, Mayer and Anthony had grown close through late-night, postgame hitting sessions. Both have beautiful left-handed swings, more traditional than Campbell’s in which he waggles the bat, pointing it almost directly toward the sky at the swing’s launch point. Starting from a better place than Campbell hasn’t kept either from reaping the benefits of Boston’s program.

“I don’t know if I’m hitting the ball harder because it’s necessarily bat speed or because I’m working in the gym, but both together could only help,” Mayer said. “So over the years, I feel like I’m hitting it harder, I’m moving the bat quicker. I have a better understanding of my swing. So all those things tie in and play a big role and lead to success.”

Knowing which prospects will find major league success is impossible, though in an era defined by objective data, the misses aren’t nearly as frequent. There was no bat-speed data when Eric Hosmer, Mike Moustakas and Wil Myers were all top-10 prospects for Kansas City in 2010. Trajekt was a dream machine when Arizona had Justin Upton, Chris Young and Carlos Gonzalez in 2007. Exit velocity was the domain of rocket ships in 2004 when Rickie Weeks, Prince Fielder and J.J. Hardy were coming through the Milwaukee system.

It’s a whole new baseball world, and it is on full display in Cage 4, where Campbell, Mayer and Anthony have spent so much time working with their instructors that they joke that Soteropulos might as well sleep there.

“It’s pretty cool to think about how many spring trainings we’ve been in there,” Anthony said. “Looking back at it and being on the big-league side, just appreciating guys like John and guys on the minor league side that take so much time out of their days to get us better.”

For all the struggles hitters around baseball have faced, the Red Sox believe in their system — and in this first generation that will serve as a litmus test to its efficacy.

“I’m committed to the game,” Campbell said. “I want to be the best player I can be every day. I want to bring whatever I can to Boston. Once I knew they drafted me, I was like, ‘That’s the team I’m going to debut with. That’s the team I’m going to play with. I want to play with the team for a long time.’ I just knew that I’m going to give all I have to this team that took a chance on me. I’m going to make sure it’s worth it for them and me.”

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