First impressions

Spring training officially gets underway today. Well, today is the first day of full workouts across camps in Florida and Arizona. As such, I’d like to reshare a story that’s been told before.

Every writer can remember an example where they were wrong.

It happens. It’s sometimes the nature of the game, especially when you’re primarily writing things that are opinion-based. Opinions change over time due to added insight or experience, improved knowledge, or some combination thereof.

Embracing those changes — or even the times we are wrong — doesn’t have to be so hard.

Anthony Rizzo has long served as a prime example of this for me.

Now, to be fair, I have never attempted to pass myself off as a scout at any point in my writing career. Scouts are trained to see things that most cannot. I like to think I have a good eye having watched the game my whole life, but scouts are far and away better at evaluating players than I will ever be. I’ve spoken with many of them over the years.

I have a vivid memory of the first time I ever saw Rizzo play.

It was 2010. I was living in Connecticut at the time. Hartford had not yet built a stadium, so the Yard Goats were not yet in existence, but there was Double-A baseball in New Britain. The field wasn’t much — basically, it was a beat-up high school field with wooden walls and enough stands to barely seat 5,000 people. It was fun, cheap, and probably 15 minutes down the road.

Dad and I would catch games when we could, as work schedules would permit. With him being a Red Sox fan, I would pay attention to when the Portland Sea Dogs would be in town. Late June brought an opportunity and we caught two of the three games.

Admittedly, I recall very few specifics about the series offhand. The New Britain RockCats were affiliated with the Minnesota Twins and the big prospect on the roster was a short, speedy center fielder named Ben Revere. With three hits and a pair of stolen bases in one of the two games, he didn’t disappoint. Revere was a Twin by September and spent the next 8 seasons in the majors.

A few years ago, a photo went viral of Aaron Judge and Jose Altuve standing side-by-side at second base. The height difference is dramatic, making the image memorable. The RockCats had their own version of this on the roster in 2010. The club was carrying both the tallest (pitcher Loek Van Mil stood 7’1”) and shortest (infielder Chris Cates stood 5’3”) players in the minor leagues. Seeing the two next to each other was just like the Judge-Altuve image.

For me, there were a pair of players on the Portland roster I was excited to see in person. The first was 20-year-old pitcher Casey Kelly, who we got to see start the Saturday game. Looking back at the box score, he was hit pretty hard that day but I recall thinking he showed promise. Kelly was a Top 100 prospect four years in a row but never really saw much success in the majors. He did enjoy a successful run in the KBO beginning in 2019.

The other player I wanted to see was a lesser-known outfielder named Che-Hsuan Lin. The native of Taiwan had already made an appearance in the Futures Game by that point and had shown solid results in the minors but wasn’t appearing on most prospect rankings entering the season. Lin impressed, from what I recall, showing good contact and an aggressive approach on the bases (4-for-8 with a double over the two games). His MLB career never amounted to many opportunities (12 plate appearances in 2012) but he’s spent the last ten seasons playing in the CPBL.

Let’s circle back to Anthony Rizzo though.

By June 2010, Rizzo was becoming a better-known prospect in baseball circles. He’d make an appearance on a Top 100 ranking the following offseason, coming off a year in which caught the attention of many.

I was not among them.

For years, I have recalled coming away from those two games wondering what all the hype was about. I thought Rizzo looked uncomfortable and awkward at first base. In retrospect, some of this was likely attributable to the inexperienced and/or subpar infielders around him (the shoddy field conditions probably didn’t help either). More concerning, his swing looked slow to me. Rizzo was 2-for-4 in one game (a pair of singles) and 0-for-5 in the other. I came in expecting a high-contact guy who would drive balls to the gaps and that wasn’t what I saw.

Again, I’m not a scout. Nor was I in 2010 when my abilities to properly evaluate a player were nothing compared to where they are today.

Following the 2010 season, Rizzo (and Kelly) was traded to San Diego as part of the return for Adrian Gonzalez. Barely a year later he was on the move again to Chicago. Everything blossomed with the Cubs.

Rizzo spent ten years with the Cubs, helping them win the 2016 World Series while batting .272/.372/.489. He won four Gold Glove Awards at first base and twice finished in the Top 5 in MVP voting. He is well-regarded in almost all baseball circles as being a genuinely good person and teammate.

He followed that stretch up with four years in New York, slashing .234/.326/.409 for the Yankees while dealing with a handful of injuries (mainly an undiagnosed concussion in 2023).

Rizzo has enjoyed a great career. That first impression I have of him? I was wrong. It was a seriously small sample size, sure, but I was still (happily) wrong.