Would struggling Red Sox rookie Kristian Campbell benefit from a reset in the minors?

Boston Globe

3 days ago

There are two questions related to that objective.
First, is improvement/development for Campbell more easily accomplished in the big leagues or minors? Secondly, how much latitude can the Sox afford Campbell given the broader struggles of the team?
First, the context: After he won AL Rookie of the Month honors in April, Campbell has been overmatched. He entered Tuesday's game against the Angels — the second straight in which he was batting ninth — hitting .133/.179/.167 with a 31 percent strikeout rate and 5 percent walk rate since May 4. He'd gone 16 straight games without an extra-base hit. The worst stretch of his baseball life is occurring under a microscope.
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'Obviously, it's Boston. Everybody expects us to win every night. That's what we expect of ourselves,' said hitting coach Pete Fatse. 'So there's, at times, an added pressure element.'
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Some young players — Dustin Pedroia in 2007, Gunnar Henderson in 2023, among others — who struggle offensively while acclimating to big league pitching provide a floor of solid defensive value. But Campbell has been a below-average defensive second baseman while adjusting to the speed of the game in the big leagues. Meanwhile, the Sox are no longer priming him as a potential first base solution.
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'We've got to get the offensive part of it going,' said Cora. 'We have to.'
Still, there's not a set template about how to proceed, even with a player like Campbell whose meteoric ascent through the minors gave him a limited professional foundation.
In July 2011, Mike Trout reached the big leagues as a 19-year-old, roughly two years removed from high school. He struggled for three weeks (.163/.213/.279), then got sent back down to Double A (!) for three weeks to reset. He returned to the big leagues for the final six weeks of the season and hit .250/.318/.450.
With hindsight, Trout believes the return to the minors after his initial big league struggle proved transformative.
'At the time, it was frustrating because you come up here, you want to stay. But I think it helped me, knowing what to expect the next time I got the call, how to prepare myself, and how to make adjustments the second time I was called up,' Trout said on Tuesday. 'The biggest thing is just slowing everything down. You come up and you want to do so much, so fast, and make such a big impression, as opposed to [playing the same way] as how you got there. That's one big thing I learned.'
Trout — who opened 2012 in Triple A before quickly establishing himself as the best player in baseball that year — believes he wouldn't have gained his footing in the big leagues as quickly without the up-and-down experience.
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Red Sox third baseman Alex Bregman had a different experience when he reached the big leagues in 2016, just over a year after the Astros made him the No. 2 overall pick out of LSU in the 2015 draft. Bregman's much-anticipated debut initially fell flat. He went 0 for 17 and 1 for 34 at the start of his big league career.
But the Astros allowed Bregman to work through that slow start. He responded by hitting .311/.359/.569 over the remainder of the season, emerging as a fixture on a team that contended for titles. He expects the same from Campbell.
'We need him up here in order to win games,' said Bregman. '[Campbell] is the same situation [as Bregman]. I was going through it and just continuing to play every day. That confidence that [Astros manager A.J. Hinch] showed in me when I was going through it, and the same confidence that [Cora] is showing in him, it'll pay off.
'He's one of the best players in this organization,' Bregman added. 'He's going to be a very, very good player in this league for a long, long time. Stuff happens. You're going to go through little slumps here and there. And once you learn how to dig yourself out of them, they become shorter and shorter. He's going to be a multi-time All-Star in this league and dominate the league. He's going to get it figured out.'
The Trout and Bregman cases offer reminders both of the tremendous difficulty that even standout prospects face when they get to the big leagues, and that there's not a one-size-fits-all strategy for navigating the situation.
Everyone around the Sox feels Campbell is committed to the most important element for escaping a slump: Work. That said, while the willingness to bulldoze ahead in the big leagues is the right answer for some players, that's not true of everyone.
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'Everybody's a different case,' said Fatse. 'I think that's where you've got to meet guys where they're at.'
For now, the Sox are trying to do that in the big leagues. But if Campbell's struggles persist, it remains unsettled whether that will remain the case.
Alex Speier can be reached at