A top prospect’s call-up isn’t always a fairy tale. Jackson Holliday’s recent stretch in the majors magnifies that point. After 10 games and 36 plate appearances, the Orioles jettisoned the game’s top prospect back to Triple-A.
While it’s often prudent to preach patience with top prospects in their early major league experience, a 2-for-34 showing with a 50% strikeout rate and no extra-base hits is difficult to tolerate, particularly for a team with championship aspirations. Holliday looked lost over the course of two weeks as his swinging strike rate nearly doubled his minor league rate. It was a general bottoming out of an approach that had been pristine over the first two years of his professional career.
To put it into perspective Holliday had a 19.4% chase rate across all levels in 2023 as a 19 year old with a 17.5% in-zone whiff rate. That’s a far cry from what we saw in the major leagues from Holliday.
The biggest question now is “how will this impact Holliday’s development?” Over the last few seasons, the Orioles have enjoyed near immediate success with their top prospects in Adley Rutschman and Gunnar Henderson. However, Orioles fans need to look no further than Grayson Rodriguez’s MLB debut and subsequent demotion. Rodriguez struggled over his first 10 starts with a 7.35 ERA over 45.1 innings. After a two month siesta in Norfolk returned and established himself as one of the division-winning Orioles’ most reliable starters.
This is not the first time we’ve seen players struggle and not have success despite lots of prospect pedigree. Invoking names like Mike Trout has become cliche. But each prospect’s struggle is different and there are certainly aspects of Holliday’s game that need work. There was a conscious decision to work on adding impact this offseason. Holliday did show hints of this in spring training. Over 15 spring training games, Holliday produced hitting .311/.354/.600 but perhaps it masked his issue with swing and miss. Holliday’s 31.3% strikeout rate in spring was dismissed as simply growing pains in favor of the slashline production. Perhaps it was a sign of things to come.
Holliday has gotten out of the all-fields approach and patient counter-punching plate approach that lifted him to the top of the prospect rankings. Time will tell if this is simply a bump in the road for Holliday. The approach and bat-to-ball skills head to Norfolk with a new set of questions. It’s up to Holliday to answer, like Grayson Rodriguez or Colton Cowser have in the past.
