Sox land former UConn star Wallace
BOSTON — On Friday, the Red Sox landed righthander Jacob Wallace — a UConn product — as the player to be named from the Rockies in the deal that shipped outfielder Kevin Pillar to Colorado at the end of last month. When Ray Fagnant received a text from Red Sox GM Brian O’Halloran that the Sox had indeed landed Wallace, the team’s Northeast regional scouting supervisor was elated at how quickly a notion had come to fruition.
“I remember vividly telling him [before the draft], ‘I hope you pitch in the big leagues, and I hope it’s for us,’ ” Fagnant recalled by phone. “‘If not, I hope you pitch in the big leagues, and you never know — we might get you one day.’ ”
Just 15 months after the Rockies made Wallace, from Methuen, Mass., a third-round selection, that possibility became a reality, much to Fagnant’s delight.
As a junior at UConn, righthanded reliever Jacob Wallace was very much on the radar of the Red Sox entering the 2019 draft. Fagnant, who lives in Connecticut, had made the Methuen High School product a priority follow, an earlyround consideration for the Sox entering the draft, and with good reason.
Wallace had shown an explosive fastball in the mid- to upper90s at UConn as a sophomore, when he forged a 3.95 ERA in 43⅓ innings while striking out 13.1 batters per nine innings. His performance then reached a new level in the summer of 2018 on the Cape, where he logged 13⅔ scoreless innings while striking out 25 and walking five.
In December of Wallace’s junior year, Fagnant met with the righthander and was blown away by his demeanor and maturity — his vision of his strengths and weaknesses on the mound, the pitcher’s view of what it would take to reach and thrive in the big leagues, his priorities off the field.
The Red Sox have their scouts assign a quantitative grade to the overall makeup and background of players. Fagnant conferred one of his highest scores ever to Wallace.
“He’s just an exceptional human being,” Fagnant said by phone. “He’s the kind of pitcher you want at the back end of your bullpen, just the kind of person you want to compete given his character. He makes people around him better . . . Most importantly, there’s big stuff and when heisonthemound,he’sacompetitor. That’s what stood out.”
UConn coach Jim Penders kept using Wallace in the highest-leverage situations imaginable — a bases-loaded entry with two outs in the eighth against a very strong Louisville team early in the 2019 season, in which Wallace entered, struck out the first hitter on three pitches, then cruised through a scoreless ninth for the save; inheriting and then stranding the tying run on third with a strikeout to kick off a fourout save against the University of South Florida in April that was followed one day later by another scoreless appearance.