‘He was our guy’
Showcases, scouts and Madonna: How the O’s picked Holliday
Jackson Holliday’s path to Camden Yards on Friday might appear as if it was destined.
He was always ahead growing up, the product of having the genetic makeup and tutelage of seven-time All-Star Matt Holliday. While small growing up, his talent was never in doubt. His story is not that of an underdog.
Holliday almost certainly would have gotten to this moment — making his MLB debut Wednesday, his home premiere Friday at just 20 years old — no matter the organization that drafted him. The Orioles’ player development staff is viewed as among the best in the sport, but his unprecedented rise through the minor leagues came with no bumps in the road, no major changes needed.
Holliday’s path might have been preordained. It leading him to the Orioles was anything but.
“Looking back now, it seems like him being the first overall pick was a no-brainer,” said Matt Blood, the Orioles’ vice president of player development and domestic scouting. “But at the time it wasn’t.”
Six months before the 2022 draft, few considered him a firstround pick — let alone worthy of the No. 1 selection, which the rebuilding Orioles owned by losing 110 games in 2021. Many assumed he would elect to play in college at Oklahoma State, where his family has close ties. Even as his stock soared that spring, no major projection leading into the draft had the Orioles selecting Holliday from a class that many believed didn’t have an obvious bellwether.
Less than two years later, it’s clear now that class did, in fact, have a bona fide star above the rest. With Holliday now an everyday player for the defending American League East-champion Orioles, the other high school players considered for the top selection are nowhere close to playing in the big leagues. Druw Jones is in Low-A with a career .227 average in the minors. Termarr Johnson is in High-A with a career .235 average. Elijah Green is in Low-A after striking out 41% of the time last year.
Holliday wasn’t on Baltimore’s radar for the first overall selection — often a franchise-altering pick, like Adley Rutschman in 2019 — until the beginning of his high school season in Oklahoma. He quickly turned the draft process upside down, flummoxing scouts who just six months earlier had a second- or third-round grade on him. As the draft neared, it became clear to the Orioles that Holliday was their guy.
The hype surrounding Holliday is as high as any prospect this century, with the assumption he will be a cornerstone of the Orioles for years to come. It’s important to remember it was far from a guarantee he’d be an Oriole at all.
“We could’ve very easily taken those other guys, and we wouldn’t have gotten scrutiny internally or externally,” Baltimore scout Ken
Guthrie said. “But I don’t think about the other players anymore. I’m just really, really happy that we got Jackson.”
‘No one was talking about him’
Holliday was opening the eyes of MLB general managers long before he was a draft prospect.
“Jackson has had elite bat-to-ball skills since the time he was hitting with a little dinger bat on the backfields in Tucson,” said Dan O’Dowd, the general manager of the Colorado Rockies when Matt Holliday played there and Jackson Holliday was a preschooler. “I’m not exaggerating. It really was elite.”
During his pivotal showcase circuit after his junior season, Holliday wasn’t eye-popping. He played well with a sweet swing and plus speed, but he was small — nothing like his dad’s 6-foot4, 240-pound frame — and his arm and power potential were unanswered questions.
Shortly after the Orioles wrapped up the 2021 draft, they turned their attention to the following year’s. In August 2021, the Orioles didn’t know they’d have the first selection the following summer — although the 19-game losing streak they suffered that month meant it was certainly on the table.
When they learned they did, Holliday was nowhere near a consideration.
“Nobody in this industry thought he would be considered at 1-1,” said Orioles area scout Jim Richardson, who is based in Oklahoma. “And if they said that’s where they had him, it wasn’t true.”
Richardson’s first time seeing Holliday play was at the East Coast Pro Showcase near Birmingham, Alabama, in early August. He said those early days of scouting at showcases are “a little bit unscientific.” The long days include watching hundreds of players take batting practice, field ground balls, run timed sprints and play in live games. At the end, scouts write a “follow” — essentially a quick-hit scouting report — and file the players into groups, with one representing the cream of the crop and higher numbers the less-valued prospects.
Richardson and Guthrie, who is based in Texas, both had Holliday as a group two follow. Guthrie projected him as a third-round pick.
“My first impression was that he was young,” said Guthrie, who first saw Holliday play in August 2021 at the Area Code showcase in San Diego. “He was a shadow of what he is physically now. People say he looks like a kid now. But he really was a little kid when I first saw him.”
Richardson and Guthrie both assumed at the time Holliday would play at Oklahoma State, where his uncle, Josh, is the coach. After time to grow and get stronger in college, they thought Holliday could become a highly touted draft prospect in 2025.
But for the No. 1 pick in 2022?
“No chance,” Guthrie said.
The summer circuit ended, and Holliday’s standing didn’t improve. In the winter, MLB Pipeline ranked him 52nd on its top 100 draft prospect list — a mid-tier second-round pick. The website’s article about the draft class didn’t even include Holliday’s name.
“There’s revisionist history going on now,” said Jim Callis, who covers prospects for MLB Pipeline. “People liked him, but the consensus was maybe a second-round pick. No one was talking about him as the No. 1 overall pick.”
But when Holliday stepped back onto the field again in the spring for Stillwater High’s baseball season, he wasn’t just opening eyes. He was making scouts rub theirs.
‘We did our work’
Richardson was questioning his sanity when he saw Holliday play in early March 2022.
His group two follow report from August was to be thrown in the trash. Holliday was the real deal.
“You’re going, ‘Golly, was I so hot back in August that I missed something? Or am I making this out to be more than it actually is?’ ” Richardson said.
To Richardson’s relief, it wasn’t just him. A week earlier, Guthrie saw Holliday’s first high school game — not because the infielder was in the organization’s sights for the top pick, but just because his schedule aligned so — and was so wowed that he called Brad Ciolek, the organization’s scouting director at the time, to sound the alarm bells.
“It was immediate,” Guthrie said, noting Holliday looked bigger and faster with better bat speed after a winter of training. “I told Brad, ‘Hey, this guy needs to get seen very quick because he should be in consideration.” Not for the No. 1 pick, but instead No. 33, the Orioles’ Competitive Balance Round A selection.
A week later, Holliday played in a four-game tournament in Arizona with evaluators aplenty, including a quartet of Orioles Southwest area scouts: David Blume, Scott Walter and Logan Schuemann. Holliday went 11-for-16 with eight extra-base hits, and he was officially on the Orioles’ radar for the No. 1 overall pick.
“I don’t remember the switch turning that quick,” said Callis, who started covering prospects in 1988. “There’s been guys who have grown into the No. 1 pick, but I’ve never seen a guy go from a second-round pick and literally a week or 10 days into the season everyone thought he could go 1-1.”
By the time his high school season ended, every scout in the organization — including higher-ups Mike Elias, Koby Perez, Ciolek, Blood and others — had seen Holliday play in person. In 40 games, he hit .685 with 52 extra-base hits and 30 stolen bases. But it was his makeup — an all-encompassing scouting term for a player’s intangibles — that impressed Blood most.
“He was one of the most advanced high school kids that I had been around,” said Blood, who has worked in professional baseball for 13 seasons and ran USA Baseball’s 18-and-under national team for three years. “It’s special. He just eats, sleeps baseball. That’s all he does and wants to do.”
Blood, then the Orioles’ farm director, was convinced Holliday was the right choice near the end of his high school season, although it’s a long process with dozens of people providing input. But Blood was sold.
“There was separation between him and everybody else,” he said. “He was our guy, and we ended up getting the guy we wanted.”
Guthrie sometimes replays the events of that spring in his head, wondering if it could’ve gone wrong. He wonders if he hadn’t seen Holliday early in his high school season or if Ciolek hadn’t deployed a team of scouts to Arizona, how it might have played out differently. That could’ve caused the Orioles to be a few weeks behind, and perhaps fewer scouts would’ve seen him play. That chain of events could have led to the scouting department having less “conviction,” potentially leading to more tension and less consensus.
Richardson doesn’t have those same thoughts. He knows the Orioles’ process was sound and would land on the right answer.
“It just goes to show you that we did our work,” he said.
‘What do I got to be nervous about?’
As the Orioles’ front office and scouting department gathered just days before the draft, Guthrie acknowledged the whirlwind the past four months had been.
“I never thought I would be talking about this player for this pick,” Guthrie said to kick off his Holliday presentation.
Guthrie, now in his 12th season with the team, knew everyone else was high on Holliday, but he wanted his pitch to be memorable. Instead of giving the normal spiel with the generic scoutspeak, he made a PowerPoint presentation — “abnormal” for those meetings, he said — with Madonna’s “Holiday” playing as pictures and videos of Holliday hitting and fielding cycled through.
“I wanted to make a statement,” he said. “I knew I was only going to be able to talk about a player like this maybe one time in my career.”
Holliday was among a handful of players the Orioles were talking about in the room, including Jones, Johnson, Green and college shortstop Brooks Lee. External rankers believed it as a tossup between Jones and Holliday, but MLB Pipeline, Baseball America and ESPN mocked Jones to the Orioles, while FanGraphs had Baltimore taking Johnson. The groupthink was that Jones had the highest ceiling, Green had the loudest tools and Johnson the best bat — which left Holliday without the label of being the best at anything.
But those mocks were just guesses, especially with the Orioles picking first.
“Mike Elias, just like they did in Houston, they don’t tell anybody anything,” Callis said of the Orioles’ executive vice president and general manager. “It seemed like it was going to be Jackson Holliday or Druw Jones. Anybody who claims they knew, we were all guessing.”
Blood guesses the other teams picking near the top all had Holliday in their top three. It’s assumed in the industry that the Arizona Diamondbacks, who picked second, were locked in on Jones. Had the Orioles selected Johnson or someone else, it’s likely Holliday would’ve gone to the Texas Rangers at No. 3.
The trajectories for Holliday and Jones since draft night couldn’t be more different. Holliday zoomed through the minors, taking just 633 days to reach the show. Jones, meanwhile, has dealt with multiple injuries, and he’s yet to show the promise of his high ceiling. On ESPN’s top 100 prospect ranking, Holliday is first and Jones is 100th.
“Holliday has had like a 90th percentile outcome and Jones had a 10th percentile outcome,” said Kiley McDaniel, who compiles ESPN’s list. “Obviously, if guys are a coin flip and then have two opposite ends of the spectrum to start their career, that’s going to make the draft a really interesting draft to look back on. Holliday wasn’t a slamdunk guy, and he now, in retrospect, obviously looks like the best player.”
Many in the Orioles’ scouting department were locked in on Holliday, but they are never sure what Elias, assistant general manager Sig Mejdal and the behind-the-scenes analysts think. Since Elias’ first draft in 2019, he had never taken a high school player in the first round. The summer before, 20 of the 21 players the Orioles picked were out of college.
In that way, selecting Holliday was out of the Orioles’ comfort zone.
“My gut said that we were going to do it,” Richardson said. “But we never know until Mike and Sig come out and announce it.”
“We don’t ever know who he’s going to pick,” Guthrie said. “Mike keeps that close to the vest.”
A few minutes before the Orioles were on the clock, Elias entered the draft room, sat down and addressed Guthrie.
“Ken, are you nervous?” Guthrie recalled Elias saying — the general manager using the high-pressure moment and the knowledge he possessed to playfully toy with the scout.
“I’m not nervous,” Guthrie replied. “What do I got to be nervous about?”
Guthrie was right. He had nothing to worry about.