The similarities for this pair are striking
Holliday’s first big league camp offered shades of Henderson’s
SARASOTA, Fla. — The similarities are unmistakable: The blond hair flowing from the back of a helmet that has trouble staying on. The boyish face underneath it. The lefthanded swing belonging to one of baseball’s premier young shortstops.
In Jackson Holliday’s first major league spring training with the Orioles, he sure looked a lot like Gunnar Henderson, baseball’s top overall prospect and a favorite to win American League Rookie of the Year.
“He wants to be the best player and wants to make it to the big leagues; I feel like I was the same way,” Henderson said. “I can really put myself in his shoes. I can provide that experience for him in any way that I can help.
“He doesn’t really look like he needs any right now.”
By this time next year, Holliday, 19, could be in Henderson’s place as the game’s No. 1 prospect.
Grapefruit League Blue Jays at Orioles
INSIDE
In his spring debut, closer Félix Bautista throws a perfect inning with two strikeouts, reaching 99 mph with his fastball, while the Orioles reassign 2022 No. 1 pick Jackson Holliday to minor league camp. Executive vice president and general manager Mike Elias called Henderson, 21, who was Baltimore’s second-round pick in 2019, a “flagship” of the team’s player development program as he skyrocketed to the top of prospect lists.
As the first overall pick in last year’s draft, Holliday won’t have to take as far of a leap to reach that status — Baseball America, MLB
Pipeline and Baseball Prospectus all rank him among the game’s top 15 prospects 20 games into his career — but he’s spent the spring showing his ability to make it, regardless.
He’s held his own and fit in not only with clubhouse games of table tennis and player matchups of mini golf, but also on the field. In his first spring at-bat, Holliday laced a double to right-center field, losing his helmet as he approached second in an echo of Henderson’s falling off amid the swing that produced a home run in his major league debut. In 17 exhibition plate appearances before he was reassigned to minor league camp Tuesday, he put up a slash line of .385/.529/.462.
“I feel like this is somewhere that I belong, and that’s that,” Holliday said. “I don’t feel like a 19-year-old.”
That mindset has been evident to those around him.
“I would not be able to handle what he’s handling right now at 19 years old,” fellow infield prospect Jordan Westburg said. “He’s mature beyond his years. … I know if I was 19, I’d be a little intimidated in this clubhouse. I’m 24, and I’m still a little intimidated in some ways.”
That maturity, Westburg said, is a mirror of Henderson, who he’s played alongside often in the past two years. In doing so, he’s gotten an up-close look at Henderson’s rise. He can see Holliday’s personality allowing him to repeat it.
“The moment never looks too big for them,” Westburg said. “I think that’s a pretty, pretty big similarity. Jackson’s being thrown into these big league games, and he doesn’t look overmatched. It doesn’t look like he’s shaking in his boots at all. He’s owning his talents. He’s owning his opportunity. And he’s making the most of it.”
Henderson didn’t participate in big league camp in the spring after he was drafted — Elias noted it’s atypical for a high school draftee to be in camp the next spring — but when he was called up from the minor league side to play in exhibitions in 2021, he was still 19 and hit .333/.556/.333 while walking three times against four strikeouts in nine plate appearances. He ended that season, his first full campaign professionally after losing 2020 to the pandemic, in Double-A. He finished the next year in the majors.
Holliday, too, has shown he can be a fast riser. In the summer of 2021, Holliday played for Team USA alongside many young talents who eventually followed him in the next year’s draft, but at the time, many, including the Orioles’ front office, didn’t view that top selection as a possibility. His father, seventime All-Star Matt Holliday, felt that way, too, telling longtime Orioles infielder Brian Roberts as much during a get-together that summer.
Roberts first met the younger Holliday when he was 3 years old; Holliday effectively grew up in major league clubhouses and said the only difference between this spring and the decade-and-a-half ’s worth he attended alongside his dad is that he’s playing in games this time. He spent his senior year at Oklahoma’s Stillwater High School taking online classes while training with his father, showing the type of growth the Orioles seek from their prospects.
“He won’t be overwhelmed, ever, because this is his normal, this is how he grew up,” said Roberts, who served as a guest instructor earlier in camp. “I think you could throw him in a big league game in Camden Yards tomorrow. I’m not saying he would be an All-Star tomorrow, but I don’t think he’d be fazed by it.”
Orioles infield coach Tony Mansolino said Holliday has an innate ability to slow the game down in a way that’s exceptionally rare for players his age. Mansolino didn’t see Henderson when he was that age, so he offered another comparison: Francisco Lindor.
The eighth overall pick by Cleveland in the 2011 draft, Lindor has become one of the game’s premier shortstops; his 10-year, $341 contract with the New York Mets is the largest ever given to a player at that position. Mansolino was among the earliest in Cleveland’s organization to work with Lindor, serving as his hitting coach during his brief stay with short-season Mahoning Valley after the draft. But even in that time and his few weeks with Holliday this spring, Mansolino has seen plenty of similarities, pointing to a game last week during which Holliday smoothly tagged out a runner attempting to steal second then ranged to his right for a ground ball.
“The feel for the game and how slow they play the game, even in such a fast environment, it doesn’t speed up on the kid at all,” Mansolino said. “Those types of players have this really abnormal ability to slow the game down at a young age at the major league level.
“You don’t say that lightly because you know how great of a player [Lindor] is. But as you see them at that same age and what it looks like, it definitely gives you a lot of excitement about what Jackson can become.”
In Henderson, Holliday is getting a direct look at his next step in that process this spring.
“The position that he is right now at 21, it’s pretty awesome to see,” Holliday said. “That’s something that I want to do and where I want to be in a few years.”