The biggest star of Red Sox camp hit .230 as a college senior and .239 in independent ball after going undrafted. He signed out of a tryout camp at age 23. If Ryan Fitzgerald's story ended right there, he would've beaten so many odds.
But it didn't end there. In fact, it might not even have begun.
The breakout star of Red Sox camp is not the player anyone would've pegged two weeks ago. The super utility man signed for his glove is doing serious damage with the bat in Fort Myers, raising the possibility that he could make the expanded Opening Day roster.
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On Thursday, he launched his team-leading fourth home run of the spring. He's hitting .385 with 1.775 OPS. He has five hits and all would be for extra bases, except teammate Yolmer Sanchez stopped running on what should've been a two-run double.
There are fairy tale stories and then there's Fitzgerald, who's living a dream just a couple of months shy of his 28th birthday, which makes him more than two years older than six-year vet Rafael Devers.
"It's incredible," Fitzgerald told WEEI.com. "But at the same time, I have nothing to lose. No one expected me to be here. No one has any expectations of me."
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Fitzgerald went undrafted out of Creighton in 2016, finishing his four-year career with a pedestrian .253 average and .692 OPS. Nothing about him said big-league prospect except maybe a decent glove around the infield. He spent a year with independent Gary in Indiana, where he popped seven homers.
The Red Sox signed him out of a tryout camp in 2018 and sent him to Low-A Greenville, where the 24-year-old was one of the 10 oldest players in the league. He told WEEI he started experimenting with a new hitting style, aided by two White Sox instructors who encouraged him to abandon a slap-hitting approach to generate bat speed and line drives.
"I was always a bat-to-ball kind of guy," Fitzgerald told WEEI. "No one really ever game me permission to try to hit balls hard."
He switched to a heavier 34-ounce bat in 2019 and broke out last year at two levels, batting .271 with 13 homers at Double-A Portland before blasting three more homers with a .913 OPS at Triple-A Worcester.
"Mass times velocity squared equals force. I just learned to swing a heavier bat faster," Fitzgerald told WEEI. "Now those line drives are doubles and homers.
"I always thought lighter meant better control and I didn't need that," he added. "I had the control already. You're going to swing and miss in this game, it's just a matter of not swinging and missing too much and then being able to maximize the contact you're making.
"Obviously, there's happy medium between trying to launch the ball and barrel accuracy, and that's different for everybody. The different ends of the spectrum are maybe Nick Madrigal and Joey Gallo. Those are the probably the two ends of that, and I think I fall somewhere in between, and maybe on the Joey Gallo side."
Madrigal is a diminutive infielder with the Cubs, while Gallo is an imposing all-or-nothing slugger with the Yankees. The 6-foot, 185-pound Fitzgerald is built more like the former, but he approaches at-bats like the latter, with impressive line drive rates in the minors that are now translating to pure power from the left side this spring.
Might he soon make his big-league debut? If he keeps swinging like this, the Red Sox won't have any choice.
"I've been around him for a month and he's a versatile, strong kid," Red Sox manager Alex Cora told reporters. "He's come here and gotten my attention and little by little is becoming a player that those guys, they're going to have value -- versatile guys that can play good defense and give you enough offensively, they're important."
They're increasingly important, and it doesn't matter how they got here.
