The What’s Next Kid: The relentless drive of Diamondbacks prospect Corbin Carroll (2024)

If you didn’t know any better, you’d think it was just a home run.

At the plate is Diamondbacks prospect Corbin Carroll, readying for a fifth-inning at-bat with the High-A Hillsboro Hops. The first pitch is a fastball, and he ambushes it with such velocity that the opposing catcher leaps into the air in astonishment. Carroll rounds the bases in triumph, high-fiving his first-base coach and giving a windmill low-five to his third-base coach before emphatically stomping on home plate and bounding back to a dugout of awaiting teammates.

Look more closely, though, and something about the scene seems off. It’s in the way Carroll’s right shoulder rotates just a couple of degrees too far at the end of his follow-through. It’s how he seems to hold his right arm rigidly in place, as if he’s carrying a suitcase as he jogs around the bases. For his parents, it’s the fact that he doesn’t flip his bat, merely letting it drop to the ground. This was a highlight moment — the video of it still lives on Twitter in that context — but it was also something else.

It’s the moment Carroll’s march toward the majors might have been forever altered.

It’s getting a little ridiculous at this point @corbin_carroll pic.twitter.com/09SSLVNQYZ

— Hillsboro Hops (@HillsboroHops) May 11, 2021

On that swing nearly one year ago, Carroll tore his shoulder so badly that he required season-ending surgery. He had played only seven games, and his brief professional career appeared to be at a crossroads. He was an exciting prospect, one who landed on top 100 lists almost immediately after the Diamondbacks took him with the 16th pick in the 2019 draft, but now he was done for the year. Thanks to the pandemic and his shoulder injury, he was destined to finish the 2021 season with only 49 professional games on his career ledger. He was young — only 20 at the time — but shoulder injuries are no joke, and it was possible he’d never be quite the same player again.

A year later, though, Carroll has made all that look like pointless hand-wringing. Now 21, he is off to a torrid start at Double-A Amarillo, batting a scorching .364/.478/.655 in 69 plate appearances. He has put every quality that has excited scouts on display. He has stolen five bases and has played an impactful center field, flashing his 70-grade speed. He has hit three home runs, his power belied by his 5-foot-10, 175-pound stature. He works counts. He makes frequent, hard contact. “There’s nothing he can’t do on a baseball field,” Diamondbacks farm director Josh Barfield says.

It’s the type of performance that would put any doubts about his shoulder to rest, except for the fact that those doubts were long slumbering before Carroll even took a regular-season at-bat. Heading into last season, Carroll ranked somewhere in the 30s and 40s on most top 100 lists. Entering this season — coming off just seven games and major shoulder surgery in 2021 — the industry got only more confident in his potential. Baseball America jumped Carroll from No. 42 to No. 20 on its latest ranking, and MLB.com catapulted him from 47th to 19th. The Athletic’s Keith Law, higher on Carroll than most, moved him up from the game’s No. 23 prospect entering last year to No. 16 this year.

How does any of that make sense? How does an undersized player miss two years of development and require a shoulder operation, all without evaluators batting an eye? How does a player with seven games of High-A experience jump to Double A and immediately rake with a reconstructed shoulder? The answer resides not on the stat sheet or on Carroll’s medical chart. It can be chalked up to something else. It’s a quality that can’t be counted but is not unaccounted for, something that may be unmeasurable but that those who know Carroll say he has in an immeasurable amount.

It’s his drive, his passion, his want-to. Whatever its name, Carroll overflows with it. If Carroll is one of the best prospects in the game — and maybe the best Diamondbacks position player prospect since Justin Upton — it’s not because of his physical gifts, although he is blessed with many. It’s because, more than just about anybody else, he is determined to be the best. “He’s got that Mamba Mentality,” Barfield says, relating the outfielder to the late Kobe Bryant.

For Carroll, being great is an obsession.

“He’s talented, but you come across a lot of talented guys in this game,” Barfield says. “It’s the makeup and the focus. He is singularly focused on being a great player.”

The assignment was to draw a simple maze.

Carroll was in the third grade at Seattle Country Day School, and one 8-by-11-inch sheet of paper would have sufficed. That’s what most of the other kids were going to produce for their teacher the next day. But anything that was worth doing for Carroll was worth really doing. Therefore, his maze wound up comprised of “20 or 30 pages taped together,” says his mother, Pey-Lin. “It went out the front door.” Going the extra lightyear was simply a personality trait. A couple years later, when Carroll’s class was visited by a cardiologist for a presentation on the vascular system, Carroll came prepared. “He named like 400 parts” of the system, Pey-Lin says. “He just dove in.”

Carroll’s mother doesn’t share those stories to brag about her son as much as she seeks to highlight the essence of his nature. To put it frankly, he has no chill. “He was a kid who was born on his due date,” she says. “He wanted to get going.” Long before nurture had a chance to shape him, Carroll couldn’t help but do anything to the maximum. Pey-Lin calls Carroll her “what’s next kid,” a child who always needed a meaty activity to occupy his attention. He was endlessly curious and quick — sometimes too much so — to test a hypothesis. (“I was the kid who would jump in the pool without checking for water,” Carroll says.) If no substantive activity was available, he’d find substance where others found boredom. He could skip rocks or kick a soccer ball or hit a baseball off a tee for hours on end, always seeking new ways to challenge himself.

The oldest of two children, Carroll played just about every sport growing up in the Pacific Northwest. In the summers, tennis practice would bleed into a soccer game, which then gave way to baseball practice. “Maybe there was cross-country in the mix, too,” he says. He was good at all of them, especially soccer, which he played at the club level in middle school. (He also won a spot on the varsity football team as a freshman, wowing coaches by running the 40-yard dash in 4.51 seconds in tennis shoes. Despite never having played football before, Carroll told coaches he was a quarterback and was awarded the backup job.) But baseball, a game nobody in his family had played growing up — his father, Brant, rowed crew at the University of Washington — was the sport that most captured his intensive attention.

After Carroll led his Little League squad on a postseason run — he played the outfield and pitched, but also made cameos as a left-handed shortstop and catcher — that attention was repaid by former big-leaguer Jeff Cirillo. The 14-year veteran is a pro scout with the Angels, but at the time, he was mostly a dad who wanted to start a summer travel team for his son. Carroll was 12 years old and “probably 5-5 and 100 pounds,” Cirillo remembers, but the kid was fast. He also had “this uncanny ability to keep his bat in the zone for a long time.” Cirillo liked to preach to kids that if they wanted to succeed at the next level, they needed to be able to handle the outside pitch. So, Carroll made a living shooting balls the other way for singles.

Over the years, Cirillo challenged Carroll to add more and more elements to his game. To make the point that a bunt is sometimes a free hit, he offered his players one dollar for every bunt single they recorded. The deal was discontinued when Carroll quickly racked up $10 in winnings. “I think you got the point,” Cirillo remembers telling him. Cirillo stressed the importance of controlling the strike zone — like Gene Hackman measuring the court in “Hoosiers,” Cirillo would point out that the plate is the same dimension in high school as it is in the majors — so Carroll learned to work counts and draw walks. OK, but can you drive the ball over the fence? Cirillo challenged. Thus, Carroll began hitting home runs.

Just about the only thing Carroll couldn’t do was grow five inches. “I was probably 5-7 and 130 pounds,” he says, and he still chafes at how his height was held against him early in his high school career. Though he performed well in club tournaments across Washington and against heavy hitters in Arizona and California, Carroll noticed that college offers didn’t come his way as quickly as they did other kids, which “really pissed me off.” So did questions about his power at the plate. Carroll’s mother is 5-foot-4 and his father is a foot taller, and his parents found themselves regularly fielding questions from recruiters about their son’s height.

“Pretty much everyone at some point in our meeting would lean over and they’d say, ‘Is he going to grow?’” Brant Carroll says. “Of course, you don’t want to upset potential suitors, so you say, ‘Yeah, I think he’s going to grow a little more.’”

Grow he did not, at least not in the way those recruiters were hoping. But Carroll wouldn’t let that hold him back. He still carries two chips on his shoulder — his late-coming college offers and being turned down for USA Baseball — and it’s worth noting he’d made them both moot by the end of his junior year. At that point, he’d already committed to UCLA. He’d also cracked the Team USA roster for the summer of 2018, going on to win a gold medal at the COPABE U-18 Pan-American Championship in Panama. Even then, he says, “I was let known multiple times, ‘You’re the last spot on this team.’” It’s a small affront, but players have to take their motivation where they can find it.

And finding it would only get harder. By the time he was a senior, Carroll looked like a consensus first-round pick, and one that might never get to the Diamondbacks at all.

Diamondbacks assistant general manager Amiel Sawdaye doesn’t remember the name of the restaurant, but he knows it was a nice little Italian place near the campus of the University of Washington. What he does remember would seem to be just as minor a detail, yet for some reason he found it to be significant. It was how Carroll greeted his sister.

Sawdaye and a few other Diamondbacks staffers were in Seattle to take the Carrolls out to dinner prior to the draft. Carroll’s sister, Campbell, arrived late from a soccer game, and Sawdaye remembers Carroll pausing the conversation to get up, greet his younger sibling with a hug and inquire about her day. It was the type of interaction that only fellow parents truly can appreciate. “I see the way my kids operate,” Sawdaye says, “and I don’t think my kids are going to act like that.” It wasn’t the only moment that caught the evaluator’s attention. At that dinner, Carroll informed his parents that he would decline an invitation to the draft in New York in order to share the experience with his friends and family at home. It was a decision he’d apparently made on his own, no adult guidance required.

“I just had never been around a player who had that level of maturity,” Sawdaye says.

The Diamondbacks had been on Carroll heavily in the year leading up to the 2019 draft, even sending international scouts to watch him in Panama the previous summer. But the notion of Carroll falling all the way to the Diamondbacks at No. 16 seemed far-fetched at that point. Sawdaye handicaps it at 40 percent, although scouting director Deric Ladnier suggests it was even more of a surprise to find Carroll still on the board when Arizona’s pick arrived. (“I was begging the Angels,” says Cirillo, whose team picked college shortstop Will Wilson one spot earlier.) Just why he lasted so long is a bit of a mystery.

It could have been because of Carroll’s size or the fact that, due to playing in the rainy Northwest, it was harder to get looks at him during his senior season. It may have been, as his mother speculates, that Carroll turned down invitations from some teams to work out for them privately as he and his parents sought to preserve a sense of normalcy during his senior year. “There was nothing else that he could show that he hadn’t already shown,” Pey-Lin says, but there was senior prom to attend. “Maybe that didn’t sit well with certain teams, that he didn’t show up to bang it out at their stadiums,” she says. “We don’t know.”

Whatever the reason, there he was at the 16th pick, and the Diamondbacks snapped him up and quickly signed him for the pick’s slot value of $3.75 million. Ladnier has drafted some All-Stars in his day — Zack Greinke, Eric Hosmer, Mike Moustakas — but he can’t think of a better player he’s ever drafted that late, and Carroll wasted no time making him look smart. He quickly outclassed the rookie-level Arizona League as an 18-year-old, batting .288 with an .859 OPS in 31 games. To close out the 2019 season, he jumped up to Short Season A-Ball (a level that no longer exists) and hit .326 with a .990 OPS in 11 games against college-aged competition. When the pandemic hit in 2020, Carroll was one of the youngest players invited to Arizona’s alternate site. He was also one of the best performers there, consistently doing damage against pitchers who were bouncing back and forth to the majors.

Then came 2021 — the home run, the shoulder tear, the surgery. Carroll hadn’t thought it was all that serious, even telling Barfield he’d be back on the field in a week. But the truth was revealed when his doctor pulled up his MRI scan and Carroll saw Diamondbacks minor-league therapist Merritt Walker wince in empathetic pain. His first full professional season had just begun, and it was already over.

But that didn’t mean it had to be wasted. A few days after his surgery, Carroll met with Barfield and Diamondbacks general manager Mike Hazen. This was an opportunity, they stressed. He could make use of his absence from the field. “If you do this right,” Barfield told him, “it could be like you missed no time.”

Carroll is hitting .364 at Double A, where the average player is nearly three and a half years older than him. That’s not missing time. It’s speeding it up.

One day last summer, just a couple weeks after Carroll underwent surgery, Barfield walked into the weight room at the team’s spring training facility only to find Carroll hard at work. Prohibited from lifting with his right arm, Carroll instead blasted his dominant left arm. That limb “was huge,” the farm director says. But Carroll’s right arm was another story. “It was like an infant arm,” the farm director laughs. “It was like a mutated arm. It was so small!” The right arm caught up over time, but Carroll got teased about that for a while.

Carroll did more than live in the weight room during his rehabilitation period. He took on a full course load at ASU as an online student, continuing his quest for a college degree that he’d begun as a part-time student a year earlier. How much of a self-starter is Carroll? His mother found out he was enrolling in college when he asked for his ACT scores one day. That was a surprise but not a shock. After all, Carroll also used to FaceTime into his high school classes while with Team USA in Panama, just to make sure he didn’t fall temporarily behind.

He also used his downtime to continue his baseball education. During most Diamondbacks games at Chase Field last season, Carroll could be found behind home plate with advance scout Jeff Gardner, asking questions. “Masters-level questions,” Barfield says. When a contingent from the Diamondbacks front office headed to a Perfect Game tournament in Surprise, Ariz., earlier this year — an event headlined by potential top overall draft pick Termarr Johnson — Carroll tagged along, bringing fellow first-rounder Jordan Lawlar with him. “I don’t know what he does in his spare time, but I’m guessing he’s probably not in Old Town (Scottsdale),” Sawdaye says. Given a million options of how to spend his precious spare time, Carroll more often than not will choose a baseball game. That reminds Sawdaye of someone. “Greinke was like that,” the assistant GM notes.

Though his Double-A batting line would suggest otherwise, Carroll does not talk like his shoulder surgery is completely behind him. He knows it’s a serious procedure that offers little in the way of future guarantees. For that reason, he resists comparisons to his pre-injury self, even flattering ones, because he finds that to be a psychological trap. “It’s chasing something that’s impossible to be,” he says. “I’m never going to fully feel like I’m that player again.” The Diamondbacks are similarly cautious about projecting unblemished health for their future centerpiece. “None of us know how the shoulder injury is going to rear its ugly head,” Sawdaye says. Carroll, he notes, “might be totally fine.” Or, the injury could become a recurring problem. Only the coming years will tell.

Whatever the joint’s state (and it appears to be a healthy one), Carroll has ensured he has come back from the injury “a year stronger (and) a year smarter,” as Sawdaye put it. And maybe a year, or at least a few minutes, more mellow, too. Recovering from major surgery has taught Carroll to relax just a little. He knows how he’s programmed. “I’ve always been someone who gives 110 percent without regarding tomorrow,” he says, but now he’s wiser about taking care of his body. Sometimes, he has learned, rest is better than hitting the gym first thing in the morning after a long bus ride. Sometimes, as teammate Dominic Fletcher has tried to persuade him, a game of poker after a game is better than another hour studying the next day’s pitcher. “He almost has trouble having an off switch,” Fletcher says. “He wants to be on all the time.”

Despite the lofty esteem in which he’s held by evaluators, there are challenges ahead. Carroll is three years into his career and only now embarking on a full season. (His mother exhaled in relief when he successfully completed his seventh game this season, surpassing his total from last year.) He knows the rigors of a five-month schedule will severely test his body and mind. He will face tougher pitching and will have to adjust. Whatever flaws there are in his game will be magnified as he moves up the minor-league ladder. He’s already dedicated part of his offseason and spring to fixing one of them: his arm strength. Notably, he already has three outfield assists.

At whatever pace he moves — and there is every reason to think it will be a quick one — the Diamondbacks envision him as a fixture atop their lineup for years to come. He is a potential star, the type of player who can “change the game in every aspect,” Sawdaye says. The industry knows it. So do the autograph hounds that swarm the netting after batting practice. (“The bro crush is real,” Pey-Lin Carroll jokes.) He is no longer overlooked or considered too small. He is a first-rounder and a top-20 prospect. Just about everybody believes in him now.

A pandemic didn’t break his stride. Even when he tears his shoulder so badly he needs surgery, he manages to hit a home run.

“I don’t think anyone’s really seen him fail,” Fletcher says. The next time Carroll does, it apparently will be the first.

(Top photo: John E. Moore III / Getty Images)