Top prospect Corbin Carroll is in MLB, and the Diamondbacks are back on the radar (2024)

Earlier this year, a reporter sidled up to a minor-league manager in the bright hours before a game against the Amarillo Sod Poodles. Who on the other team, the reporter asked, has been the most impressive? The center fielder, he replied, tilting his head and raising an eyebrow in a show of respect. Our pitchers can’t get him to bite at anything. Top prospect Corbin Carroll, says anyone who knows him, is so rarely caught off guard or fooled. Thus, it is richly ironic that, immediately before receiving the biggest news of his baseball life, Carroll walked right into a trap.

Triple-A Reno was finishing up a Sunday game in Sacramento, and Carroll was riding the bench. It was a planned off day, which for a top prospect — Carroll leads both Arizona’s system and all of baseball, according to the rankings of The Athletic’s Keith Law— means being all but sedentary. Top prospects do not pinch hit when they are off. They do not pinch run. They are off and off-limits. So, it should have seemed odd when Reno manager Gil Velazquez informed Carroll to get ready because he’d been cleared to enter the game midway through.

The rest was captured on video. Unquestioning, Carroll began loosening up. He stretched his arms and bent over to touch his toes. Then came the breaking ball, the slider that Carroll usually sees miles away. “This guy’s not going into the game,” Velazquez announced in the dugout, a hand on the outfielder’s shoulder. “He’s going to the big leagues.” A bear hug from a teammate didn’t prevent Carroll from looking toward his manager in confusion. By the second hug, it seemed to have sunk in.

“I can’t believe he bought this,” said Arizona farm director Josh Barfield, laughing, a day later.

Some 𝒄𝒂𝒍𝒍𝒔 just can't wait till after the game ☎️@corbin_carroll | @MiLB | @MLBPipeline pic.twitter.com/lP85r5etKB

— Reno Aces (@Aces) August 29, 2022

By that night, Carroll had landed in Phoenix. The next day, he was in the starting lineup, batting eighth and playing right field against the Phillies. Two pitches into the game, he caught a fly ball at the warning track, his first official act as a big leaguer. By the end of the night, he held an authenticated baseball, rubbed in mud and housed in a jewel case. It was his first big-league hit, which just so happened to be a game-winning double in a 13-7 victory.

A year earlier, Carroll had been sitting behind home plate, not wielding a bat alongside it. For the second year in a row, he’d been robbed of a professional season. In 2020, a year after he was drafted in the first round, it was the pandemic. In 2021, it was a torn shoulder a week into the season. He spent the year rehabbing and sitting with the team’s scouts in the stands. He had played in just 49 professional games over three years, only 18 of them above Rookie ball. Carroll had his eye on the majors, literally and figuratively, but he had much ground left to cover.

That he would come so far in a year — 58 incandescent games at Double A, 33 more of similar brightness at Triple A, in the majors just more than a week after his 22nd birthday — surprised many in the organization. But it did not shock them. They’d seen his work ethic. They knew his drive. Slyly delivered good news aside, Carroll picked up on things more quickly than most. Speed was his hallmark on the field, but it also defined him everywhere else. “Everything Corbin does is fast,” Reno hitting coach Mark Reed said. Even reaching the big leagues.

And now the Diamondbacks, relevant the past few years only for their failures, are picking up steam as well.

The Diamondbacks have called up a lot of players over the years — some who stuck, many who have not — but Monday was different. Arizona scheduled a press conference for Carroll in Chase Field’s media room. General manager Mike Hazen held a scrum of his own in the dugout. Taking advantage of an off day in the minors, the Diamondbacks flew their Double- and Triple-A coaching staffs to Phoenix to take in their top prospect’s debut. “There’s definitely excitement and buzz around the organization,” Barfield said.

This one, it all seemed to signal, is important.

It’s certainly true that, in the eyes of the industry, Carroll is a caliber of prospect the Diamondbacks haven’t boasted since Justin Upton made the majors at 19 years old in 2007. Essentially two years and one major surgery removed from playing meaningful baseball, Carroll hit the Texas League like Pecos Bill atop a tornado. For three months, he hardly found an equal, batting .313/.430/.643. He swatted 16 home runs — in a homer-friendly park, to be sure — and stole 20 bases. The only thing that slowed Carroll was a bout with COVID-19 that sidelined him for a couple of weeks. Once he’d conquered it, the Diamondbacks decided he’d conquered Double A as well. Midway through July, they bumped him up to Reno.

Triple A barely interrupted his gait. He homered in his first game and posted a .943 OPS in 157 plate appearances. He wowed coaches with his hunger for and facility with information. There was no such thing as “too much.” “He’s just above everybody else,” Reed said. More people have seen Bigfoot than have watched Carroll struggle. Diamondbacks rookie outfielder Alek Thomas remembers one rough day at the alternate site two years ago. Reed watched Carroll strike out five times in one game last week. “If I did see him struggle, it was probably that day,” Reed said, and he’s not sure that will ever happen to Carroll again. Even last year, when Carroll hurt his shoulder in just his seventh game of the season, he did it while hitting a home run.

All that success, ironically, has masked improvement. Like a duck gliding seamlessly atop the water, Carroll churned furiously underneath the surface as he propelled himself toward the majors. The Diamondbacks wanted to see Carroll, a left-handed hitter, improve against same-handed pitchers. So, he made that a focus of his pre-game work. (His first big-league hit, not-so-coincidentally, came in a left-on-left matchup.) They wanted him to be defensively versatile, so he began bouncing among center, left and right. If it’d help him get to the big leagues, he’d do it. “He is always looking from that 30,000-foot view,” Barfield said. “That’s why he’s been able to improve so quickly and move so quickly.” After only 142 career minor-league games, that’s why he’s already in the majors.

His unyielding excellence was making it hard to justify slowing his progress. There wasn’t an obvious spot for him — the Diamondbacks are blessed with a host of young outfielders, most of whom also hit left-handed — but they intend for Carroll to be an integral part of their core next year. Why not acclimate him to the majors now? “We wanted him to come up and sort of rip this Band-Aid off this year,” Hazen told reporters Monday. But ripping off bandages is supposed to hurt. For the Diamondbacks, and especially for Carroll, this just feels great.

“This is what I want to do, and this is the stage I want to do it on,” the outfielder said in his pregame presser. “To be able to say that means a lot.”

After wins in recent years, the hallways outside the home clubhouse at Chase Field would be filled with the giggles and thwap-thwap-thwap-thwap of little tennis-shoed feet on the concrete. They awaited their fathers on the other side of the clubhouse door. These days, however, few children populate the halls following games. Most of the players aren’t old enough to have any.

“The clubhouse is pretty young right now,” Thomas said. “It’s really cool.”

Arizona’s youth movement began long before Carroll’s 178-pound frame was fitted for a No. 7 jersey. Zac Gallen was a rookie when the Diamondbacks acquired him at the 2019 trade deadline. Daulton Varsho and Pavin Smith, the former a top-100 prospect and the latter a first-round pick, debuted in 2020. Shortstop Geraldo Perdomo cracked the big leagues last year, and Thomas broke through earlier this season. Monday against the Phillies, the only position player in Arizona’s lineup over 30 years old was first baseman Christian Walker. The only other tricenarian hitter on the roster is shortstop Nick Ahmed, who has missed most of the season with a shoulder injury.

This is the core the Diamondbacks have been building, and if Carroll’s arrival doesn’t quite signal the beginning of a new era, it at least suggests a new phase of the current one. Arizona could have kept him down until a few weeks into next year to secure an extra year of service time, but Hazen would like his club to start winning now. (Though a few people in the game speculated that no prospect of Carroll’s caliber would be promoted, by the Diamondbacks or any other team, if not for a provision in the new collective bargaining agreement that awards teams with draft picks if a rookie finishes high in the voting for end-of-season awards. By hitting the majors within 45 days of the end of the season, Carroll preserves his rookie eligibility — and therefore his candidacy for Rookie of the Year — for next season.)

If the Diamondbacks of past seasons were starved of young big-league talent, Carroll’s arrival presents the organization with the opposite problem. There are too many mouths to feed, and they all play the same position. Thomas has struggled offensively of late, but he’s similarly a franchise centerpiece who has excelled as a defender all year. Varsho has been an above-average bat and is second on the team in home runs with 18. Jake McCarthy, the youngster with the least amount of relative prospect pedigree, is hitting .286 with a .772 OPS.

There’s depth and then there’s redundancy, and the Diamondbacks might have more of the latter built into their outfield than NASA did in the lunar module. Rival scouts wonder about a trade — teams have asked about McCarthy before, only to be rebuffed — but the Diamondbacks insist they can squeeze four starting outfielders into three spots. “There should be plenty of at-bats,” said Hazen, pointing out the availability of the designated hitter and his team’s packed September schedule. Amiel Sawdaye, Hazen’s top lieutenant, noted that depth has a way of evaporating quickly, sending the front office into the lab to fashion big leaguers out of spare parts.

“We’ll see what happens,” Sawdaye said. “It’s exciting to watch them all impacting the game and helping us win games.”

If having too many young and talented lefty outfielders is a problem, it’s one to solve in the offseason. Now is the time to dream of adding more talent, not subtracting it. Perhaps shortstop Jordan Lawlar, a top-15 prospect in his own right, will follow Carroll’s blazing path to the majors next year. Who knows how quickly outfielder and No. 2 pick Druw Jones will advance when he returns from shoulder surgery next year. Carroll’s arrival is neither the beginning nor end of a trend. It’s simply one chapter in a longer tale.

But it is a significant one. Carroll is here, not in the stands nor on some minor-league field, but outside the home dugout, wearing a headset as he discusses his momentous debut with the television broadcast. Smiling, he casts a furtive glance to his right. Seconds later, he sidesteps in the opposite direction, leaving Thomas to dump a cooler of ice water harmlessly onto the dirt. Another celebratory moment subverted, except this time Carroll was in on the joke.

You can’t fool him, they all say. He saw it coming a mile away.

(Top photo: Joe Camporeale / USA Today)