Saturday was the second day in a row that the Red Sox celebrated a long-term commitment to a young superstar.
“It feels like just yesterday we were gathered in this room and celebrating a very important moment for the Boston Red Sox,” joked chief baseball officer Craig Breslow as the Fenway Park’s interview room filled with laughter early that afternoon.
Twenty-six hours after Garrett Crochet’s contract-extension press conference, Breslow and team president/CEO Sam Kennedy were back in the same seats. This time, Kristian Campbell sat between them, his parents and younger brother off to the side.
It’s been a long time since baseball’s oldest ballpark had such an exciting and promising energy. Campbell is a big reason why, with Breslow describing the extension as “a massively significant moment for this organization.”
Some of what sets Campbell apart from fellow top prospects Marcelo Mayer and Roman Anthony is that he wasn’t the prototypical rising star. Two years ago, he was finishing the school year at Georgia Tech. That summer, he was Boston’s 2023 draft-compensation pick from the San Diego Padres after they signed Xander Bogaerts. He skyrocketed from High-A to Triple-A last season and won several awards for his efforts.
“Kristian was not drafted in the first round, he wasn’t a top prospect upon entering the organization,” said Breslow, who praised Campbell, and the organization’s scouting and development departments. “What he was was a good player who made himself a great player because of his work ethic, and diligence, and open-mindedness, and attitude.”
In the relatively short time since Campbell joined the organization, he’s impressed everyone from teammates and coaches, to the front office, with how he goes about his business, diligently and with maturity beyond his now-22 years. He can be reserved at times, but he lights up when he talks about his favorite topics, including his loved ones and of course, baseball.
“The word to describe your son around camp, from where I sit anyway as someone who’s not in the clubhouse each and every day, is humility,” Kennedy said, “that’s probably life’s greatest achievement.”
That was evident, too, in why Campbell decided to sign the extension, and his mindset now that he’s a millionaire. Asked if he had any big purchases in mind, he said he hadn’t thought about it, and probably wouldn’t until the offseason.
“(Saving and investing) is a great idea,” he told the Herald. “Save it as much as you can, and keep playing.”
He also knew there was a good chance he was be leaving tens, even hundreds of millions on the table by signing this deal, but that wasn’t his priority.
“The extension is life-changing for me and my family,” he told the Herald on Friday morning. “It’s a really big deal to us, and for them to put their trust in me and do what they did means a lot to me and my family. It’s just a blessing to be in this situation, and it’s life-changing for me and my family.”
Campbell’s deal is one of, if not the earliest long-term commitment the Red Sox have ever made to a player, but it sounds like it won’t be the last of its kind.
“John (Henry), and Tom (Werner), and Mike (Gordon) have been pushing us to be aggressive in terms of locking up the future,” Kennedy said, referring to the club’s principal owner, chairman, and president of Fenway Sports Group.
While Breslow and Kennedy focus on that, Campbell is thrilled to have the contract, his family, and his future mapped out, because he wants to focus on his own job.
“It frees me up a lot,” he said of getting the deal done. “That’s literally all I’m worried about right now, is just winning games.”
Over 1,200 regular-season games stand between Campbell and the final guaranteed year of his contract. To the 22-year-old, the age-30 season may feel eons away, but he has no reservations about spending them in Boston.
“It’s a great place to be for when I am 30,” he said earnestly, eliciting a few laughs. “I have no complaints about it… couldn’t ask for much more.”
Asked what made Boston and the Red Sox the right fit for him, Campbell said, “Everything.”
“The city’s great. It’s a city of winning people. It’s a winning culture, there’s winning people everywhere around me, everywhere I go, and the coaches and staff around me make it really easy for me to enjoy being here.”
Already in his young career, Campbell is something of a home-opener veteran. Three of his eight major league games were home openers: first in Texas, then Baltimore, and finally, Fenway the day before his press conference. Game No. 1 at his new home field reinforced that he made the right choice.
“Just being in front of fans, being in front of the city for the first time, just experiencing that, that’s what I’m really excited for, to be honest,” he told the Herald on Friday. “I mean, I played in Texas and Baltimore now, and those were exciting, but I feel like there’s nothing like the home crowd.”
“It definitely was the ultimate experience,” he reiterated in the press conference. “I mean, I experienced a couple more opening days on the road, and this one that we had yesterday didn’t compare to those two. It was better here in Boston.”
“Fans were really engaged, they were into the game, and we did really good, also! I mean, everybody went off yesterday,” he said happily, eliciting more chuckles. “Just the energy. I was on-deck whenever (Trevor Story and Wilyer Abreu homered) back-to-back. … It was just crazy just hearing how loud the stadium was and the energy that went all throughout the stadium, so it’s fantastic.”
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