Boston Red Sox First-Round Pick Struggling in Professional Debut

Boston Red Sox First-Round Pick Struggling in Professional Debut

While one Boston Red Sox 2025 draftee, Anthony Eyanson, is off to an incredible start to his professional career, the same cannot be said for first-round pick Kyson Witherspoon, who has struggled through his first month of professional baseball. Is there a reason to be concerned about the slow start for the 21-year-old starter?

Seen as a consensus top 10 talent in the 2025 MLB Draft, Witherspoon saw himself slide on draft day before the Red Sox selected him with the No. 15 pick out of the University of Oklahoma. Witherspoon signed with Boston for $5 million, just shy of the $5,114,200 slot value associated with the pick.

After spending the rest of the 2025 season in Fort Myers with the remainder of the Red Sox draft class, Witherspoon was assigned to High-A Greenville to make his professional debut at the beginning of this season, where he has not seen the success that his fellow draft classmate has.

In his first six starts for Greenville, Witherspoon has allowed 21 runs (17 earned) on 23 hits across 21.2 innings, which is good for a 7.06 ERA and an opponent batting average of .280. In those 21.2 innings, Witherspoon is seeing an unusually high batting average on balls in play (BABIP) of .357, the 15th-highest mark in the South Atlantic League. The league average for BABIP usually sits around .300, meaning that Witherspoon should be due for some positive regression on balls in play.

Red Sox Senior Director of Player Development Brian Abraham joined WEEI's Rob Bradford on the Baseball Isn't Boring Show on Sunday and discussed Witherspoon's slow start. "We try not to get caught up in ERA and some of the numbers that might seem one way publicly and really try to focus on the process behind that, whether it be K-rate, walk rate, foul rate," Abraham said, "while the numbers publicly might not be as strong, I think under the hood a little bit, there's a process behind it, progress behind it and we're making improvements," he continued.

As for what Witherspoon is doing well, Abraham is right: the strikeout rate has been solid for the 21-year-old righty, striking out 10.38 batters per nine innings. "We've seen the velo be maintained, the secondaries pick up, and I think he's just bringing it all together," said Abraham when discussing some of the improvements the team has seen from Witherspoon.