The last meaningful baseball game Roman Anthony played was back on September 2nd against Cleveland where he suffered a strained oblique that ended his season. The following week, ever untrusting of this ownership, we here at Over The Monster asked if Alex Bregman and Roman Anthony had already played their last game together. Well, today we got our answer to that question, and it’s a resounding no!
Earlier this afternoon, Tim Healey of the Boston Globe was the first to break the news that Roman Anthony will be joining Teams USA in the World Baseball Classic next month alongside former Red Sox third baseman Alex Bregman, and current Red Sox teammate Garrett Whitlock. He’ll be replacing Corbin Carroll of the D-Backs, who broke his hamate bone earlier this month. Here’s a link to the entire Team USA roster, which is absolutely stacked.
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This is great news for Red Sox fans! Not just because it’s a chance to watch one of the team’s blossoming stars take the field on a national global stage, but also because it gives Anthony experience in this type of game. One of the sneaky worst things about the oblique injury ending his 2025 season early is that it didn’t just take him out of their postseason run run last fall – It also robbed him of some valuable postseason experience, which he could have used to take into future Octobers.
He even may have indirectly touched on this point when asked about potentially joining Team USA earlier this week:
“It would be a great opportunity and a great learning lesson for me, to go be around a bunch of the best players in the game.”
He’s probably talking more about just getting to see how the best in the game go about their business everyday, which is another valuable piece to all of this, but I’m also excited for him to get real at bats in a high leverage, urgent, and chaotic baseball environment. You simply can’t replicate that until you’ve stood in the box and experienced the mayhem.
Back in 2024 when Anthony was in Worcester, I asked him about postseason baseball and how much he pays attention to it. His answer was interesting:
“I always watch postseason baseball. Just watching the games, the atmosphere, the electricity of it. There’s nothing like it.
You can also learn a lot. Just turning on a game and watching a complete baseball game, there’s so many lessons. You can pick up a lot more than just going and watching highlights. Not enough people do it, and I try to do it as much as I can.”
Well, the WBC is not quite postseason baseball, but with the way it’s growing and the way the last one ended, I’d argue it’s the closest thing to it. Now, Roman Anthony is going to get firsthand experience in it, and with the way he operates like a sponge, that’s probably going to be a good thing for the Red Sox come October (if he can help carry them there).
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