Diamondbacks Superstar Corbin Carroll @ 2023 MLB Season All-Star Debut Might Exceed Expectations for Hometown Fans

Corbin Carroll, who will start in the MLB All-Star Game on Tuesday at 8 p.m. ET on FOX, attended high school just 11 miles away at The Lakeside School

. In just four years, he has bridged the enormous chasm between the two disciplines, a meteoric climb that has alternately astounded his most ardent supporters and conditioned them to cease doubting his capacity to amaze.

Carroll, who will turn 23 next month, is the best player on a surprising strong Arizona Diamondbacks club. He is currently the frontrunner for National League Rookie of the Year and should be considered for National League Most Valuable Player.

His first full season has been as impressive as his brief 2022 debut was hopeful. Carroll is racking up superlatives on the base paths at the same rate.

He is one of only two players in the MLB during the All-Star break to have hit 15 home runs and stolen 26 bases, joining Ronald Acuna Jr.

Seattle native and lifelong Ichiro fan Carroll didn’t allow himself to consider the possibility of playing in his hometown All-Star Game until mid-June, following a particularly terrific series in Detroit.

Carroll was born in August of 2000, so he missed Ichiro’s iconic rookie year with the Mariners in 2001.

“It was just something cool to look forward to if it happened,” he remarked on Monday. And even if it didn’t, I still intended to return to Seattle. If I wasn’t a member, I’d be a fan.
Carroll’s meteoric rise from bright Pacific Northwest prospect to major-league force has yielded a distinctively personal reward. He could not have sought for this, could not have planned his own coming-out party to be this well-placed.

The main point is that this is the only All-Star game he will ever play in Seattle, right? This was it for him,” Carroll’s high school coach at Lakeside, Kellen Sundin, said.

Carroll’s legendary 2023 has been met with admiration and disbelief from a wide variety of people, including Sundin, a top prospect who trained with Carroll, and an assistant general manager who leaped at the chance to draft him.

“He’s that guy,” said Jordan Lawlar, the shortstop who has replaced Carroll as Arizona’s top prospect. “He’s definitely that person. Obviously, he recognises himself as “that guy.”

They certainly couldn’t have anticipated Carroll’s rapid improvement. Despite his short stature (he’s only 5’10”), the baseball community has come to expect nothing less than the best from these overachievers.

Sundin admitted, “The truth is, I gave up a while ago.” “I told him, ‘I’m not gonna allow you to surprise me with any of your successes anymore,’ since he’s done it so often.

You don’t expect a rookie to make the All-Star Game in Major League Baseball, but of course he is going to.

I can’t imagine this person being our top choice. Every level of baseball seems to mirror Corbin Carroll’s discoveries. He was never an outstanding physical figure, but at the age of 14, he helped Sundin see.

After Sundin watched the freshman’s swing at tryouts, he predicted that the player would go on to great success.

To paraphrase his coach, “You know, he was a small, little guy — and he could obviously always run — but he had a big, powerful swing and a surprising amount of juice in his bat for a kid that size at that age.”

Carroll’s meteoric rise to fame began with his stellar play on Lakeside and travel teams, and culminated in his selection to the highly regarded Team USA under-18 squad for the 2018 Pan-Am Games.

“If you look at the roster on that team, it’s pretty wild right now to look at it — some of the better young players in baseball,” Sundin said, referring to a group that includes Anthony Volpe, C.J. Abrams, Bobby Witt Jr., and Riley Greene.

And that was a great achievement on his part. He had to displace players from teams he had previously missed out on.

Carroll’s performance on the field earned him a higher ranking on Arizona’s draft board. Although Carroll wasn’t exactly under the radar, he didn’t receive as much attention as Witt and the rest of his team.

Amiel Sawdaye, the assistant general manager of the Diamondbacks who is in charge of the draft, said that after seeing Carroll play for the national team, the scouts were “effusive in their praise.”

It sounded like Sawdaye was reliving a moment from Sundin’s past, but it was actually a reflection on how impressed the men were with the “sneaky power” Sundin possessed. Says, “You see a smaller guy, and a lot of times, you just don’t know what you’re gonna get with the ability to drive the ball.”

Sawdaye was worried that Carroll wouldn’t be available for Arizona’s first pick in the 2019 MLB Draft because of his excellent showings for Team USA and subsequent high school showcases, where he was second only to Adley Rutschman.

According to him, the team entered the year with the mindset of “Man, we’re picking 16th.” We’ve seen nothing this summer to suggest that this guy should be our first pick.
The Pacific Northwest is hiding a formidable force. It wasn’t Carroll per se, but rather the area in which he grew up, that most likely helped the D-backs.

There are a lot of talented major leaguers from Seattle and the surrounding Pacific Northwest, but most of them were never able to show their stuff to professional scouts when they were in high school. Sundin claimed that the region’s notoriety does not match the quality of its talent.

People have this preconceived notion that baseball games played in Seattle are always played indoors because, as he put it, “it rains all the time.”

The real issue is one of far more logistical complexity. The Pacific Northwest, according to Sawdaye, “gets a bad rap.”

“It’s not that they don’t produce players,” he emphasised. As one scout put it, “It’s hard to scout.”

It’s not always easy to make an accurate prediction about a player who spent their formative years in a cooler or more distant climate. Similar lack of knowledge caused Mike Trout to fall to the 25th choice in the 2008 draft.

Many excellent players from Washington and Oregon, such as Jacoby Ellsbury, Michael Conforto, and Adley Rutschman, go on to distinguish themselves at the collegiate level, and Carroll’s senior high school season was a prime example of why this is the case.

Due to conflicts with school, Carroll only got two pregame batting practise sessions, which evaluators rely on to get a sense of a player’s raw talent.

Sawdaye remarked that the youngster would benefit from greater game time and exposure for his batting average if he were based in Texas or Atlanta. To paraphrase, “I think people would have seen a little bit more of what we felt like he had, some of the emerging power that he had.”

However, the batted-ball data the D-backs obtained on Carroll from Team USA and other showcases gave them a bit more confidence in their initial assessments of his ability.

This statistic has become increasingly widespread and sophisticated over the past decade. Sawdaye claimed that the team was impressed by the hitter’s natural ability to hit line drives that carried, to hit the ball with backspin and to make solid contact to all fields.

Sawdaye claimed that everyone knew Carroll was a game-changer because of his ability to defend, run, and hit with power. The Diamondbacks had a more positive outlook on his power potential, therefore their evaluation was more accurate.

Sawdaye laughed when Carroll continued to hit home runs in late June, saying, “I can’t sit here and say that I anticipated him hitting I don’t how many home runs.” I believe we all had faith in his ability to hit the ball hard and barrel up the baseball.
“Extremely careful in every aspect of his work.”

Carroll suffered a torn labrum and injured posterior capsule in his right shoulder just seven games into the 2021 minor league season, thereby ending his season early. The injury was so severe that he had to have surgery and would miss the rest of the season.

This is possibly the most impressive aspect of Carroll’s remarkably smooth ascent to major league ball. He accumulated 142 games played in the minors. Trout, another rookie sensation from a cold-weather high school, played 286 games before he became a regular in the majors.

Sawdaye said Carroll showed his unique blend of determination and acumen in those months when he couldn’t take the pitch, even though Arizona would rather he hadn’t hurt his shoulder and didn’t have any more scares like the ones he’s had in recent weeks.

He spent the summer after turning 21 at Chase Field, the home of the Arizona Diamondbacks, talking baseball with scouts.

According to Sawdaye, “he sat behind home plate and came every night — like literally” during the year that he was absent. It seems like the number of games he missed is manageable on one hand.

Injured Futures Game participant and top shortstop prospect Lawlar joined Carroll later that season. They learned that even professionals make mistakes and that sticking to the same strategy over time is the best way to achieve success.

Additionally, Carroll is reliable. Diet and exercise are as important to him as hitting and playing. Lawlar praised Carroll’s “dialled in” approach to nutrition, noting that he has learnt a lot from Carroll since he is “meticulous with everything he does.”

That dates back quite a ways. According to Sundin, it was already in operation when he first met Carroll in ninth school.

I’d say it was quite evident early on that he had a really high degree of attention to detail and preparedness,” the high school coach stated. As one of his friends put it, “He always was pretty calculated in terms of what his routine was going to be and what he wanted to get accomplished each day.”

It’s his own kind of leadership, Sundin emphasised; there’s no bluster or bravado, just a strong, unassuming presence. When Carroll’s high school friends saw how hard he worked, they stepped up their efforts as well.

Through an interpreter, D-backs teammate and fellow All-Star Lourdes Gurriel Jr. remarked that this season’s Carroll is the best rookie he has ever seen, and that he plays like a veteran.

After cheerily reading about Carroll’s successes at Double-A, Lawlar has now realised that his pal “has a reason behind everything he does.”

I believe you hear about his preparation, but unless you’re around it every day in spring training, it’s different, according to Lawlar.

Carroll commended his parents for providing him with a solid foundation the day before the All-Star Game in his hometown, an achievement few others would have achieved despite having comparably high potential. But he admitted that, as usual, he had taken the ball and run with it.

“I’ve always been a little bit obsessive,” he admitted on Monday. When I commit to something, I like to see it through to the end.

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