Jackson Holliday has been a very scrutinized man so far in Baltimore Orioles camp. After a largely quiet offseason, the O's are counting on internal growth in order to finally get over the October hump. And that growth pretty much has to start with Holliday, who entered last season as the consensus top prospect in all of baseball — accompanied by generational hype after storming through the Minors before his 21st birthday — only to flop in his first taste of the big leagues.
To say that Holliday's rookie season didn't go too well would be an understatement. He tallied just two hits in his first 34 at-bats, and while things improved somewhat following another stint at Triple-A, he still posted a measly .523 OPS over his final 40 games. It was very, very far from what the baseball world expected, and much of the talk this spring has been about the lessons Holliday learned from that adversity and the changes he's made to try and make the production match the hype in 2025.
But while everyone in Baltimore is hoping on a sophomore leap, and the talent that made him such a coveted prospect still remains, there's just one problem: History isn't exactly on his side.
For more news and rumors, check out MLB Insider Robert Murray’s work on The Baseball Insiders podcast, subscribe to The Moonshot, our weekly MLB newsletter, and join the discord to get the inside scoop during the MLB season.
History isn't on Jackson Holliday's side for potential Year Two leap
MASN Sports recently took a look at how some of the top position-player prospects in recent history adjusted to the Majors, to see how Holliday's rookie struggles stacked up — and try to determine just how unprecedented it would be to see him become a quality big-leaguer in his second season.
The answer? Pretty unprecedented. Bobby Witt Jr. posted an OPS above league-average while hitting 20 homers and stealing 30 bases in 150 games for the Kansas City Royals in 2022. Holliday's new double-play partner, O's shortstop Gunnar Henderson, slashed a very solid .259/.348/.440 in a 34-game cameo that same season. Even a player who's been heavily criticized for his failure to develop offensively, New York Yankees shortstop Anthony Volpe, put up a .666 OPS as a rookie that was substantially better than Holliday's .565 — while playing better defense at a more difficult position.
Granted, Holliday is a bit of an outlier here, hitting the Majors at just 20 years old. And there's one sense in which the O's have very good reason to believe he'll become a star: According to MASN, all of MLB Pipeline’s No. 1 overall prospects since 2011 have made at least one All-Star Game, and seven of those 11 did it within the first three years of their careers.
But none of them got off to as rough a start as Holliday has. Even the poster child for the Year Two Leap, Los Angeles Angels outfielder Mike Trout, doesn't exactly apply here. Trout was even younger than Holliday at the time of his debut, not even 20 years old yet, and while his topline numbers look rough (.672 OPS, 30 strikeouts in 40 games), they're marred by a late-season slump and flukily bad numbers on balls in play; Trout was hitting the ball much harder than Holliday was, and his first-year OPS was still over 100 points higher.
Again, none of this is to say that Holliday's fate is already sealed. He just turned 21 last December, for goodness sake. But the flaws that got exploited in his rookie season were real and glaring, and if he does manage to figure them out this quickly, he'll be pretty much standing alone in recent MLB history.