Kristian Campbell occasionally encounters clips from his one season at Georgia Tech. He is jarred by the vision.
“I look at that player like, ‘Noooo! What are you doing?!’ ” Campbell said. “I see some videos of my old swing and I don’t like it. It worked, for sure, but I see it and I’m like, ‘Dang, I looked like that? It worked at the time, but it’s gonna look a lot better in less than a year.’
That’s what I’d be saying to Kristian from Georgia Tech: ‘You have no idea what you’ll grow into.’ ”
Campbell’s growth from a fourth-round, slap-and-dash draft pick in 2023 to the Minor League Player of the Year in 2024 represents a stunning ascent—one that was driven primarily by a player who transformed his swing and offensive approach over the course of one year.
Yet for members of the Red Sox organization, it also highlighted the payoff of an overhauled approach to hitting development.
After the 2022 season, the Red Sox engaged in an organizational self-examination. The championship-winning team from 2018 was built chiefly around an elite homegrown core of position players—Mookie Betts, Xander Bogaerts, Rafael Devers, Andrew Benintendi and more—but a years-long gap had formed behind Devers.
“We probably weren’t getting progress in development, maybe the way that we had hoped,” Red Sox farm director Brian Abraham said. “We wanted to put a system in place and processes in place that allowed for consistency in development all the way through our system, not just in one place—to be able to track, be able to be objective about the development that was happening, be able to see progress.
“We had to take a step back to see where we were process-wise. We probably weren’t as far along as maybe we would have hoped.”
The Red Sox leaned hard into overhauling their hitting development in pursuit of alignment behind a clear organization-wide philosophy. The process included some painful decisions to let go of some respected, longtime hitting coaches while seeing others choose to leave.
At the same time, Boston hired Jason Ochart—who founded Driveline’s hitting program in 2016, then worked as the Phillies’ minor league hitting coordinator from 2019 to 2022—as minor league director of hitting and program design.
Ochart was tasked with creating a more data-driven development environment and to scale it out in ways to achieve measurable progress in areas that both he and Red Sox player development…