Red Sox prospect Christopher Troye said he was “dying laughing” when he saw Triston Casas’ response to his Instagram reel.
“I posted a reel on Instagram (Nov. 3) — just some (Arizona) Fall League highlights of me pitching and I was feeling a little confident and the caption was like, ‘Did you think I would make it even this far?’” Troye told MassLive.
The always honest Red Sox first baseman — who played with Troye in the 2016 Under Armour All-America Game in Chicago when they were high schoolers — didn’t hold back.
“To be fair, since I’ve known you, never thought you’d get this far,” Casas commented on the reel.
Troye immediately sent Casas’ reply to top Red Sox prospect Marcelo Mayer.
“We were laughing together. I’m like, ‘Hey, thanks for keeping it real but I’m not done,’” Troye said.
In reality, he has just started. The Red Sox drafted Troye in the 12th round (346th overall) out of UC Santa Barbara in 2021. He began pitching only three years before (2018) when he was a college freshman. He has come a long way in a short time. Troye, who is listed at 6-foot-4, 225 pounds, led all Boston minor leaguers in strikeout percentage (39.5%). He punched out 87 of the 220 batters he faced for High-A Greenville and Double-A Portland. He held opponents to a .169 batting average in 49 ⅓ innings of relief and posted a 3.10 ERA.
One of his main goals entering 2024? He wants to pitch in the big leagues.
“To be honest with you, I wanted it yesterday,” Troye said. “I wanted to be a big leaguer yesterday. I’m hoping for a big league spring training invite and then I’m hoping to make the club out of big league spring training. I think that’s probably best-case scenario. … I know that I don’t control those things. I know I don’t control whether I get a big league spring training invite. I can control my performance and the decision-makers will decide what they’re going to decide regardless. For me, it’s just about giving them a hard conversation. Just trying to be in the mix. Put my name in their minds.”
He credits his hard fastball for his high strikeout rate. He averaged 15.9 strikeouts per nine innings for Greenville and Portland.
“I’ve always been a big strikeout guy,” Troye said. “I’ve just always had big stuff.”
His fastball typically ranges between 94-97 mph. He topped out at 98.5 mph and averaged approximately 94.8 mph this past season.
The hardest fastball he has ever thrown came during his professional debut for the Florida Complex League Red Sox against the FCL Pirates when he reached 100.3 mph.
“I’ve just got to be in the zone with it,” Troye said. “And I think that’s been the story of my life.”
When Troye has struggled, it typically has been because of control issues. He averaged 6.6 walks per nine innings this past season. He has averaged 6.4 walks per nine innings in pro ball.
“Gotta get that down,” Troye said. “But for the most part, as long as I throw my stuff in the zone, I like my odds.”
His second best pitch is his gyro slider.
“Most people, when they see me throw it, they think it’s a 12-to-6 curveball but it’s actually a slider,” Troye said. “It just has that movement profile.”
He also has added a cutter as his third pitch. He worked on it a lot during the Arizona Fall League.
“By working on it, I mean just throwing it and getting experience and failing with it,” Troye said. “Every time I fail with it, for me it just speeds up the process of getting better. I know that any development is going to require an element of risk. And in order to get better, you have to take risks. That’s what I’ve felt like I’ve done with the cutter. I think longterm that’s what’s best for my career.”
UC Santa Barbara recruited Troye as a catcher. As a freshman, he was behind then-sophomore Eric Yang, now a catcher in the Reds’ system with Triple-A affiliate Louisville, on the depth chart.
“He’s a year older than me. He had just come off a freshman All-American catching season,” Troye said about Yang. “And my coach at Santa Barbara, coach (Andrew Checketts) told me that I probably wasn’t going to be able to contribute behind the dish that much my freshman year. And obviously the 18-year-old with the ego coming off the high school All-America Game, it’s like, ‘I’m going to beat this guy out.’ I definitely pushed back a little bit.”
But Checketts told Troye, “get on the mound!”
“I think I hit like 97, 98 (mph) my first bullpen,” Troye said. “And UC Santa Barbara is very analytically advanced. So they saw the metrics on my fastball. They saw the big velocity. And they said, ‘I think it’s probably in your best interest to go pitch.’ And I haven’t looked back since.”
Yang and Troye ended up becoming good friends — and college battery mates.
“I don’t miss hitting, dude. I miss catching though,” Troye said. “I feel like catcher is the one position in baseball that you’re just playing the game every single pitch. Every single pitch of every single game, you’re just in it. I played high school basketball. I loved to play high school basketball because it’s so fast paced. Behind the dish, it’s very similar in that way. You’re always playing.”
Troye is from the Bay Area. He grew up a big fan of then-Giants catcher Buster Posey and then-San Francisco manager Bruce Bochy, a former catcher.
“Honestly, I think that (catching) is why I have the fastball that I have,” Troye said. “I would be interested to hear what Kenley (Jansen, a former catcher) has to say about his fastball and the role that catching played in his pitching development.”
Much of what he learned as a catcher translates to the mound.
“I’m reading swings when I’m on the mound and it’s the same way you learn to read swings behind the dish,” he said. “You see a guy who’s late on the fastball and he can’t catch up to it and can’t get on top of it. Why are we going to throw anything else? There’s hitters that I face that maybe my fastball is really on that day and they can’t catch up to the first one. So it’s like, ‘I’m not going to throw anything else. I’m just going to go with three heaters right down the middle and see what happens.’ More times than not, it does work out. But I feel like being able to read swings and my experience as a catcher, playing the game from that perspective, has definitely helped me as a pitcher.”
Troye feels his next step is throwing strikes consistently.
“It’s not one or the other. I think I can do both (throw hard and throw strikes),” he said. “I’m just trying to figure out how to do that. When I can do that on a consistent basis, I think that’s when my game is going to really explode.”
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It’s not unusual for someone who began pitching so late in his amateur career to have some trouble throwing strikes.
“I think it’s more reps, more experience,” Troye said. “Every time I throw something, it’s like, ‘OK, I’m going to try to throw it there.’ And then I miss and I then try to learn from the miss and try to learn from the failure. But I think it’s just a rep thing, man. I’ve only been pitching since 2018. … So I know I’m going to continue to get better. And I know my distribution of walks has gotten better, which means I’m more consistently in the zone. I still have a lot of walks but they’re like one or two walks at a time as opposed to in previous years being like five, six at a time. So I’m getting better.”
Troye is confident his time will eventually come whether in 2024 or another year.
“There is a big league version of myself and I don’t know when I’ll be a big leaguer because that’s a little bit outside of my control but I know for sure that I will be a big leaguer and that’s something that I’ve honestly always felt, something that I’ve always kind of held onto. For me it’s just about being as prepared as humanly possible for the big leagues and I can do that every day I can play catch.”
Troye said he and Casas (a.k.a. Mr. Honest) have hung out together during spring training.
“The last couple of spring trainings, we’ve grabbed meals together and we’ve hung out a decent amount off the field, which has been cool,” Troye said. “But the first and foremost thing about Triston Casas is that dude is zen. He’s grounded. Probably one of the most grounded individuals I’ve ever met. And I can see how that helps at the big league level. I’ve never played in front of 50,000 fans but I imagine a guy like Triston Casas doesn’t get sped up.”
