LOS ANGELES — When Alex Anthopoulos and his Atlanta Braves were evaluating free agents before the 2020 season, Eddie Rosario’s name came up. Their bench coach, Walt Weiss, had a lot of friends in the organization that had just non-tendered him, the Minnesota Twins. He called around. Everybody said the same thing.
A few months later, after Rosario spent the first half of the season with Cleveland, he pinged Atlanta’s radar again as it hunted for outfielders to help make up for the loss of Ronald Acuña Jr., who suffered a torn ACL in July. Weiss called a few people in Cleveland. They all said the same thing, too: “This guy wants to be in the box with the game on the line.”
“For all of them to say that …” Weiss said. “It was crazy. I’ve never had everybody say that about a player. And they all said that about him.”
The intel was good. When this postseason began, Rosario transformed. He is hitting .471 with a 1.249 on-base-plus-slugging percentage in October. He has done it against teams with two of this year’s deepest and most dominant pitching staffs, the Milwaukee Brewers and the Los Angeles Dodgers. His hit in Game 2 of the National League Championship Series gave Atlanta a walk-off win over Los Angeles. He nearly hit for the cycle in Game 4. Even in Atlanta’s loss in Game 5, Rosario found a way to double against the untouchable stuff of reliever Blake Treinen.
“Eddie’s been great for a long time now, and when you get that kind of hotness, it’s a good feeling. I was on second base for the last home run [in Game 4], and he swung under a 1-0 splitter,” said Atlanta first baseman Freddie Freeman, indicating just how well Rosario seemed to see the ball, that he could not only anticipate the movement of a splitter but adjust so completely as to have overcompensated. “It’s very hard to swing under a splitter, and he did it. Then he didn’t swing under the next one.”
Freeman and others said they weren’t exactly sure what the Braves, who face the Dodgers in Game 6 on Saturday, were getting when they added Rosario in exchange for Pablo Sandoval at the deadline. They knew he was a good player but didn’t know much else because Rosario had spent all of his big league career in the American League.
And they didn’t get a quick introduction. Rosario was on the injured list with an abdominal strain, the latest setback in what had been a disappointing first season with Cleveland: He was hitting .254 with a .685 OPS, a number that would have been the ninth-lowest among qualified major league hitters if the trend had continued.
It didn’t. Atlanta activated Rosario in late August. He posted a .903 OPS from that day until the end of the season and even hit for the cycle on five pitches Sept. 19. He didn’t hesitate when asked about the reason for the shift.
“The weather,” he said, to plenty of laughter from reporters, though he wasn’t joking. “The first two months is 40 degrees all the time in Cleveland. And June is — I’m hitting better. When it’s hot, I feel better.”
But as Weiss’s intel indicated, Rosario seems to feel even better in October, even with the fresh chill. The 30-year-old’s first-ever postseason at-bat was at Yankee Stadium in the 2017 American League wild-card game. He homered. He owns a 1.059 OPS in 16 career postseason games — or a higher OPS than regular season leader Bryce Harper’s 1.044.
“I think I sort of define myself and identify myself with these big moments. I think that’s how I characterize it when someone just comes up in these clutch moments,” Rosario said through an interpreter. “And I think that’s just sort of — my focus is not to try to do too much and just do what I can.”
Rosario wasn’t acquired to do all this. He was one of four outfielders Anthopoulos acquired this past summer in the hopes that the combination would help make up enough of Acuña’s production to keep the Braves afloat. At times, he was even the odd man out of that quartet because Adam Duvall and Joc Pederson provided plenty of punch against right-handed pitching and Jorge Soler was offering pop out of the leadoff spot.
But when Soler tested positive for the coronavirus before the NLCS began, Manager Brian Snitker slid Rosario into the leadoff spot, hoping he would take.
“It was either he or Joc, and I kind of thought I would rather have Joc, at the time, just hitting down in the middle with the opportunity to drive runs in,” Snitker said earlier this series. Pederson did that and has come up with multiple big hits with men on base from his spot in the middle of the order.
Rosario did more. He has emerged as a postseason star who seems likely to be playing his way into a free agent deal that would have seemed unthinkable just months ago.
Minnesota non-tendered him this winter rather than pay him an estimated $12 million in arbitration. Cleveland traded him in what was basically a salary dump midseason. And yet he is on the verge of carrying the Braves to their first World Series in more than 20 years.
“I came here, and I wanted to show my name, showcase my talents and prove to the people the kind of ballplayer that I am,” Rosario said through an interpreter. “I feel like I had success in Minnesota and I struggled a little bit in Cleveland, so when I came over here, I definitely wanted to make sure that I showcased my talents appropriately.”
