ESPN MLB insider Author of “The Arm: Inside the Billion-Dollar Mystery of the Most Valuable Commodity in Sports”
JAC CAGLIANONE WAS a freshman in high school in 2018 when Shohei Ohtani arrived in Major League Baseball. Like so many, the 15-year-old Caglianone marveled at Ohtani’s ability to hit tape-measure home runs on the same day he threw 100 mph fastballs. His fascination went beyond just gawking, though. Caglianone aspired to be Ohtani.
“I just thought it was the coolest thing ever,” he said. “I’d always done both, and it was something that I planned to do in college, and seeing the way his game grew and keeping a pretty close eye on him and studying all that he did — that was exactly who I wanted to be.”
Caglianone is 20 now and primed to make his Men’s College World Series debut (Friday, 7 p.m. ET on ESPN) as a sophomore for a strong Florida Gators team. In a bracket loaded with future MLB stars, Caglianone might be the most fascinating. Of all the players in the past five years to attempt playing both ways, to embrace the mental and physical burden — to have the gall to think he can imitate Ohtani — none has done it as well as Caglianone in 2023.
In his first college season as a two-way player — Caglianone didn’t pitch his freshman year as he recovered from Tommy John surgery — the 6-foot-5, 245-pound left-hander led the country with 31 home runs as a first baseman and regularly hit 99 mph with a fastball that carried him to a 3.78 ERA over 16 starts. While college baseball is populated with far more two-way players than pro ball, almost all of them leave behind such aspirations eventually, focusing on whichever position will best set them up to play professional baseball. Paul Skenes, the best two-way player in the country last year, ditched hitting after he transferred to LSU, where he flourished into the best pitcher in college baseball and a certain top-5 pick.
Caglianone has no such plans. Being the next great two-way player, he said, is his future.
“I don’t really see me really stopping unless a team flat-out tells me down the road that I’ve got to pick one or makes the decision for me,” Caglianone said. “I have no interest in stopping whatsoever.”
Which means the player who gladly wears the nickname “Jactani” — given to him by Nick De La Torre, a writer who covers Florida — will introduce himself to the country on college baseball’s grandest stage this weekend. And if he lives up to expectations, it will undoubtedly force teams to continue asking themselves the same question they’ve been asking all year.
Can he do it in the big leagues?
FOR THE PAST three years, Ohtani has been so much better than everyone else in MLB that it’s easy to take him for granted. In almost every way, Ohtani is an accident, a glitch in the matrix, a confluence of physical qualities and skills that simply don’t overlap in human beings who choose to play baseball.
The size, the power, the athleticism — it is abundant in Caglianone, too. Caglianone (pronounced CAG-lee-own) grew up in Tampa and blossomed at Plant High, the baseball factory that also produced Pete Alonso and Kyle Tucker. His father, Jeff — Jac is actually an acronym for Jeffrey Alan Caglianone, his given name — played baseball at Stetson and encouraged the young Caglianone to take advantage of all his skills.
Florida recruited him and planned to use him as a pitcher only, but that plan changed after Caglianone blew out his elbow a week before arriving on campus in August 2021. To stay busy during the yearlong rehab, he lifted weights and swung the bat. The loud cracks did not take long to notice. Florida coach Kevin O’Sullivan soon thereafter asked if Caglianone might consider burning his planned redshirt season so he could join the lineup. He agreed, homered in his third college at-bat, whacked seven total over 115 plate appearances and looked the part of a promising hitter. Caglianone, said Jarrett Schweim, the athletic trainer for Florida’s baseball team, was “a 6-5, 235-pound freshman who can lift a house. Cags is a little bit of an anomaly when it comes to college baseball bodies and physical abilities.”
Schweim knows outliers well. When he was the athletic trainer for the UCF basketball program, a 7-foot-6 center named Tacko Fall was playing for the team. Schweim wanted to know how to keep him healthy, and he knew he needed help. He placed a phone call to the training staff of the Houston Rockets, hoping that the Rockets’ experience with Yao Ming, their 7-foot-6 Hall of Fame center, might offer some insight. (Don’t skimp on orthotics, he was told.)
“The biggest thing is managing a body,” Schweim said, and that sounds so much simpler than it is. In order to play both ways, Caglianone needs to do nearly twice the work of his teammates. The games are actually the easy part. It’s the work in between, the maintenance, the discipline — the recognition that health is more important than performance because performance can’t exist without health.
As Caglianone began his return to pitching this offseason, it became clear that this would be no ordinary rehab. Planning a return from Tommy John surgery is tough enough. Doing so for a pitcher who also plays first base full time is madness. So Schweim and Florida’s strength and conditioning coaches vowed to be even more hands-on — literally and figuratively.
They monitor Caglianone’s sleep patterns through a Whoop band and ensure he gets at least 5,000 calories a day to stave off the weight loss that normally comes during a season. They did almost daily maintenance on his body: massages Monday, acupuncture or dry needling Tuesdays, soft tissue work on his fascia throughout the week. They stayed on him about keeping his left arm hearty with lower-weight exercises that strengthened the flexor mass (forearm), rotator cuff (shoulder) and everywhere in between.
By the time the first game of a series rolled around Friday, Caglianone was ready to play first base. He would arrive at the stadium well over three hours before first pitch and climb into Normatec boots, which almost go from foot to hip and use compression to get blood circulating. As long as he felt good, the plan was the same Saturday, though if ever the staff felt Caglianone needed a breather, he could take it easy on drills and throws.
When Sunday rolled around, Caglianone would show up to the stadium around 7:30 a.m. for the noon game, hop into the hot tub for 10 or 15 minutes, do his arm exercises afterward, warm up and try to match his prodigious offensive output on the mound. Perhaps no other team in the country would use a player with Caglianone’s stuff as their No. 3 starter, but having right-handers Hurston Waldrep and Brandon Sproat — the former an expected top-15 pick, the latter projected to go in the first round — is a luxury that affords it.
Next season, Caglianone figures the script will be flipped. Instead of playing nine innings at first Friday and Saturday before starting Sunday afternoon, he’ll be in line to be Florida’s Friday night starter and will have to manage any lethargy in the field Saturday and Sunday. It doesn’t concern him.
“The biggest thing that goes overlooked is the recovery,” he said. “I’m not going to sit here and say that I don’t feel fatigued at all. But I feel I could do this all year, honestly.”
OTHERS HAVE TRIED this audacious act and run into the harsh reality that dominance in college does not necessarily translate. Most of the great ones — from John Olerud, after whom the college award for the best two-way player is named, to Nick Markakis, who was a two-way juco legend — don’t bother trying. Like Caglianone, Kent State’s John Van Benschoten hit 31 home runs to lead the country in 2001. The Pittsburgh Pirates preferred his right arm to his bat. Van Benschoten’s career ended with the single worst ERA of the 5,544 pitchers with at least 90 major league innings (9.20) — and one home run hit.
The closest to Ohtani that the college system has produced is Brendan McKay, the fourth overall pick in the 2017 draft out of Louisville. He debuted for the Tampa Bay Rays in 2019 with 49 forgettable innings, homered once in 11 plate appearances, and has been hurt pretty much ever since. There are pitchers who become hitters (Rick Ankiel and Adam Loewen) and hitters who become pitchers (Kenley Jansen and Sean Doolittle, a two-way star at Virginia) and they are rightly celebrated for their skills, because it takes most players a lifetime of focus, of uber-specialization, to even sniff the big leagues. To be that good at both — even if not simultaneously — is an incredible feat.
For all the sanguine appraisals that Ohtani’s success would pave the way for an influx of two-way players into MLB, multiple executives now say it might actually have the opposite effect. Said one longtime general manager: “If you have to be the most talented player in the world to do it, then it’s probably too hard for anyone else to do.” Only players with off-the-charts tools on both sides are likely to even get the chance. San Francisco took left-hander Reggie Crawford — he of the 100 mph fastball and batted ball — with the 30th pick in last year’s draft.
Caglianone’s aspirations are greater. If he can refine his control — “I need to cut down on walks,” he said, acknowledging that 49 in 69 innings won’t play — perhaps more teams will regard him long term as someone who could start on the mound. In addition to the big fastball, he throws a slider that flashes as an above-average pitch and a work-in-progress changeup. Even though his batting numbers this season (.336/.402/.766 with 31 home runs and 84 RBIs) were enough to place him with Skenes and his LSU teammate Dylan Crews as the finalists for the Golden Spikes Award — the college baseball Heisman — scouts said Caglianone needs to tighten his swing decisions next year if he wants to join UNC’s Vance Honeycutt in the discussion for the No. 1 overall pick in the draft.
For all the chasing Caglianone might do, he hits the ball with the force of few in the world. His home runs regularly went more than 450 feet. His opposite-field shots rose with the majesty only truly elite power hitters produce. His peak batted-ball numbers — in the 118 mph range — put him in a cohort with the best sluggers in the world: Aaron Judge, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Giancarlo Stanton … and Ohtani. And even Ohtani doesn’t test his limits by playing in the field daily, something on which Caglianone prides himself.
“I always was a hitter who could pitch,” Caglianone said. “Then in high school, when the velo started ticking up, I became a pitcher who could hit. But now it’s shifted to which one’s going better for me at the moment.”
Florida hopes the answer to that question is: both. This week, O’Sullivan could turn to Caglianone in a fireman role, perhaps a preview of what an Ohtani-adjacent big league career could look like: everyday player in the field, high-velocity arm out of the bullpen. Or maybe the Gators stumble in their first game against a dangerous Virginia lineup, win their second game and turn to Caglianone to start their third to avoid elimination.
Whatever his role is, it will include hitting and pitching. The Jac Caglianone experience is coming to the Men’s College World Series, and it will serve as a reminder, to fans and all 30 front offices watching, that as cool as Ohtani is, Jactani is an excellent imitation.
ESPN baseball reporter. Covered the Washington Wizards from 2014 to 2016 and the Washington Nationals from 2016 to 2018 for The Washington Post before covering the Los Angeles Dodgers and MLB for the Los Angeles Times from 2018 to 2024.
NEW YORK — Giancarlo Stanton, one of the first known adopters of the torpedo bat, declined Tuesday to say whether he believes using it last season caused the tendon ailments in both elbows that forced him to begin this season on the injured list.
Last month, Stanton alluded to “bat adjustments” he made last season as a possible reason for the epicondylitis, commonly known as tennis elbow, he’s dealing with.
“You’re not going to get the story you’re looking for,” Stanton said. “So, if that’s what you guys want, that ain’t going to happen.”
Stanton said he will continue using the torpedo bat when he returns from injury. The 35-year-old New York Yankees slugger, who has undergone multiple rounds of platelet-rich plasma injections to treat his elbows, shared during spring training that season-ending surgery on both elbows was a possibility. But he has progressed enough to recently begin hitting off a Trajekt — a pitching robot that simulates any pitcher’s windup, arm angle and arsenal. However, he still wouldn’t define his return as “close.”
He said he will first have to go on a minor league rehab assignment at an unknown date for an unknown period. It won’t start in the next week, he added.
“This is very unique,” Stanton said. “I definitely haven’t missed a full spring before. So, it just depends on my timing, really, how fast I get to feel comfortable in the box versus live pitching.”
While the craze of the torpedo bat (also known as the bowling pin bat) has swept the baseball world since it was revealed Saturday — while the Yankees were blasting nine home runs against the Milwaukee Brewers — that a few members of the Yankees were using one, the modified bat already had quietly spread throughout the majors in 2024. Both Stanton and former Yankees catcher Jose Trevino, now with the Cincinnati Reds, were among players who used the bats last season after being introduced to the concept by Aaron Leanhardt, an MIT-educated physicist and former minor league hitting coordinator for the organization.
Stanton explained he has changed bats before. He said he has usually adjusted the length. Sometimes, he opts for lighter bats at the end of the long season. In the past, when knuckleballers were more common in the majors, he’d opt for heavier lumber.
Last year, he said he simply chose his usual bat but with a different barrel after experimenting with a few models.
“I mean, it makes a lot of sense,” Stanton said. “But it’s, like, why hasn’t anyone thought of it in 100-plus years? So, it’s explained simply and then you try it and as long as it’s comfortable in your hands [it works]. We’re creatures of habit, so the bat’s got to feel kind of like a glove or an extension of your arm.”
Stanton went on to lead the majors with an average bat velocity of 81.2 mph — nearly 3 mph ahead of the competition. He had a rebound, but not spectacular, regular season in which he batted .233 with 27 home runs and a .773 OPS before clubbing seven home runs in 14 playoff games.
“It’s not like [it was] unreal all of a sudden for me,” Stanton said.
Yankees manager Aaron Boone described the torpedo bats “as the evolution of equipment” comparable to getting fitted for new golf clubs. He said the organization is not pushing players to use them and insisted the science is more complicated than just picking a bat with a different barrel.
“There’s a lot more to it than, ‘I’ll take the torpedo bat on the shelf over there — 34 [inches], 32 [ounces],'” Boone said. “Our guys are way more invested in it than that. And really personalized, really work with our players in creating this stuff. But it’s equipment evolving.”
As players around the majors order torpedo bats in droves after the Yankees’ barrage over the weekend — they clubbed a record-tying 13 homers in two games against the Brewers — Boone alluded to the notion that, though everyone is aware of the concept, not every organization can optimize its usage.
“You’re trying to just, where you can on the margins, move the needle a little bit,” Boone said. “And that’s really all you’re going to do. I don’t think this is some revelation to where we’re going to be; it’s not related to the weekend that we had, for example. Like, I don’t think it’s that. Maybe in some cases, for some players, it may help them incrementally. That’s how I view it.”
Eovaldi struck out eight and walked none in his fifth career complete game. The right-hander threw 99 pitches, 70 for strikes.
It was Eovaldi’s first shutout since April 29, 2023, against the Yankees and just the third of his career. He became the first Ranger with multiple career shutouts with no walks in the past 30 seasons, according to ESPN Research.
“I feel like, by the fifth or sixth inning, that my pitch count was down, and I feel like we had a really good game plan going into it,” Eovaldi said in his on-field postgame interview on Victory+. “I thought [Texas catcher Kyle Higashioka] called a great game. We were on the same page throughout the entire game.”
In the first inning, Wyatt Langford homered for Texas against Carson Spiers (0-1), and that proved to be all Eovaldi needed. A day after Cincinnati collected 14 hits in a 14-3 victory in the series opener, Eovaldi (1-0) silenced the lineup.
“We needed it, these bats are still quiet,” Texas manager Bruce Bochy said of his starter’s outing. “It took a well-pitched game like that. What a game.”
The Reds put the tying run on second with two out in the ninth, but Eovaldi retired Elly De La Cruz on a grounder to first.
“He’s as good as I have seen as far as a pitcher performing under pressure,” Bochy said. “He is so good. He’s a pro out there. He wants to be out there.”
Eovaldi retired his first 12 batters, including five straight strikeouts during one stretch. Gavin Lux hit a leadoff single in the fifth for Cincinnati’s first baserunner.
“I think it was the first-pitch strikes,” Eovaldi said, when asked what made him so efficient. “But also, the off-speed pitches. I was able to get some quick outs, and I didn’t really have many deep counts. … And not walking guys helps.”
Spiers gave up three hits in six innings in his season debut. He struck out five and walked two for the Reds, who fell to 2-3.
The Rangers moved to 4-2, and Langford has been at the center of it all. He now has two home runs in six games to begin the season. In 2024, it took him until the 29th game of the season to homer for the first time. Langford hit 16 homers in 134 games last season during his rookie year.
Eli Lederman covers college football and recruiting for ESPN.com. He joined ESPN in 2024 after covering the University of Oklahoma for Sellout Crowd and the Tulsa World.
USC secured the commitment of former Oregon defensive tackle pledge Tomuhini Topui on Tuesday, a source told ESPN, handing the Trojans their latest recruiting victory in the 2026 cycle over the Big Ten rival Ducks.
Topui, ESPN’s No. 3 defensive tackle and No. 72 overall recruit in the 2026 class, spent five and half months committed to Oregon before pulling his pledge from the program on March 27. Topui attended USC’s initial spring camp practice that afternoon, and seven days later the 6-foot-4, 295-pound defender gave the Trojans his pledge to become the sixth ESPN 300 defender in the program’s 2026 class.
Topui’s commitment gives USC its 10th ESPN 300 pledge this cycle — more than any other program nationally — and pulls a fourth top-100 recruit into the impressive defensive class the Trojans are building this spring. Alongside Topui, USC’s defensive class includes in-state cornerbacks R.J. Sermons (No. 26 in ESPN Junior 300) and Brandon Lockhart (No. 77); four-star outside linebacker Xavier Griffin (No. 27) out of Gainesville, Georgia; and two more defensive line pledges between Jaimeon Winfield (No. 143) and Simote Katoanga (No. 174).
The Trojans are working to reestablish their local recruiting presence in the 2026 class under newly hired general manager Chad Bowden. Topui not only gives the Trojans their 11th in-state commit in the cycle, but his pledge represents a potentially important step toward revamping the program’s pipeline to perennial local powerhouse Mater Dei High School, too.
Topui will enter his senior season this fall at Mater Dei, the program that has produced a long line of USC stars including Matt Leinart, Matt Barkley and Amon-Ra St. Brown. However, if Topui ultimately signs with the program later this year, he’ll mark the Trojans’ first Mater Dei signee since the 2022 cycle, when USC pulled three top-300 prospects — Domani Jackson, Raleek Brown and C.J. Williams — from the high school program based in Santa Ana, California.
Topui’s flip to the Trojans also adds another layer to a recruiting rivalry rekindling between USC and Oregon in the 2026 cycle.
Tuesday’s commitment comes less than two months after coach Lincoln Riley and the Trojans flipped four-star Oregon quarterback pledge Jonas Williams, ESPN’s No. 2 dual-threat quarterback in 2026. USC is expected to continue targeting several Ducks commits this spring, including four-star offensive tackle Kodi Greene, another top prospect out of Mater Dei.