Welcome to Sliders, a weekly in-season MLB column that focuses on both the timely and timeless elements of the game.The 27th round of the 2018 draft went about as expected. Half of the players came from California, Texas, Florida or North Carolina. One of them came from New England. All of them have failed to reach the majors except the pride of Merrimack, N.H,, a born hitter who has also turned out as expected.“I never had a doubt in my mind,” Mickey Gasper said last month, in the home clubhouse at Fenway Park. “As soon as I picked up a bat, I always wanted to be a baseball player. I just never had plan B. Never thought, ‘This would be a better career choice for me than baseball.’”Gasper has been a switch-hitting, late-summer force for the Boston Red Sox, with a .400 average and six home runs in the last two weeks of August. On Tuesday, when the calendar flipped to September, Gasper homered again.
Mickey. It was always Mickey. pic.twitter.com/IpnLKSlXsW
— Red Sox (@RedSox) September 1, 2026With a 1.671 OPS, Gasper’s August was among the hottest months on record. It’s a generous threshold, but with a minimum of 30 plate appearances, only Ted Williams (September 1957), Barry Bonds (August 2003, April 2004) and Carlos Peña (August 2005) have ever had a better OPS in a calendar month.That’s folk-hero stuff, made even richer by Boston’s decision to option Gasper to the minors last Sunday when two players came off the injured list. The Red Sox lost by 15 runs that day at Yankee Stadium, brought Gasper right back when Willson Contreras strained his hamstring, and he homered in his at-bat on Monday.“There’s certain things you’re drawn to as a scout, and one is this common thread of makeup, and the desire to be at the park and put the work in and just never give up,” said Matt Hyde, the scout who signed Gasper. “Even getting sent back down to Worcester and then being brought back up and hitting another home run, it’s like, ‘Yeah, that’s no surprise.’”Gasper’s story would be too tidy if Hyde had been a Boston scout and Gasper had grown up dreaming of the Red Sox. In fact, Hyde scouts for the New York Yankees, who happened to be Gasper’s favorite team.Gasper still carries the Yankees to the plate with him in a sticker on the knob of his bat. It’s a photo of him as a boy, wearing a Yankees cap, with his arm draped around his dad. Gasper’s father, also named Mickey, had grown up rooting for the Yankees in New Jersey, so Gasper liked them, too.Before a recent game in the Bronx, Gasper showed off a bat knob featuring a childhood photo of himself and his father in Yankees gear. (Tyler Kepner / The Athletic)The Yankees signed Gasper out of Bryant University in Smithfield, R.I., but lost him to the Red Sox in the 2023 Rule 5 draft. Gasper was 28 then and had played only 22 games above Double A, hitting .191. He went 0-for-18 for the Red Sox in 2024.They traded him after that season to the Minnesota Twins. The Washington Nationals claimed Gasper on waivers this January, and two weeks later, he was claimed by the Red Sox.It’s been a whirlwind, but big-league journeys rarely start in New Hampshire. Only two current major leaguers, Gasper and Detroit Tigers outfielder Ben Malgeri, were born and went to high school in the Granite State.For Hyde, Gasper had the same kind of toughness he saw in Ben Rice and Cam Schlittler, who blossomed into All-Stars for the Yankees this season, and in Anthony Volpe, who spent three and a half seasons as the starting shortstop.While Volpe was a first-rounder from a New Jersey high school, Rice and Schlittler were later-round college picks like Gasper. (Rice was a 12th-round pick from Dartmouth College in 2021, Schlittler a seventh-round pick from Northeastern University in 2022.) The game consumed them, and Hyde noticed. He signed them all.“That’s like a whole tool in and of itself: being obsessed with the game and wanting to be there and be consistent,” Hyde said. “And Mickey certainly has that trait of just loving to be there, loving to put the work in. You saw it firsthand at practices in January, with snow on the ground in Smithfield, Rhode Island. Just knowing all the sacrifices he had to make to become a prospect, there was no doubt he was going to maximize his potential.”Hyde scouted Gasper both at Bryant and in the Cape Cod League, where Gasper won a championship with the Brewster Whitecaps. Gasper was clearly a good hitter – anyone could see that – but Hyde learned from the coach that he was also the team leader. It was the kind of insider tip that the Yankees’ longtime scouting director, Damon Oppenheimer, encourages his staff to find.“It’s so vitally important, because it would be easy to walk past a Mickey Gasper if you just went on watching him on video,” Hyde said. “But it’s something that Damon has really stressed to all of us, and it’s led to so much of the success: getting to know the players, getting to the other side of the fence.”Gasper was nearly 23 years old when the Yankees picked him, and he signed for just $5,000. Teams didn’t quite know where to play him, and they’re still not sure; Gasper has played designated hitter, catcher and first base for the Red Sox, and the Twins also tried him at second base and in left field.
