In Game 2 of the ALCS, Evan Carter did something unusual by his standards: He did not record a hit.
But fear not for the rookie. The 21-year-old Rangers phenom still drew a walk, meaning that he’s gotten on base in each of his seven career playoff games, just one piece of a slew of trivia the left fielder has built for himself this October. Every game, it seems, comes with its own fun fact. After Game 1 of the ALCS, you could note that Carter had reached base 14 times in the playoffs, tied for the most of any rookie in his first six postseason games. After the ALDS, you could note that he was the youngest player ever to reach base 13 times in any five-game playoff stretch.
Pair his incredible plate discipline with heads-up baserunning and sharp defense, including an outstanding, potentially game-saving catch, and you have one of the most electric players of the postseason so far. And that’s before you consider his journey here.
Carter was called up to the big leagues scarcely a month ago. (He debuted Sept. 8.) He saw his 100th major league plate appearance just this week. But he’s shone all the same. This Rangers’ squad was built to contend on the backs of big, splashy free agents. And then you have Carter, a homegrown rookie and the youngest player on the roster by years, who was a relative unknown when he was drafted yet now looks like a star.
“The guy’s just blossoming in front of our eyes,” says Rangers bench coach and offensive coordinator Donnie Ecker. “Every player goes through some type of adversity, but we’re kind of just waiting for that moment, because it hasn’t really come yet for Evan.”
Indeed: He’s made everything look easy. Rangers manager Bruce Bochy said that Carter is among the most gifted young players he has worked with in his long career.
“He’s right up there,” Bochy said during the ALDS. “At his age, to do the things that he’s doing, the discipline and the calmness. … He’s always smiling. He plays the game you want your guys to play. That’s [to] have fun. Play with joy. He has that innocence about him you love. Doesn’t matter where you play him or where you hit him, he just loves playing baseball.”
For all Bochy’s talk of Carter’s joy, he was right to preface it with his discipline and calm. The 21-year-old’s signature skill is his patience at the plate. No one in MLB this year had a chase rate below 10%. The league average was nearly 30%. Even for the most experienced players, it’s very, very hard not to swing at pitches outside the zone. Unless you’re Carter, that is, who was seeing major league stuff for the first time yet still maintained a best-in-baseball chase rate of 9%.
“He comes up and faces these guys and he’s like, ‘Man, this is the best pitching I’ve ever seen,’” Ecker says. “But you’re still not really seeing him chase.”
Vision and patience have always been hallmarks of his game. But it’s only natural for those to slip a bit as players move up to the big leagues. (Especially players drafted out of high school, like Carter, who moved through the system so quickly that he had limited experience at the highest levels of the minors.) Yet despite his lack of previous exposure to elite stuff, Carter hasn’t just maintained his discipline in MLB, he’s found ways to improve it. He posted a .413 OBP in his 23 regular-season games at the big league level. And so far in the postseason? He's gotten on base in more than half of his plate appearances: Carter has a .536 playoff OBP.
“What we normally see, as guys scale up to the big leagues, that tends to dissipate a bit,” Ecker says. “But what we’re seeing with Evan is that not only has his plate discipline gotten better, but he’s actually done it while still being more aggressive.”
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Texas has encouraged Carter to be more aggressive on the first pitch and in hitters’ counts. (Ecker notes with pride that the Rangers’ first run in the ALDS was courtesy of a Carter double that came on an 0–0 pitch.) They’ve suggested a few other tweaks: Carter now swings a stick bat in the on deck circle, rather than using a donut, and the organization has had him focus especially on high velocity at the top of the zone and on low sliders. But for the most part, they say, this is simply the player they always knew he could be.
“From the moment that he walked on the field in instructional league, it was pretty evident that he was very mature, very advanced, very confident in what he wanted to do and how he wanted to accomplish it,” says Ross Fenstermaker, the Rangers’ vice president and assistant general manager for player development and international scouting.
Carter was added to the roster to bolster the outfield after Adolis García injured his knee in early September. But Fenstermaker says the conversations about promoting Carter had been ongoing for “several weeks” before the García injury. They knew he was still green. (Carter turned 21 only in August and is younger than all but one player who appeared on a big league roster on Opening Day.) But the organization believed he was ready for a new challenge. They had long thought he was special—Texas had picked Carter high in the 2020 draft, even though he didn’t appear on mainstream draft lists, period, let alone as a prospective early pick. But the Rangers believed they had found a true gem. Carter may not have attracted much notice in high school. But those who did notice him believed he was the real deal.
His high school coach, Ryan Presnell, recalls the first swing he saw Carter take in batting practice as a freshman.
“I remember looking at my assistant coaches and saying, ‘That kid will never play JV,’” Presnell says. “It was special from the beginning. That’s for sure.”
Carter is from Elizabethton, Tenn., in the northeastern corner of the state, population 14,546. That’s not exactly a traditional target for big league scouts: The rural county has only one high school and had never produced an MLB player before Carter. (It had not produced even a minor leaguer since 1975.) This alone meant it would have been easy for Carter to fly under the radar. But there were other factors, too. He did not attend many high-profile showcases. Those were expensive and time-consuming, Carter figured, and he believed he had his future set without them. The valedictorian of his high school class, he took education seriously, and he’d committed to Duke. He hoped that pro baseball would be in his future. But he knew that was no guarantee, no matter how hard he worked, and so he had a backup plan. He wanted to be a dental specialist—an endodontist performing root canals—and a Duke education seemed like the best way to get there.
“He’s supposed to be a junior at Duke now, right?” Presnell says. “For all intents and purposes for a very long time, we really thought that’s what was going to happen, and that’s where he was supposed to be. But here he is. … The Rangers identified what everybody that was in his close circle knew. And that’s that this guy is a major leaguer hiding out in a high school uniform.”
Texas staffer Danny Clark had known Carter’s father growing up and gave his name to the team’s area scout for Georgia and Tennessee. The Rangers liked what they saw. But they knew that other clubs probably would, too, if they only got a chance to see him. A few other teams knew of him and had made contact. It seemed like Carter’s senior season, in the spring of 2020, might attract more attention.
But the pandemic canceled Carter’s season after just a few games. There was no more in-person scouting to be done before the draft in 2020. The Rangers’ early work on Carter meant they were primed to grab him early.
“It was just really old-school scouting,” Fenstermaker says with a grin. “We had a limited look at him because of COVID and because he wasn’t all over the national scene in terms of those big tournaments. … But identifying those talents and being able to see on the field the skills he might ultimately possess, we were blessed to select him where we did.”
When the Rangers took Carter in the second round, then, it was a surprise to just about everyone outside the organization. MLB Network’s Greg Amsinger noted on air that Carter had not been part of MLB Pipeline’s top 200 or Baseball America’s list of top 500 potential draftees. Others on the broadcast said they had never heard of him.
Yet by this year, he’d become the Rangers’ top prospect. He flew through Double A and Triple A. (He logged just eight games at the latter.) And he’s now in the big leagues in October—disciplined as ever.
“He’s an old soul in a 21-year-old body,” Fenstermaker says. “He’s just a tremendous kid. I love him and I’m so happy for him and his family.”
