How Jac Caglianone found his love for baseball again after distressing 2025
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- Caglianone found his love for baseball again after a distressing 2025 season.
- He entered spring training as a confident Royals draftee and camp invitee.
- At 22, he was less than a year removed from college while joining the Royals' camp.
As Jac Caglianone last year was going through his first spring training with the Royals, he exuded a certain wide-eyed radiance. He smiled so readily it seemed to be his default look.
Never mind that he was just the third Royals draftee in 20 years to be invited to big-league camp in the spring after being selected. Or that he had just turned 22 and was less than a year removed from spending such mornings in an 8 a.m. class at the University of Florida.
Chatting in front of his locker one morning, he beamed over how comfortable he already felt and said it “feels like home.”
And when he considered his biggest challenge to that point, he paused and pondered the question for a few seconds.
“Hasn’t really been one,” he said, with innocence, not arrogance.
That even proved true in the weeks to come. Caglianone surged through Double-A Northwest Arkansas and a somewhat token stop at Triple-A Omaha, making himself irresistible to the parent club.
The Royals had wished not to submit to the enticing spell being cast by their 2024 top draft pick, knowing that calling him up in a time of need could add another dimension of pressure.
In more ways than one, though, they couldn’t help themselves because of the void in their offense and a belief that there wasn’t much more for Caglianone to achieve in the minor leagues.
But then came … the challenge — perhaps the biggest of his young life. The would-be phenom struggled much of the rest of last season, hitting .157 with seven home runs and 18 RBIs in 62 games.
Ultimately, one way or another, it was too much change too fast for Caglianone, a pitcher and first baseman in college who also was learning to play in the outfield for the first time since high school.
By the end of the season, that seemingly perpetual smile of his was seldom-seen — at least publicly or around the media.
At times, even the typically vibrant body language of his 6-foot-5, 250-pound frame had become more of a droop — as if he were lugging an unbearable weight.
To some degree he was.
Just ask Caglianone.
In an interview with The Star last week, he said he had started counting down the days to the end of the 2025 season. When asked if he had come to feel off-balance much of the time, he indicated this was true.
“No need to lie,” he said. “I just was quick to anger and got frustrated quick.”
He became so lost, he said with a laugh, that he was reluctant even to return to a sports psychologist, Cory Shaffer, with whom he’d worked in the past.
“It was such a whirlwind,” he said. “I was like, ‘Dude I don’t even know where to start.’”
He knew where to start in the offseason, though, as he resolved never to feel that way again.
And through Shaffer and later in conjunction with the Royals mental performance staff, Caglianone clearly has reset early this season.
While he had yet to knock in a run or homer through Thursday night, he had three multi-hit games in his first six starts after managing just five in 59 starts last season. Through 13 games, he was hitting .237 but his on-base percentage had improved to .333 from .237 last year.
Perhaps more promising, he’s demonstrating much more patience and selectivity at the plate: Through 10 games, per the Sox Savant analytics account, Caglianone had the second-most substantial cutdown of his chase rate in Major League Baseball.
Keep that and his confidence up, Royals general manager J.J. Picollo said, and the power surge is inevitable.
Also inevitable: Caglianone will go through funks, even as he’s on an apparent path toward realizing his potential. In fact, he was just 1-of-15 over the last four games entering the Royals’ return Thursday to Kauffman Stadium for a four-game series against the Chicago White Sox.
But whether he’s prospering or sputtering, Caglianone believes he is girded in an entirely new way now. Both through the experience of last season and with more tools to help him keep his bearings.
“I kind of view (last season) now as a big blessing, because you know how to navigate it,” he said. “You know what it feels like. And I feel like mentally I have these compartments in my brain where I can kind of snap out of it quicker now.”
A variable that will be vital.
Maybe even defining.
“There’s no such thing as being hot at the plate for 162 games,” he said. “You’re going to struggle at some point throughout the year, and what separates good from average is how quickly you can get out of it.”
A lot of things converged to make him feel stuck a year ago.
No matter how much the Royals told him he didn’t need to be anything but himself, no doubt he felt something more when he joined the team for a series that started June 3 in St. Louis.
Sure, the Royals were 31-29 at the time. But they had scored three runs or fewer 39 times and were eight games out of first place.
The perception, largely by fans and from some media outlets, teammate Vinnie Pasquantino recalled, was along the lines of, “‘He’s going to save the team, he’s going to do this, he’s going to do that.’”
As mature as Caglianone might have been, Pasquantino added, “we live in a day and age where you can’t hide from it …. You can’t not see stuff like that.”
While he had some fine moments early, they became fewer and farther between. In that loop, Caglianone’s struggles compounded themselves. And he seemed to spiral.
So the guy who felt so at home in spring training and in Class AA ball with Northwest Arkansas at times felt out of place. And he absorbed the echoes at home.
When he roomed with teammate Carter Jensen in Arkansas and Nebraska, Caglianone said last July, they had a daily habit of reflecting on their games and how they were feeling while watching movies or playing video games.
Here, though, Caglianone was living by himself for the first time in his life. And when he was speaking last July about the contrast, he said when he got home after Royals games, he mostly just spent his time … thinking.
So by the time Jensen was called up in September, he could see how Caglianone was struggling with his confidence. He’d try to remind Caglianone to believe in himself, that he’s one of the best baseball players he’d ever seen and that everybody goes through tough times.
The difference in Caglianone’s demeanor and game from then to now, Jensen said, has been amazing to see.
“It looks like he’s been in the big leagues for years now,” said Jensen, whose locker in Kansas City is next to Caglianone’s.
Part of that is simply because he’s been successfully working to stay in the moment.
His approach now, he said, is to stay on the attack for an at-bat and tell himself “as soon it’s over, it’s over.”
“Just kind of moving on,” he said. “Take away what you can take away from it, but there’s no reason to harp on it.
“I think your mental health dictates your reality.”
As for while he’s actually at the plate, he said, he’s learned fresh techniques — such as focusing on his breathing, including when he steps out of the box.
“One of the biggest keys that we talk about is that your breath is the thing that can bring you back to reality in the present moment,” he said. “You can’t think about the breath you’re going to take, you can’t think about the breaths you have taken. If you focus on that (next) breath, you’ll get kind of locked back in.”
Something else helped unlock Caglianone, too: playing in the World Baseball Classic for Team Italy, for which Pasquantino was one of his teammates.
Caglianone lit up at the mention of the WBC, especially as he described an atmosphere in which he couldn’t hear himself say the word “wow” in the din of the game.
“Really just kind of found that love for the game again, especially with the WBC; that was huge,” he said. “And being around the same group of guys (in Kansas City) from the beginning of the year rather than just being inserted in the middle of the year, definitely feel like I have more of a place now.”
“So it’s a lot more comfortable this year, this time around. That’s been like the biggest thing, to be honest with you.”
To the point it feels like home.
Something that’s been evident in his aura.
Something Picollo can see in everything from how he walks to the plate to his at-bats themselves.
Something Caglianone believes will help him break through the challenges he never really faced until he got here.
This story was originally published April 10, 2026 at 5:30 AM with the headline "How Jac Caglianone found his love for baseball again after distressing 2025."