Orioles top prospect Jackson Holliday 'learning how to handle failure' and making adjustments to get back to the bigs
It’s not normal to hear “Happy Holidays/The Holiday Season” by Andy Williams echo over a ballpark in May. That’s exactly what fans heard earlier this week as Orioles’ top prospect Jackson Holliday walked up to the plate in his first ever at-bat at Polar Park.
“Pretty much every ballpark that has a sense of humor (does that),” Holliday smirked as he spoke with the WooSox media, including Beyond the Monster on Friday. “It’s fun.”
Holliday finished 0-for-4 in Tuesday’s game with three strikeouts and went 0-for-9 to open the series until he hammered a 422-foot, two-run homer off hard-throwing WooSox reliever Ryan Zeferjahn.
A humble and well-spoken Holliday was happy to break his hitless streak in the series with the home run. “That was nice,” he said. “I’ll try to do that again,” he laughed.
All kidding aside, Holliday is laser-focused on one goal, and that’s getting back to the big leagues and staying there. The top prospect is making minor offensive adjustments.
“Yeah, some just little adjustments. I didn't think I was too far off in the big leagues. Just a little thanks here and there. Just trying to get back to what I was doing during spring training. Because in spring training, I was really successful against a lot of really good pitching and a lot of really good big league arms. And just trying to simplify it.
I mean, everything kind of sped up on me a little bit once I got up to the big leagues. But just trying to relax and get back to what I was doing during the first spring training.”
Baseball adjustments aside, Holliday is learning how to deal with adversity at a young age in professional baseball.
“Yeah, I mean, obviously learning how to handle failure at an extremely high rate. I think I did a pretty good job of handling myself with everything that was going on. But yeah, the experience of going whatever I did and just learning from it, coming down here, and being able to just play baseball.
And I'm excited to be able to get back up there on police duty later and use that experience to help maybe kickstart a great rest of the year.”
The 20-year-old struck out 18 tomes and batted just .059 with an RBI and a .111 on-base percentage with his first cup of coffee in the majors.
“I felt really good in spring training, and going into the beginning of the year, and obviously had a little of a down stretch,” Holliday said. “So just trying to build back up a little bit and get my confidence up. I obviously had a good swing (Thursday's homer) and a few misses that were positive even though they were outs.
“Just trying to reframe that. It’s hard; baseball is really hard, and just being able to adjust fast and find the positives in each and every at-bat.”
