Meet Eric Garfield, Orioles fans' eyes and ears at minor league camp in Sarasota
Camp videos of Adley Rutschman and other top prospects from a Baltimore transplant in Sarasota are the only way to see any Orioles baseball this spring
Eric Garfield’s north star when it comes to posting videos and observations from Orioles minor league training camps, as he’s done for the last several years, is a simple one.
“If I was in Baltimore,” he said, “I’d want someone to do this very badly.”
This year, with minor league camp slowly ramping up before camp opens in full this week, his presence has been the only one providing a glimpse at what the Orioles’ blossoming core of prospects is up to.
He wears a multitude of hats: his Twitter bio lists scouting and player development work with Fusion Sports Agency, writing roles at Prospects1500, Eutaw Street Report, and Overtime Heroics Baseball, and a podcast: the Florida Prospect Report.
Most relevant to Orioles fans who are looking for a glimpse at the rebuilding project without the prospect of spring training games on the major league side starting very soon are the videos that Garfield is posting of top prospects like Adley Rutschman, Grayson Rodriguez, Gunnar Henderson, Heston Kjerstad, Coby Mayo, and so many more.
Garfield, 43, has been in Sarasota for nearly a decade. His roots, however, provided the basis for his new calling. A Reisterstown native who grew up in a family that had Orioles season tickets and went to the University of Maryland, he brought a taste of home down there when he opened the Baltimore Snowball Factory in downtown Sarasota in 2014.
He was expanding into trucks – first by helping fight decades-old legislation that banned them in the city – and was getting into the popular desert fad of cookie dough before a bike accident derailed his plans.
Garfield had a different schedule and a lot of free time as he recovered, so he started walking a lot. One day, less than a mile from his house, he walked past Ed Smith Stadium and saw a rookie-level game. It was free and open to the public, and he kept coming back. The 2019 edition of that team, starring Henderson, won its division and was dominant in the Gulf Coast League, though their championship bid was cut short by a hurricane threat.
Garfield went to as many games as possible that summer and found a niche writing about what he saw – with the only people following diehards on Orioles message boards and players’ families. On one occasion, a player’s dad who read him all the time said hello, via his son on the field.
“I wasn’t trying to do it for profit or anything like that,” he said. “I was just trying to give fans like me information, because they couldn’t be in the location where I was, so taking advantage of Sarasota.”
The following year, he was writing for the message board Orioles Hangout at spring training in 2020. He remembers one day that March when a fence was put up to keep him at a distance from the minor league camp proceedings in the early days of COVID-19, then the next day camp was closed and everyone was sent home.
The advantage of his proximity would have to wait until the fall of 2020, when instructional camp began, but he continued to keep eyes on the Orioles’ youngest prospects all through 2021. That meant seeing Mayo’s breakout in-person in the Florida Complex League in the summer, and in the fall and into the spring, being one of the few to get eyes on the 2020 No. 2 overall pick Kjerstad as he builds back up from missing a year with myocarditis.
It’s not easy to do, either. When camp is closed to the public, as most of these camps have been, Garfield is reduced to watching from the fringes – and shooting video from wherever he can get a good vantage point.
“There are places you can get situated in the outfield for some fields, down the right-field line for others,” he said. “A lot of places, I stand on something so I can be a little bit taller. But I’m getting center field views of batting practice for Adley Rutschman. It’s kind of a minimal sacrifice. Our fans don’t get to see what these guys are doing day-to-day.”
He tries to get to the field as often as he can, and his mindset while he’s there is a simple one. Garfield said he likes to absorb as much as he can, with his focus honing eventually on “who’s noticeably doing something better at the end.”
But now three seasons into his observations, he’s also noting long-term growth, with players like Darell Hernaiz starting to round into the type of talent he believed he’d be when he was a young high school draftee in 2019. Given he’s often limited to the outfield, there’s also plenty of outfield observation. He noted John Rhodes’ body control when he gets near a wall, and Hudson Haskin’s posture in tracking fly balls.
“For baseball nerds like us, this is the only baseball action they can have right now – and there’s a lot of positive things going on within the Orioles,” Garfield said. “We don’t even have the full scope of it. Looking through my camera, I can’t see everything. Even if we see a lot, I can’t post everything, so I try to determine what’s the best of the best and what’s going to make fans the happiest in seeing.”
There will be plenty more to see when camp opens fully this week. He’s not sure who will be at what field, or how close he’ll be able to get. But he knows, through at least this early minicamp, what has gotten the most attention.
“I think how everybody else thinks, so, just seeing Kjerstad and how really good at every part of baseball that he is, it has really been the most positive thing that I’ve been able to show,” Garfield said. “If there’s only one thing I could show, it would be that he really appears to be a very foundational piece to where the Orioles are going.”
The uncertainty in the major league lockout means Garfield’s videos might be all anyone sees for a while. Minor league camp will be open to the media beginning Tuesday at Twin Lakes Park, with games beginning March 16 and running into the first weekend in April, but it’s unclear who might take advantage of that. It’s unclear whether fans will be allowed in. Garfield knows, however, that there’s interest in what’s happening there back home no matter what.
“It’s been very positive,” he said. “Fans are very happy they can watch the players improve.”