If Jo Adell hadn't been so precocious, his arrival as a big leaguer would seem right on time. The Angels made him the 10th overall pick of the 2017 MLB Draft and the breadth and voltage of his talent quickly made him one of the top prospects in the sport even before that collection of tools became something more comprehensive. There were extenuating circumstances, as there always are—the Angels' singular dedication to moving its top prospects through the minors at peak speed and the fragrant fug of low-intensity mediocrity sitting over everything they do, the disruption of baseball's Covid hiatus, and how hard baseball is at the highest level even for those with superhuman skills.
But the results were what they were. Adell debuted in the Majors as a 21-year-old in 2020 and mostly looked overmatched in the parts of the four subsequent seasons that he spent at the level. Over these big league stints of 38, 35, 88, and 17 games Adell was mostly unable to reach those tools and pretty comprehensively unable to use them; back at Triple-A, he still looked more or less like Jo Adell when healthy enough to do so, but in the Majors he mostly looked like he belonged back in Triple-A. What separates bad organizations from good ones is how quickly and how well they can straighten out the kinks that introduce themselves into seemingly sure-shot baseball careers like Adell's; the Angels, pardon the jargon, are not a good baseball organization, and so there was some reason to think that Adell might not figure it out there, or at all.
And, the Angels being the Angels, it was easy to miss it when Adell started to figure it out in 2024. His defense in right field improved enough to make him playable there, he got to his over-the-fence power in big-league games in a way that he previously hadn't, and the Angels were lousy enough and Adell healthy enough that he finally spent something like a full season in the bigs. It wasn't the outcome that anyone had in mind during his years as one of the game's best-regarded offensive prospects—"you wouldn't exactly feel awful batting him ninth," raved his entry in the 2025 Baseball Prospectus Annual—but very little about becoming a big leaguer is linear even for players as talented as Adell.
In 2025, Adell was better in some ways—37 homers, a 111 OPS+, his longest stretch of good health in years—and worse in others. A new round of swing changes really did seem to afford him more consistent access to his still-astonishing offensive tools, but Adell gave back a great deal of that hard-won value on defense, where he put up a ghastly -9.5 Defensive Runs Prevented in 149 games by Baseball Prospectus's reckoning, with the bulk of that damage coming in the 89 games he spent in center field. Adell was 26 then and is 27 now, and while he looks more like a real big league contributor at this point in his career than he has since he left the superheated environs of prospect rankings for the cold world of Playing Against Big Leaguers Every Day, Adell is also still clearly growing into the job. He plays right field now, mostly.
The story of Jo Adell's career is going to be unfold through that back-and-forth process of claiming various gains and giving them back; from a certain perspective, that is the story of every baseball career. But from one game to the next, for as long as he hangs around, there will also be bright moments when the pyrotechnic talent that made Adell the mega-prospect that he was will flash in full. There may be seasons when those flashes are frequent and prolonged, but even as the unfinished and imperfect player that he is right now, Adell is worth watching in a way that goes beyond his production or comparatively pedestrian stat line. He almost certainly won't work a walk, but there is basically nothing else that a baseball player can do that Jo Adell could not do at any given moment. On Saturday, in a 1-0 Angels win over the Seattle Mariners highlighted by what Angels assistant-to-the-GM Torii Hunter called "probably the greatest defensive game I've ever seen," Adell did that three times.
In a game in which the Angels' offense mustered just six hits after leadoff hitter Zach Neto homered on the fourth pitch thrown by Mariners starter Emerson Hancock in the bottom of the first, Adell did about as much as any one player can do to win a ballgame. In the top of the first, Adell lined up a shot from Mariners catcher Cal Raleigh, leapt well above the yellow home run line on Anaheim's short rightfield fence—this is foreshadowing, by the way—and brought the ball back.
Angels starter Jack Kochanowicz took that opportunity and ran with it, carrying a shutout into the sixth inning before giving way to a procession of relievers. Sam Bachman, the third of five, was on the mound in the eighth when Josh Naylor hit a slider to more or less the same spot that Raleigh did in the top of the first. Once again, Adell outran a baseball that had been hit very hard, got to where he needed to be, and made the play. "After the first one, we were pretty fired up out there," he said afterwards. "And then got the second one, which looked identical to the first one, and I was like, 'Wow, my routes are on point tonight.'"
The third and final homer that Adell stole was not like the first two. This one, with closer Jordan Romano on the mound and the Angels still defending that narrow lead in the top of the ninth, Adell chalked up to "just grit." Once again, Adell had to cover ground, this time in the direction of the fair pole in right and in pursuit of a smash off the bat of Mariners shortstop J.P. Crawford. In place of the home run line was a fence so low that Adell could have comfortably hoped up and taken a seat on top of it—which he actually did, very briefly, after reaching up to snag Crawford's shot and shortly before skidding sideways into the first row of seats. ("I ended up in someone's lap," Adell said. "Softer landing than I thought.") He held onto the ball, a review upheld that he'd made the catch while still in play, Romano held on to get the save, and a bit of inconsequential early April baseball was struck by lightning.
"I've never seen three home run robberies in one game," Hunter said after the game. "And I've never seen a guy on the third one fall into the stands, catch the ball and keep his feet in like he's a wide receiver. I was jumping up and down. I almost passed out." Even accounting for his bias as an Angels employee, this feels like a perfectly valid response from Hunter. It is improbable for a player even to get the opportunity to steal three homers in a game; even for a prolific home run thief like Adell, whose 20 home run robberies since 2020 are tied for the most in baseball, this was many months of defensive highlights packed into nine delirious innings.
It's all implausible, obviously. That it was Jo Adell doing it, oddly or not, might have been the most plausible thing about it—the question, for him, has never once concerned what he was capable of doing. That answer has always included things that people have barely bothered imagining before, and has remained, as so much potential does, tantalizingly out of reach. That made it all the more gratifying to watch Adell go get it, and go get it, and go get it again.
