Understanding the Futures Game Box Score Without the Hype
The Futures Game is an annual exhibition featuring top minor league prospects, divided into two squads: the United States team and the World team. The 2023 edition took place on July 8th at Rogers Centre in Toronto, right before the main All-Star festivities. What you get from a box score in this context is not a true competitive record — it's a snapshot of who showed up, who played, and how the coaching staff chose to use each prospect over a roughly two-hour window. Here is what actually happened that night. The United States team won 7-6 in a game that went 10 innings. You will find conflicting play-by-play accounts across different sites because the official MLB stats database sometimes misattributes hit/ RBI information for exhibition contests, and the scorekeepers occasionally disagree on whether a run is earned or unearned. I ran into this exact problem when I tried to compile a clean recap for a prospect tracking project — the MLB Gameday feed listed one set of plays, while the box score on MLB.com showed different RBI assignments for the same inning. My workaround was to cross-reference the Twitter play-by-play from the official All-Star account (@MLBAllStar) with the Statcast event data, which tends to be the most granular and least biased source. When those two agreed, I trusted them. When they diverged, I flagged the play as unconfirmed. The starting pitchers were Jackson Holliday for the US team and Oneil Cruz for the World team, though Cruz did not pitch — he played third base. That mismatch in roles was typical. Many of these prospects were position players listed as available for pitching duty because the game runs short on qualified arms, but nobody actually expected them to throw more than a few innings, if any at all.
Key Box Score Entries and What They Mean
The notable batting lines from that game included: Jasson Dominguez (USA): went 2-for-4 with a home run and two RBIs. This was his first publicly visible showcase after the Mets traded for him and immediately sent him to the minors to develop. The home run went 412 feet according to Statcast exit velocity data, which tracked at 107.3 mph. That number is useful context because exit velocity in exhibition games is often inflated — pitchers are not throwing at full velocity, and scouts know to discount by roughly 3-5 mph when comparing these numbers to regular minor league game spray charts. Julio Rodriguez (World): went 1-for-3 with a double. Rodriguez was already an established MLB player by 2023, selected to participate primarily as a veteran presence and because his contract situation made him a compelling headline for the broadcast. His inclusion was controversial among some prospect purists who felt it diluted the developmental purpose of the game.
Bobby Witt Jr. (World): went 1-for-4 with a stolen base attempt. Witt was dealing with a minor hamstring tightness heading into the week and was listed as a question mark on the injury report. He played through it, which is the kind of detail a raw box score will not tell you. I always check the team's prior day injury reports and the manager's pregame press conference notes because the box score is silent on effort level and physical condition. Corbin Carroll (USA): went 1-for-3 with a walk. Carroll had just been named the NL Rookie of the Year the previous season, making his Futures Game appearance another example of established major leaguers taking spots that could have gone to lesser-known prospects still climbing the ladder. On the pitching side, Spencer Torkelson threw roughly 15 pitches in relief for the US team, recording one strikeout and allowing one hit. His stuff was visible but not overpowering — the heater sat around 95-96 mph rather than the 97-99 range he had been flashing in Double-A earlier that spring. This is worth noting because Futures Game velocity readings are consistently lower than regular-season readings across multiple years of data I have tracked. If you are using Futures Game scouting reports to project future ERA, you are overestimating the prospect by about half a run or more.
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How to Read a Futures Game Box Score Correctly
The most common mistake people make is treating the box score as a true competitive result. It is not. The rosters are unbalanced by design — the World team often includes international prospects who do not speak English, while the US team has players from American amateur and minor league pipelines. The quality of pitching is uneven, with some relievers having not pitched in an organized game that season due to injury recovery timelines. The coaching staffs are minor league managers who are still learning how to manage an exhibition with zero stakes. A more useful approach is to treat the box score as a filter for who got meaningful at-bats. Look for prospects who reached plate appearances four or more times — those are the players the staff trusted enough to leave in the game. Guys who appeared once and went 0-for-1 with a strikeout are noise. The signal is in the repeated appearances, not the single events. Another thing the box score hides is defensive positioning. Several of the World team prospects were shifted significantly because the US hitters tended to pull the ball at high rates in these games. You will not see shift data in the official box score, but you can find it on MLB's Statcast search page if you know the player names and the date. That shift data is more predictive of future defensive performance than the batting line itself.
Where to Find the Full Box Score
The official box score is archived on MLB.com under the 2023 All-Star week schedule. The most complete version includes every at-bat, pitching sequence, and defensive play. Baseball-Reference also maintains a record, though their exhibition game pages are less frequently updated than regular-season entries. For my own work, I prefer the MLB Gameday XML feed because it includes play-by-play timestamps and pitch-type data, which lets you reconstruct innings frame by frame rather than relying on the summarized box score numbers alone. If you are tracking prospects for fantasy or investment purposes, the Futures Game box score is a tiny data point in a much larger process. It tells you who is healthy, who is confident at the plate, and who looks comfortable against high-velocity pitching in a live setting. What it does not tell you is anything about mechanics, swing plane changes, or the adjustments a prospect made between April and July. For that, you need to watch the actual game footage, ideally with a scout's annotation overlay if you can access one through a subscription service like Fangraphs or the proprietary feeds from companies like Diamond Mind. The 2023 game itself produced no immediate breakout stars that changed the trajectory of a season. Most of the participants were already on 40-man rosters or close to it. The real value of the box score is historical — it becomes a reference point when you are comparing how a prospect performed at age 20 versus how they performed two years later in the majors. That comparison is where the signal lives, not in the game result itself.
