Red Sox Fans can’t Stop Talking of this Uplifting deal of the Returning Catcher Mark Kolozsvary
Mark Kolozsvary reportedly agreed to a minor league contract with Boston
The Boston Red Sox agreed to a minor league contract with catcher Mark Kolozsvary, ESPN’s Kiley McDaniel reported Thursday, citing a source.
The deal reportedly includes an invitation to spring training.
This obviously doesn’t qualify as earth-shattering news. There’s a chance Kolozsvary, a seventh-round pick of the Cincinnati Reds in 2017, doesn’t sniff the majors for a second consecutive season. He spent all of 2024 with the Red Sox’s Triple-A affiliate in Worcester.
But it nevertheless adds to Boston’s organizational catching depth, an area the club already addressed this offseason by signing Seby Zavala to a minor league contract, acquiring Carlos Narváez from the New York Yankees and landing Blake Sabol in a trade with the San Francisco Giants. And Red Sox fans undoubtedly will love Kolozsvary’s backstory, which resurfaced Thursday on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
Kolozsvary, now listed at 5-foot-7, played college baseball at the University of Florida, where he climbed the depth chart after arriving as a walk-on.
“I remember his senior year of high school I drove into town, and I remember taking him to Starbucks (and asking him), ‘How do you feel about going somewhere for three years and you might not play at all?,’ ” former New York Mets scout Jon Updike recalled in a social media clip posted by 108 Performance in March 2023. “He goes, ‘That’s what I want to do. I want to prove everybody wrong.’ And I’m like, ‘OK, cool. Dude, fair enough.’ Taught me a lot about the kid, right?”
Kolozsvary ended up becoming Florida’s catcher when the two backstops ahead of him suffered injuries. He even singled off now-Reds pitcher Nick Lodolo in the College World Series, the culmination of tremendous hard work.
“I walked into the old ballpark in Florida, and I hear, ‘Whack! Whack!,’ ” Updike continued in the 2023 clip. ” ‘Hey, what is that?’ And here’s that cat, no gear on, with the pitching machine that throws fuzz, catching full-bore 90, 92 miles an hour. And he’s catching it, catches the ball and scoots up. And he ended up working to about 10 feet in front of that machine, just crazy ninja-looking goat. I couldn’t believe he caught the ball. But he was in there working on it. There was nobody else in the building, nobody else in the ballpark.”
Kolozsvary’s career hasn’t taken off at the MLB level. He’s totaled just 21 plate appearances across 11 big league games with the Reds and Baltimore Orioles. He slashed .185/.349/.354 with three home runs and 10 RBIs in 83 plate appearances last season with the WooSox.
But there’s no denying Kolozsvary’s determination, which worked out well at Florida and even paved the way for him to represent the United States at the 2020 Summer Olympics. The Red Sox can expect him to keep grinding, if nothing else.
“He had talent and skill, but his determination and work ethic put him in that position,” Updike said of Kolozsvary’s ascent to The Show. “And that’s really what it takes.”
