Anthony Eyanson's Breakout Carries Personal Meaning in 2026
Anthony Eyanson’s High-A Greenville debut produced six strikeouts across three innings, and each one of them triggered a donation to the National Eating Disorder Association.
That’s not a coincidence. It’s personal.
The Red Sox took Eyanson in the third round of the 2025 draft, and he showed up to spring camp in 2026 with a velocity spike that had the organization paying close attention. He allowed one run in those three innings against High-A competition, but the strikeout number was what mattered to him. Six punchouts, six donations.
The reason traces back to when Eyanson was 10 years old and got diagnosed with achalasia, a rare condition that makes swallowing food nearly impossible. He didn’t know what was wrong at first. When he started summer baseball, he couldn’t get meals down before or after games. Weeks went by before he said a word about it to anyone.
“It was really tough to eat and fuel my body, tough to recover,” Eyanson said. “Mentally, it felt like a barrier. I felt like I was different from everybody else.”
He didn’t want to stand out as a kid. That’s what kept him quiet.
“I was pretty shy to speak up about it,” he said. Doctors couldn’t pin down a diagnosis initially and sent him home. His mother pushed for a hospital evaluation once symptoms kept worsening, and that’s where they finally landed on achalasia. Eyanson went through four procedures that summer. He hasn’t had problems since.
“I feel very normal now,” he said. “I have no problems eating pretty much all foods, which is a very big blessing.”
The baseball career that followed is hard to overstate. At Lakewood High School in California, Eyanson played both ways as a senior and hit .472 with 30 RBI and 15 stolen bases while also posting a 0.50 ERA over 85 innings with 110 strikeouts on the mound. He started college at UC San Diego, earned a Team USA invite, and eventually transferred to LSU. His junior season in Baton Rouge was something: a 12-2 record, a 3.00 ERA, 152 strikeouts that ranked third nationally, and First-Team All-America honors from Baseball America. He also got the win in the College World Series clincher.
The charity idea came from watching his LSU teammate, outfielder Chris Stanfield, donate money for every stolen base and extra-base hit during 2025. Eyanson saw that and knew he wanted to connect something similar to his own story. An eating disorder tied to an esophageal condition that went undiagnosed for weeks, the isolation that came with it, the embarrassment of being different at an age when kids don’t want to be.
“Having an eating disorder, I knew I wanted to bring more awareness to that, just with how isolated I felt,” he said.
That isolation is the thread running through all of it. He didn’t tell his mom for a month. He didn’t want anyone to know something was wrong. Now he’s donating per strikeout and talking openly about what he went through, which is the opposite of staying quiet.
Six strikeouts in his first High-A start. More are coming.