Fresh Cleats is where we track the newest arrivals to the show — the can’t-miss prospects, the long-shot journeymen, and the ones getting a second (or third) crack at it. Some stick. Some don’t. We’re here for all of it.
Four innings. That’s all it took for fantasy baseball owners to be reminded.
Wednesday afternoon at Chase Field, in just his second game back in a Rockies uniform, Zac Veen turned on a pitch and sent it out of the yard for a two-run home run — part of a Colorado offensive outburst that also included a Brett Sullivan three-run shot off the foul pole in a game the Rockies were very much controlling. No nerves, no 12-game horror show, no .118 batting average lurking in the box score. Just a barrel finding a baseball, the way it did roughly two dozen times a month for him at Triple-A this summer to the delight of fantasy baseball owners.
It’s the kind of moment that makes a redemption story feel less like wishful thinking and more like it’s actually, currently, happening. So before we get to what happens by the final out, let’s rewind and explain exactly how Veen got from “the worst 34 at-bats of anyone’s career” to “two-run bomb in the fourth inning” in the span of sixteen months. Buckle up — it’s a genuinely good story.
The prospect who was supposed to be a sure thing
Colorado drafted Veen ninth overall in 2020 out of Spruce Creek High School in Port Orange, Florida — the same school that produced Astros outfielder Austin Hays. He was MLB.com’s highest-rated high school player in a college-heavy draft class, a prep bat with a loud swing that graded as a 60 with 55 power on the 20-80 scale. The kid grew into his 6-foot-3 frame by adding 45 pounds in two years of high school, and scouts talked about his swing the way sommeliers talk about a good vintage — something to “dream on.”
The pro debut backed it up. In 2021 with Low-A Fresno, Veen slashed .301/.399/.501 with 15 home runs, 75 RBI, 27 doubles, and 36 stolen bases across 106 games — a 20-20 season’s worth of tools stuffed into half a schedule. This was the Zac Veen fantasy baseball fan pages were built for: patient, powerful, fast, and left-handed. The full package.
Then baseball did what baseball does to prospects with too much hype attached to their name: it got complicated. Veen returned to Double-A Hartford in 2023 but missed the majority of the season with a left wrist tendon injury. Back at Hartford again in 2024, he hit well but lost nearly two months to a back injury and another month to a thumb injury before finally getting bumped to Triple-A late that year. Scouts started hedging. Baseball America noted his prospect stock had begun to slip, pointing out that his bat-to-ball skills had regressed as he added loft to his swing, driving his whiff rate up — the classic “traded contact for power and got neither” special that’s derailed a thousand prospects before him.
Debut No. 1: A rough one for sure
Veen got his first real taste of the big leagues on April 8, 2025, against Milwaukee, and it did not go well. Over 12 games and 37 plate appearances, he hit .118 with one homer, two RBI, two walks, and 14 strikeouts — a .424 OPS that looked less like a batting line and more like a cry for help. Purple Row didn’t sugarcoat it: fastballs beat him, breaking stuff neutralized him, and pitchers found a clear path through the strike zone. He was optioned back down, and the golden-boy prospect who was supposed to be Colorado’s next great fantasy baseball outfielder instead became a cautionary tale about rushing.
It got worse before it got better. Spring 2026 was rough for reasons that had nothing to do with pitch recognition. Veen has been candid about it: he’s said he dealt with “a pretty big substance abuse problem for a few years” before making real changes to his life and his body — swapping bad habits for protein shakes, essentially, and his old high school coach has noted the added muscle has actually improved his speed and exit velocities. Not every prospect fixes their swing by fixing their life first, but that appears to be the order of operations here.
Chapter Two: Albuquerque goes nuclear
Whatever clicked, it clicked hard. Sent back to Triple-A to “begin the 2026 campaign,” as the reports politely put it — a nice way of saying he was buried on the org chart — Veen instead put together one of the best minor league seasons in the entire sport. Across 100 games and 445 plate appearances with the Isotopes, he hit .327/.402/.635 with a 1.037 OPS, 24 home runs, 87 RBI, 18 stolen bases, and 82 runs scored. That’s not a hot streak. That’s a full-blown, system-wide malfunction of opposing pitching staffs. Also it’s the kind of season that fantasy baseball owners drool over.
He didn’t just hit his way back — he announced it. On the Friday before his call-up, Veen went 5-for-5 with three home runs and a franchise-record 17 total bases in Albuquerque, the kind of night that makes a front office’s decision for them. Rockies manager Warren Schaeffer wasn’t shy about crediting the process over the moment: “He pushed his way to the big leagues. He’s been working on his plate discipline and showing a ton of power. He’s just been doing everything that we’ve asked of him, so he’s earned his way here.”
Even Colorado’s grizzled elder statesman noticed the transformation. Kyle Freeland, who’s been holding down the Rockies rotation since Obama-era fashion was cool, said Veen has undergone “a massive turnaround of his attitude and how he goes about things over the past year,” adding that “how he carried himself was almost a 180 of what it was a year prior. We all noticed it immediately, and we were all happy for him.”
And in true 2026 fashion, Veen found out about the promotion the way we all find out about anything important now — via phone, mid-video-game. “I was about to load into a ‘Call of Duty Zombies’ game in the hotel, and that’s when I got a call,” he said with a smile. Somewhere, a lobby of strangers is still wondering why their fourth player never spawned in.
The Scouting Report: What he actually brings to the table
Strip away the redemption-arc narrative for a second and look at the tools, because there’s still a legitimately interesting fantasy baseball player under all the storyline.
Hit: Originally a 60-grade hit tool coming out of high school, MLB Pipeline had trimmed that down to a 50 by early 2026 as his strikeout rate crept north of 25 percent at the upper levels — the residue of chasing loft and power instead of staying short to the ball. The swing-decision data backs up an old scouting staple, though: Veen’s plate approach has long graded as plus, with a strong ability to discern balls from strikes and a habit of rarely passing on a fastball over the plate. The swing got long; the eye never left.
Power: A 55-grade tool that the 2026 numbers suggest may have finally arrived on schedule. Twenty-four home runs and a .635 slug at altitude-adjacent Albuquerque isn’t nothing, and reports have specifically flagged his 2024 performance against breaking balls and fastballs above 94 mph as an encouraging sign for handling actual major league stuff.
Speed and Defense: Plus grades on both speed and arm, with a 55 on fielding round out a profile that was never short on athleticism — the concern with Veen has always lived in the batter’s box, not the outfield grass. Eighteen steals at Triple-A this year confirm the wheels are very much still attached.
Overall: A 45 overall fantasy baseball grade — a potential everyday regular with some star-level ceiling if the bat-to-ball skills stabilize, and a “solid platoon piece who runs hot and cold” floor if they don’t. The gap between those outcomes is, charitably, the entire plot of this article.
Back to this afternoon’s game
Which brings us back to that two-run homer in the fourth — the one that opened this story.
Final score is in the books, and it’s exactly the kind of chaotic, ugly-but-a-win game that felt appropriate for the occasion. Colorado survived a bullpen meltdown and 10 walks on the day to hang on for a 6-4 victory, taking the rubber match of the series — their first road series win since a June sweep of the Angels, and their first series win in Arizona since 2022.
The offense did the early heavy lifting. Brett Sullivan hit a three-run homer down the right-field line in the second inning to cap a four-run frame against Arizona starter Merrill Kelly, and then, right on cue, Veen added his own two-run homer in the fourth — in what was officially his first game of the 2026 season.
The line: A two-run home run in the fourth inning off Merrill Kelly, in his 2026 season (and effectively second-chapter) debut. Per the box score, Veen also had an at-bat with a runner in scoring position that didn’t come through — so it wasn’t a spotless, storybook 4-for-4, just a very good, very real one: the kind of game where the swing that mattered, mattered.
Context that makes it sweeter: This was, officially, Veen’s first game of the 2026 season — the actual moment this whole story has been building toward since spring training. Sixteen months after a 4-for-34 nightmare, he stepped into the box, saw a pitch he liked, and didn’t miss it.
The verdict: One swing doesn’t erase a .118 batting average, and one game doesn’t rewrite a fantasy baseball scouting report that still flags his strikeout rate as a real question. But this is about as good a re-opening statement as Veen could have written for himself — a two-run bomb, in a series-clinching win, in his first game back, after the version of himself that showed up in April 2025 clearly isn’t walking through that clubhouse door again. Redemption arcs don’t get finished in one plate appearance. They just get started. This one’s off to a very loud start.