Kansas City Royals rookie Jac Caglianone has had an extremely slow start to the year, but he can still hit a ball very hard.
That power flashed big-time on Wednesday, when he crushed a 466-foot homer over the batter’s eye off Pittsburgh Pirates starter Bailey Falter. The long ball, measured at 110.8 mph off the bat, put the Royals up 3-0.
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It was the fourth homer in 32 games of Caglianone’s career.
Per Baseball Savant, the homer is tied for the 10th-longest homer hit in MLB this season and is the second-longest by a rookie, behind only Denzel Clarke’s 471-footer with the Athletics on July 4. It’s also the 10th-longest homer measured by Statcast at Kauffman Stadium.
The sixth overall pick of the 2024 MLB Draft, Caglianone entered this season as a consensus top 100 prospect and made his MLB debut in early June after laying waste to Double-A and Triple-A. The big leauges have been a different story, as Caglianone sits well below the Mendoza line and would need a string of good games just to reach .200. It took two weeks to hit his first homer.
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Caglianone has plenty of time to improve at 22 years old and his peripherals aren’t as horrific as his baseline stats. Going off the xBA and xSLG stats, in which Baseball Savants approximates a deserved batting average and slugging percentage going off batted-ball data and other numbers, he should have been hitting .249 and slugging .432 entering Wednesday. He has had brutal batted-ball luck, with a .163 batting average on balls in play (BABIP).
Still, this is hardly the start the Royals envisioned for a guy seen as a potential star slugger. At 45-48, Kansas City entered Wednesday only 3.5 games back in the AL wild-card race, so the price of a rookie struggling to figure things out is high when compared to a viable first baseman.
Wednesday provided a reminder of what the Royals are looking for. We’ll see if he provides any more in the coming days.
